The Puzzles of Thermopylae

This is an oddly shallow article. The Persian army, whatever its exact size, was vast; too vast to have travelled by sea, instead marching overland into Greece.

The Persian fleet's job was to supply them with food and other necessities, as the army was too large to live off the land. It is reasonable to view Thermopylae as a delaying maneuver, although due to political differences between the Athenians and the Spartans, it's also reasonable to view the Greek defenders as having been backed into a strategic corner by indecision.

Anyway, while the Spartans and a small Athenian contingent were marching off to Thermopylae, Themistocles, an Athenian leader, sent word to Xerxes that the (much smaller) Greek navy was fearful and likely to surrender - partly true, as the Peloponnesian contingent was less firmly committed than the Athenian one. Xerxes has his navy block the Greek ships into a relatively narrow strait, but then (on Themistocles' orders) the Greeks navy ran from the Persian ships instead of giving battle. The Persians, sensing victory, chased them into the strait.

But whereas a narrow passage provided a huge geographic advantage to the Spartan and Athenian foot soldiers bunched together in a phalanx, it was a fatal mistake for a naval force, which depends on freedom of maneuver. The huge Persian navy crowded into the narrow strait, leaving the ships bunched up against each other, at which point the Greeks reversed course and attacked their flanks, laying waste to them. With his supply system in pieces, Xerxes was forced to withdraw his army.

Incidentally, the popular book/film 300, which focuses heavily on the bravery and martial ethos of the Spartans, instead depicts the Persian fleet as being destroyed by a storm prior to the decisive battle. This makes for a simpler story, but at a rather significant loss of historical accuracy.

>> Yet another puzzle is Leonidas’ decision to stay and die.

That's probably the easiest question to answer: the Spartans were war-crazy.

This is well-documented, and the tales of Leonida's wife asking him what to do if he doesn't return, and the 300 celebrating their own funerals, etc, are par for the course, for Spartans. Their whole society was hyper-militarised, their highest ideal was bravery in battle, to kill their enemies with no regard for their own life (in the service of the City, of course). They drilled their children from a young age to this mindset and they all became mad with it. So when the time came to choose between ditching their shield and running to fight another day, or staying and dying, the Spartans stayed and died. "Ή ταν, ή επί τας" as a Spartan mother said to her child ("with it, or on it"; "it" being his shield: either he carried it home, or they carried him home on it).

It is perhaps difficult to interpret this mindset from the point of view of a rational actor, because in terms of a strategy that maximises rewards and minimises losses, heroism does not compute. But a good general must take into account the fact that people are not perfectly rational, that they are in their most irrational when faced with death, that men with their backs to the wall fight to the death to a man. And that, at the end of the day, some troops will never break and run.

Remember also the Sacred Band of Thebes.

Dan Carlin I feel does a relatively good job at covering this battle within the broader context of the war in his Hardcore History podcast. Specifically, in his three-part series King of Kings. Don’t ask me which one, as it’s been well over a year since I listened to it, but he does make a reasonable attempt at drawing out some logic for why the rearguard stayed and died. If I recall correctly, one factor is that it helped buy time for the Greek city-states to retreat back and remove sources of supplies, which would stretch the Persian supply chains even further.

He paints this particular battle into the context of many others too, and tries to put some thoughts around the broader environment in which both the Greeks and Persians were making their decisions during these wars. He tells it all with his trademark engaging fascination and I really cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s part of his free releases, so you should readily find them on your podcast source of choice.

Good article, but some quibbles:

>The Persians were meticulous record keepers; but no Persian source has survived

Eh, they weren't particularly big on record keeping. The Babylonians (who were part of the Persian empire) kept decent records, but not the Persians.

>Modern guesstimates by different means arrive at around 200,000.

Those are just people throwing out random figures. In reality it's highly unlikely that the Persians had the logistical capability to field an army that large beyond the fringes of their empire. Tens of thousands would likely be a more realistic number.

Despite the huge numbers, the battlefield supremacy of the greek phalanx seems to be forgotten here. 100 years after this, Alexander the Great conquered the world with the phalanx enhanced with longer spears called the sarissa.

I recall reading many descriptions of the Alexander's forces taking on armies 10x bigger than them and routing them with little losses as he conquered Persia and other lands to the east.

Alexander never conquered the Spartans, IIRC.

For all who are interested in this I can strongly recommend the book Beyond the Gates of Fire: New Perspectives on the Battle of Thermopylae coaoutherd by a favorite authour of mine Christopher Matthew.