What the Three Days Bought
Militarily, Thermopylae was a defeat. The pass fell, the army that held it was destroyed, and the road to central Greece was open. Athens was evacuated to the island of Salamis and burned to the ground. The Acropolis was sacked. Anyone assessing the campaign that autumn would have called the Greek position hopeless.
But the fleet at Artemisium had fought Xerxes' navy to a standstill for the same three days, and had withdrawn intact when the pass fell rather than being cut off and destroyed. A month later that fleet caught the Persian navy in the narrows at Salamis, where numbers again could not be brought to bear, and broke it. With his supply line at sea gone, Xerxes took much of the army home and left his general Mardonius to finish the job. The following summer, at Plataea, the Greek army the Spartans had held back — the one those five thousand dismissed men marched home to join — met Mardonius in open ground and destroyed him. On the same day, more or less, the fleet finished the Persian navy at Mycale.
The invasion failed. Whether it failed because of Thermopylae is a fair question and the honest answer is: not directly. The pass bought days, not the war. What it bought that mattered more is harder to measure — evidence, held in common by a coalition that had every reason to fall apart, that the Persian army could be made to bleed, and that men from cities that had spent a century fighting each other would stand in the same line and not run.
A delaying action that is remembered for two and a half thousand years was not, in the end, only a delaying action.
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