The Line
It was here, in the waiting, that Dienekes said the thing this company is named for.
Someone from Trachis told him the Persian archers were so numerous their arrows would blot out the sun. Dienekes, Herodotus says, was not impressed, and answered that this was good news: if the Persians hid the sun, the fighting would be in the shade. Herodotus names him the bravest man at Thermopylae, and it is worth noticing that he earns the title for something he said before the fighting, not for anything he did in it.
The other line everyone knows — molon labe, come and take them — is not in Herodotus. It appears centuries later in Plutarch's collection of Spartan sayings, attributed to Leonidas answering a Persian demand to surrender his weapons. It may be authentic. It is not contemporary reporting.
On the last morning the Greeks came out from behind the wall, further forward into the wider part of the pass than before, and fought where the ground favored them less. The reading is that they were no longer holding a position but killing as many men as possible in the time they had. Herodotus writes that Persian officers drove their own troops forward with whips, that men were trampled and pushed into the sea, and that the Greeks fought until their spears shattered and then with swords.
Leonidas fell there. What followed was a fight over his body — four separate Persian charges, by Herodotus' count, before the Greeks dragged him back. Two of Xerxes' brothers were killed in it.
Then the Immortals came down the track behind them. The Greeks pulled back behind the wall to a low hill in the pass and made a circle. The Thebans, Herodotus says, went over and surrendered, and were branded with the king's mark. The rest fought until their weapons broke and then with hands and teeth, and the Persians, unwilling to close with them again, stood off and shot them down.
Xerxes had Leonidas' body beheaded and crucified. Herodotus notes this as extraordinary, a violation of Persian custom toward brave enemies, and reads it as the reaction of a man who had been made to look foolish for three days by a force he outnumbered many times over.
The Greek dead were buried where they fell. The stone over them carried a line by Simonides that has never needed improving: go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie. Megistias got his own stone, paid for by a friend.
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