The Last Morning
Leonidas held a council, and it broke into an argument. Some wanted to withdraw. Then he dismissed the army — most of it, by contingent, and sent it home.
Herodotus gives two readings and does not choose between them cleanly. In one, the allies left of their own accord and the Spartans stayed because Spartan law forbade retreat. In the other, Leonidas released them deliberately, to preserve trained men for the war that was coming, while a rearguard held long enough for the withdrawal to work. Herodotus says he inclines to the second, and most historians have followed him. Somewhere behind it is an oracle from Delphi telling Sparta that either a king would die or Sparta would fall — which may be genuine, may be later invention, and either way was believed at the time.
Whatever the reason, roughly five thousand men marched south that morning and lived. About fifteen hundred stayed:
The 300 Spartans, and the helots with them, who had no say in the matter
The 700 Thespians, under Demophilus — who were not ordered to stay, were free to leave with everyone else, and refused to go
The 400 Thebans, whom Herodotus says Leonidas kept as hostages against their city's loyalty — a claim later Greek writers disputed, and which reads a little too neatly against Thebes' subsequent record
Megistias was told to leave and would not. He sent his only son home instead and stayed to die with men he had just told were going to die.
Two Spartans, Eurytus and Aristodemus, were laid up in a nearby village with an eye infection severe enough to blind them both. Told what was happening, Eurytus had his armor put on and had a helot lead him into the fighting, where he was killed. Aristodemus went home. Sparta called him the Trembler; no one would speak to him or give him fire. A year later at Plataea he broke the line charging alone into the Persians and was killed, and the Spartans decided he had fought bravely but wildly, and gave the honors to other men. A third Spartan, Pantites, had been sent as a messenger to Thessaly and missed the battle entirely. When he came home and learned what he had missed, he hanged himself.
The Thespians are the part of this that matters. They had no code obliging them, no reputation to defend, no king watching. They stayed anyway.
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