The Ground
Thermopylae today looks nothing like it did. Silt from the Spercheios river has pushed the coastline several miles out; what was a shoreline track is now an inland plain with a highway on it. In 480 BC the pass was a narrow shelf between the cliffs of Mount Kallidromos and the water, with three pinch points the Greeks called gates.
At its tightest the track was perhaps fifty feet wide. This was the entire point. A Greek hoplite fought in a phalanx — a dense block of men in bronze helmets and breastplates behind interlocking shields, each with a spear eight or nine feet long. In open ground, cavalry and archers could work around such a formation and take it apart. In a corridor fifty feet wide, there was no around. The Persians could only feed men into the front of it, a few dozen at a time, into the part of the fight the Greeks were best at.
The Greeks took the middle gate, where an old wall built by the Phocians still stood, and rebuilt it. Then they waited.
Xerxes waited too — four days, according to Herodotus, expecting the Greeks to see the size of his camp and disperse. He sent a scout who reported that the Spartans were sitting outside the wall exercising and combing their long hair. Xerxes found this ridiculous and asked Demaratus, an exiled Spartan king traveling with him, what it meant. Demaratus said they were preparing to die, and that these were the best men in Greece, and that if Xerxes beat them there was no one left worth worrying about. Xerxes did not believe him.
The Spartan Drop — Veterans Day 2026. 300 numbered tees. No restock. Get early access →
0 comments