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Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World
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About Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed The World
Product Description In 480 B.C., the mighty Persian king Xerxes led a massive force to the narrow mountain pass called Thermopylae, anticipating no significant resistance in his bid to conquer Greece. But the Greeks, led by Leonidas and a small army of Spartan warriors, took the battle to the Persians and nearly halted their advance. Paul Cartledge's riveting, authoritative account of King Leonidas and the legendary 300 illuminates this valiant endeavor that changed the way future generations would think about combat, courage, and death. Review “Impeccable...Enthralling...Vividly reconstructs [the Spartans’] finest hour.” – The Independent “Briskly written...Offers a fresh look at the battle and the complex events leading up to it.” – Forbes “In the annals of heroism, the Battle of Thermopylae is an archetype, a classic.” –Noel Malcolm, The Telegraph (UK) “The real passion of Thermopylae lies in the author’s sudden discovery that his subject is exciting to other people again.” – The Wall Street Journal About the Author Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek history at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Alexander the Great, The Spartans, and The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One THE ANCIENT WORLD IN 500 bce: FROM INDIA TO THE AEGEAN In Lacedaimon are to be found those who are the most enslaved [douloi] and those who are the most free. Critias of Athens, Spartan Society Herodotus begins by placing his chosen subject of the Graeco-Persian Wars in the broadest framework of East versus West historical and (what we should call) myth-historical conflict. A major 'moment' in that chronic Greek-barbarian, West-East contest was the Trojan War sung by Homer in the Iliad. Like its companion epic the Odyssey, the Iliad was the culmination of a long bardic tradition of oral poetic composition and recitation stretching back to the Late Bronze Age or Mycenaean era. But if there was one Homer, that genius of a monumental poet who created the unified stories of Achilles and Odysseus, he would have lived somewhere in east Greece; that is, along the west Anatolian littoral or on one of its offshore Greek islands such as Chios, at around 700 bce. This was also, and not coincidentally, when Ilium or New Troy was founded on what was taken to be the site of Homer's Troy by Greeks coming out from central mainland Greece to settle permanently in north-west Asia Minor. Ilium was just one of a whole host of such new Greek foundations established during the age of Greek 'colonization' which occupied the two centuries from about 700-500.* This great movement of people was prompted by a variety of motives and factors including land hunger, political faction-fighting and sheer adventurism. By the end of it, Greeks were to be found perched (as Plato later put it) like frogs or ants around a pond - or rather two ponds, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The resulting Greek world in the year 500 was not a political unit but rather a series of individual, independent, often mutually hostile political communities that mostly called themselves poleis, or cities. We would call them republics, though there were a number of monarchies among them too - and a unique 'dyarchy', or double kingship, Sparta. There were well over one thousand such independent units all told, scattered around much of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts - from, as the Greeks themselves said, the Pillars of Heracles (Straits of Gibraltar) to Phasis (in modern Georgia at the far eastern end of the Black Sea). Most lived in Europe, extending from Byzantium (modern Istanbul) in the east to the southern coast of Spain in the far west, and taking in most of coastal Sicily and southern Italy and part of the French Riviera. There were some Greeks settled in Africa too, along the Mediterranean coasts of today's Libya and Egypt, most notably at Cyrene and at Naucratis in the Nile delta. But there
