Location: Thermopylae, Greece

Belligerents: Xerxes of Persia, 100,000-1,000,000 warriors; Leonidas of Sparta, 300 Spartan Hoplites and 1,000 Hoplites from other City States

They had held the pass for two days, held back the flood of innumerable screaming Persian warriors without a single break in the line. The armies of Persia were all but defeated, their morale sunken to new depths in the wake of 48 hours of utter failure to break the Spartans. Xerxes readied his men to retreat, to go home in shame as his father’s army had done before him. It was in his most dire moment that a traitor emerged from the Spartan homeland. Ephialties, forever destined to live on in the annals of history as the most disgraced Greek to ever live, told the Persians about a small goat herding pass through the mountains. Xerxes’s cavalry moved around the Greek force, positioning themselves behind the Spartan-led forces. Knowing that defeat was imminent, Leonidas declared that all free Greek men should return to their homes and prepare to face the Persians from the walls of their own cities. Rather than retreat with the rest of the army, some 7,000 men, Leonidas and his Spartans would hold off the Persians long enough for the other Greeks to escape.

In the end, 1,000 men from various city states remained to face the Persian horde alongside their Spartan brothers. The battle would be fought in the pass at Thermopylae, with the Greeks surrounded and vastly outnumbered. When the horn of battle sounded, the bloodshed began. Persian cavalry charged the Greek rearguard, who formed a phalanx (a tightly packed wall of shields in which each man’s shield overlaps that of his neighbor) to hold off the horses. In the front, the Spartans did the same. Though initially the formation held, the Persians simply outnumbered the Greeks and were not afraid to loose arrows into their own lines. The barrage of arrows and the constant pounding on the shield wall eventually broke the Spartan lines, leaving them to battle man to man in the dust. The Spartans first used their eight foot long fighting spears, and when those broke, they drew bronze swords. The soil at their feet ran thick with the blood of Greek and Persian alike, yet still they fought on.

The Spartans were the ultimate warrior, unafraid of death and pain, and when their swords blunted, broke, or fell from their grips, they turned to the ancient Greek martial art of pankration. Kicking, punching, and biting their enemies into submission, the Greeks refused to surrender. It was sometime in the early afternoon that King Leonidas fell, and his body became lost behind the Persian lines. The Greeks refused to leave the body of their bold leader, and pushed back the Persians to recover his body. Barely alive and their formation utterly broken, the Spartans pushed the Persians back four times to drag away the body of the King of Sparta. When the King’s body was safe, they fought on. Not to a standstill, not to a surrender, but to the last man. The Persian forces allowed one to live, to carry the message of the defeat back to Sparta, yet every other man fought to the death.

It is not certain how many men died in the pass that day, but only two Spartans survived. Estimates of Persian casualties number between 20 and 100 thousand men dead or wounded, with only 2,000 on the Greek side. Thermopylae is, truly, not a last stand in the common sense of the term. The battles would continue, Athens would fall, and the Greeks would eventually take victory from the jaws of defeat. To this day, however, there is no story as grand, as archetypal of the warrior ethos as that of the last stand of the 300 at Thermopylae.