8 August 480 BC: The Stand at Thermopylae

Spartan soldiers hold out against seemingly impossible odds at Thermopylae, defeating a much larger Persian force by holding a narrow pass against them. This makes them the preeminent city of Greece, and their method of rule – military dictatorship – becomes the norm across all of Hellas.

In reality, Leonidas was the leader of an ad hoc alliance of Greek city-states. About two thousand of the seven or so thousand Greeks were killed in the battle, with an estimated twenty thousand of possibly hundreds of thousands of Persians killed before the Greek were defeated.

The Greeks could very well have held out, if it hadn't been for the treason of Ephialtes who told the Persians about another path through the mountain pass of Thermopylae.

A general view of the pass at Thermopylae looking to the west from the spur of hills held by the Greek forces. The Persians would have been attacking towards the photographer. In 480 BC when the battle occurred here, the coastline was roughly in the same position as the road today.
Image © Astarte Resources.

With the Persians advancing on two fronts, Leonidas dismissed all Greeks but three hundred Spartans, probably on August 11. The Spartans, along with Thespian and Theban contingents, stayed behind in a suicidal effort to halt the Persians; some time later the Thebans defected to the Persians, and in the end all of Leonidas' men were killed.

The immediate aftermath of the battle of Thermopylae (and the simultneaous naval battle of Artemisium) was Xerxes' sack of Athens, whose inhabitants had fled to the island of Salamis.