When was thermopylae

But the Battle of Thermopylae has little competition when it comes to sheer drama. It represented the struggle of the smaller Greek empire against an overbearing force bent on taking their homeland away from them, and forever enshrined the valiance of the Spartans. The battle, though a loss for the Greeks, was a metaphorical victory of freedom over tyranny, and courage over fear.

In the more than 2,00 years since, its allegorical powers have only grown stronger. Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Planet Earth.

Credit: Mino Surkala. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. Iron arrowheads and spearheads were found in the Koinos hill, where the last defenders of the Thermopyles fell, slain by the arrows of the enemy. Already a subscriber? Want more? More From Discover. Recommendations From Our Store. Stay Curious. In order to achieve hegemony over the Greek mainland, Xerxes planned to attack by land and by sea.

The loose coalition of Hellenes ancient Greeks identified the mountain pass of Thermopylae and the cape of Artemisium as the key defense land-and-sea points respectively and sent a conglomeration of Greeks headed by King Leonidas of Sparta to protect Thermopylae. Because the Olympic games were occurring at the same time as the expected Persian invasion, the Greek alliance sent only a small advance guard.

Leonidas sent the local contingent to defend Anopaea, a single-file pass near Thermopylae, while the Spartans and others remained on the narrow, yet somewhat larger pass of Thermopylae. The Persian assault began on August 17 and lasted for three days before the Persians finally killed the Spartans who had defended the mountain pass with another small Greek contingent of roughly three to four thousand men.

Before the Spartans and others died, however, they had slain twenty thousand Persians. While the Battle of Thermopylae was technically a defeat for the Greek coalition, it was also a conquest. It marked the beginning of several important Greek victories against the Persians and represented a morale shift among the Greeks.

Even though almost all of the Spartans two men had defected had died, they had fought vigorously and valiantly, refusing to merely submit to the Persians. When Leonidas learned of the encirclement early on the third day, he called a meeting. They still had time to withdraw, but Leonidas and what was left of his Spartans insisted on staying. So, too, did the contingent of from the ancient Greek city of Thespiae. Since their city in the nearby region of Boeotia was in the path of any Persian advance, they had good reason to lay down their lives.

Four hundred Thebans also stayed only to desert at the end. The rest of the Greek force chose to leave. The historian Herodotus, keen to lionise Leonidas, tells us that the leader sent the allies away to spare their lives and win immortal glory.

The Persians unlike the Greeks had cavalry , which could overtake and destroy the retreating forces. To buy time for the retreating troops, Leonidas needed a rear-guard to hold back the Persians — and die, if necessary.

The rear-guard held their own, despite losing their commander Leonidas amidst brutal, drawn-out fighting. But then the Immortals arrived, and the Greeks had to retreat to a low hill. The vicious hand-to-hand fighting had broken their spears and swords, but they fought on with daggers, hands and teeth until the Persians tired of unnecessary losses and shot them down with arrow volleys. Arrowheads of Anatolian design have been found in large numbers on the hill by modern archaeologists. Thermopylae was a Greek defeat.

The rear-guard was annihilated and the Persians rolled on to occupy central Greece. But Thermopylae did — crucially — prove that the Persian war machine could be stopped. It also tested the Greek strategy of using confined space to neutralise Persian numbers, a strategy that later proved devastatingly effective when the Greeks destroyed the Persian fleet in the narrow strait of Salamis just a month or so later.

It is not here, however, but elsewhere that the way is narrowest, namely, in front of Thermopylae and behind it; at Alpeni, which lies behind, it is only the breadth of a cart-way, and it is the same at the Phoenix stream, near the town of Anthele. To the west of Thermopylae rises a high mountain, inaccessible and precipitous, a spur of Oeta; to the east of the road there is nothing but marshes and sea.

But the modern visitor to the site sees two not very imposing looking hills; they lie to the south, not to the west. This discrepancy has led some scholars to assert that Herodotus never even saw the site, and that if he could make so basic an error all of his topographical information about the site, which is copious and detailed, must not be trusted; others tried to save his credibility by positing that he saw the site around noon, so that the sun was directly overhead and it was impossible to orient himself.

Kendrick Pritchett, who is generally credited with injecting new life into the study of ancient topography, has mounted a vigorous defense of Herodotus's reliability on this and other sites. Pritchett points out that Herodotus seems to have done a very careful study of the site despite the error over the directions; he gives many distances in stades and plethra, and his account also includes an unusually high number of obscure toponyms.

More puzzling for the tourist who arrives at the site with his Herodotus in his hand is what lies to the south of the hills, beyond the modern roadside monument: a broad expanse of scrubby ground stretching out for about four miles to the sea. It looks today like no pass at all. The reason for this is no mystery. Due to what geologists call "alluvial fans", a process by which rivers deposit silt travertine and other sediments , the coastline of the Gulf of Malea has advanced from miles over the last years Kraft et al.

Kraft and his team calculated the sea level in using a mathematical formula known as the "eustatic curve". Together with the results of radiocarbon dating on the deposits and stratographic interpretation of the layers of the new land, they were able to account for the fact that travelers of only a few centuries ago reported the pass to be much narrower than we would expect if the process of buildup were proceeding at a steady rate.

Rather, according to Kraft :. Fluctuations in the width of the pass at Thermopylae [have been] common, as expected in an unstable structural configuration along the flank of a major graben i.

Kraft concluded that the pass was not more than meters wide in That was too wide for Pritchett, who attacked the findings in volume VI of his Studies in Greek Topography Herodotus says that the pass at Thermopylae was narrower than that at Alpeni, which he puts at half a plethron or roughly 15 meters wide.

The confrontation at Thermopylae took place in the late summer of Some modern accounts seem to know exactly on what dates the battle fell, because Herodotus says 7. This confidence about the precise dating has lately been called into question e.

For example, we know that when Xerxes and the Persian imperial army arrived at Anthela, just west of the pass, they encamped and waited for five days before attacking.

The reason for this is fairly straightforward. First, although the Persians could be confident that they would outnumber the enemy, they had as yet no idea how many hoplites were waiting on the other side of the pass, hidden by a hastily reconstructed wall. Second, Xerxes was waiting for his battered fleet to catch up; it had been damaged and delayed by bad weather yet again, the hand of the gods on the side of the Greeks 7.

A quick victory over the Greek fleet would allow him to simply land troops in the rear of the enemy, obviating the advantage offered to the Greeks by the terrain at the pass.