Avenging the 300: The Day Persia Paid for Leonidas

[00:00:00]After the fighting at Thermopylae ended, the Persian king walked the pass among the Greek dead. And when he found the body of Leonidas, he gave three orders.

[00:00:08]Cut off the head, fix the head on a wooden stake, raise the body on a cross above the pass so that every Greek who marched north afterward would see what became of a king who defied him.

[00:00:19]Herodotus, who collected this account from men who lived through the war, notes that the act broke every Persian custom of royal warfare. Persian kings honored the bodies of enemy kings.

[00:00:32]Xerxes' own father Darius had returned the Athenian dead after Marathon with formal rights. Xerxes did none of that for Leonidas, and the reason was not cruelty for its own sake. Leonidas had cost him three days at the pass. Those three days had cost him the summer, and the summer was the thing he could not get back.

[00:00:55]This is not the story of a clean revenge won by Spartan virtue alone. In the weeks after Thermopylae, the Spartan state refused to send another army north, and the Peloponnesian League voted to abandon Athens and wall off the Isthmus of Corinth. The Athenians emptied their own city >> [music] >> and watched from the water as Persian soldiers climbed the Acropolis and set it burning. For roughly 6 weeks in the autumn of 480 BC, Greece looked like a defeated [music] country. The revenge for Leonidas was going to be won if it was one at all by one Athenian who talked a frightened fleet into fighting in the wrong place at the right moment.

[00:01:36]His name was Themistocles, and he had spent 10 years arguing a single unpopular idea inside the Athenian Assembly, that the next Persian war would be decided on water and not on land.

[00:01:51]When a rich vein of silver was struck at the mines of Laurion, the revenue was enough to hand every citizen a bonus of 10 drachmae and the assembly wanted to divide it among themselves.

[00:02:03]Themistocles argued instead that the silver should be poured into warships and he won the vote by a thin margin and built his city a fleet of 200 triremes >> [music] >> against every instinct of the men who paid for it. When the invasion came, the oracle at Delphi told the Athenians that a wooden wall alone would keep them safe. The old men read that as the timber palisade that had once ringed the Acropolis.

[00:02:28]Themistocles read it as the ships >> [music] >> and he pushed the assembly to abandon the city and put its people aboard the fleet.

[00:02:36]When the Persians took the empty city and burned the temples on the rock, the ancient wooden statue of Athena Polias, the oldest sacred thing in Athens, burned with them.

[00:02:48]And that fleet now sat at anchor behind the island of Salamis, 370 Greek triremes drawn from every state that had refused to kneel while the Peloponnesian captains argued to pull it south to the Isthmus and leave Athens to the enemy for good.

[00:03:05]Themistocles knew that if the ships scattered, the war was lost. So, he took the decision out of their hands. That night, he sent a household slave named Sicinnus across the dark strait to the Persian fleet with a message that was a lie shaped like a gift.

[00:03:22]"The Greeks were terrified," Sicinnus told them, "and planning to slip away before dawn.

[00:03:27]Move now, seal both mouths of the strait and the whole fleet could be caught divided and fleeing." The Persians believed it because it matched what they already thought the Greeks would do.

[00:03:38]Xerxes gave the order. Persian squadrons rowed through the night to block the exits. And when the first light came, the Greek ships had not run at all. It was the Persian fleet that had moved in the dark into the one stretch of water where numbers could not save it.

[00:03:56]The battle came on the 29th of September.

[00:03:59]The strait narrows to roughly 2 km at its tightest.

[00:04:04]And into that gap, the Persian fleet had committed its front line before the sun was fully up, the rear squadron still pushing forward behind, no one able to turn.

[00:04:13]The Greek ships waited along the western edge and let them come. When the light broke fully across the water, the first Greek trireme drove forward out of the line, an Athenian ship under a man named Aminias of Pallene, and rammed a Persian vessel square in the side and split it open.

[00:04:32]Behind him, the whole Greek line came on at once. The Greek triremes were heavier and built for exactly this, a straight killing charge in close water, and the Persian front rank shattered under the impact.

[00:04:45]Then the disaster fed on itself.

[00:04:48]The rear Persian squadrons, still driving forward, crashed into the wreckage of their own front line. Ships tangled with ships. [music] Men went into the water in armor and did not come up.

[00:05:00]Xerxes watched all of it from a throne carried up onto the slope of Mount Aegaleus, 3 km from the fighting, and he kept scribes at hand to write down the names of the captains who fought well so they could be rewarded when it was over. The scribes worked through the morning. Most of the men whose names they wrote were dead within hours.

[00:05:19]From the hill, Xerxes could see the water filling with broken hulls, could see his own sailors drowning, could see the Greek ships backing off and turning and driving in to ram a second time.

[00:05:31]He had come to watch a victory recorded in his honor.

[00:05:34]He watched the destruction of his fleet instead. When it was over, roughly 200 Persian ships had been sunk or taken against about 40 Greek losses.

[00:05:44]But the number of hulls was not the thing that mattered. The invasion had depended on that fleet to feed the army as it advanced. And without it, the largest army ever brought into Greece could not be kept supplied through a Greek winter.

[00:05:58]Within days, Xerxes took the bulk of that army home and left his kinsman, Mardonius, behind with 60,000 picked men to winter in Thessaly and finish the conquest in the spring.

[00:06:10]The revenge for Leonidas had begun.

[00:06:13]It had only begun.

[00:06:15]Mardonius still commanded the most dangerous army in the peninsula. Athens still lay in ashes. And in Sparta, the ephors were once more debating whether it was worth marching north for a city that was not their own.

[00:06:28]The winter that followed nearly broke the alliance.

[00:06:31]Mardonius understood that Athens without walls or harvest could be bought.

[00:06:36]And through the winter, he sent Alexander the first of Macedon to Athens as his envoy carrying an offer close to everything a ruined city could want.

[00:06:47]Full autonomy under Persian protection.

[00:06:50]Money to rebuild the temples that had been burned.

[00:06:53]A separate peace that would take Athens out of the war and leave the rest of Greece to face Persia alone. The Athenian assembly heard the offer and refused it.

[00:07:02]But the refusal carried a warning to the Spartan envoys who stood listening.

[00:07:08]If Sparta failed again to march in the spring, Athens would have no choice left but to accept. Because there was a limit to what a homeless people could refuse.

[00:07:17]In Sparta, the argument dragged on behind closed doors until the spring of 479 BC when the Athenian ambassadors made it plain that the alliance stood hours from breaking.

[00:07:30]If Athens went over to Persia, the enemy regained a great fleet and the wall across the Isthmus became worthless. So, Sparta marched at last. And this time, it marched in full. The ephors gave command to Pausanias, the young regent and nephew of the [music] dead Leonidas, and put under him the largest army the Peloponnesian League had ever fielded.

[00:07:50]Spartan hoplites with their helots beside them, Corinthians, Tegeans, and contingents from every allied city joined with the Athenians into a force near 60,000 fighting men.

[00:08:03]It marched north, crossed the Isthmus, and came down onto the plain of Plataea in Boeotia, where Mardonius waited >> [music] >> behind the line of the Asopus River. For 11 days the two armies watched each other across the plain.

[00:08:17]Both sides sent skirmishers, and the Persian cavalry rode out to cut at the Greek supply lines and to foul the springs the Greeks depended on for water. On the 11th night, the Greeks tried to shift their whole position back toward better water, and the movement came apart in the dark. By dawn, the army that had marched as one line lay broken into three separated groups across the plain. The Spartans under Pausanias exposed and alone in the middle of open ground.

[00:08:47]Mardonius looked out that morning, saw what looked like the beginning of a rout, and threw his best troops forward to catch the Spartans before they could form.

[00:08:56]What you are watching is a reconstruction built from Herodotus in his ninth book, from more than a century of survey and excavation on the plain at Plataea and in the strait at Salamis, and from the modern work of historians like Peter Green, Paul Cartledge, and J. F. Lazenby.

[00:09:15]What the tradition handed down about the revenge for Leonidas and what the ground actually shows are not the same story.

[00:09:23]This channel builds every documentary out of primary evidence and current scholarship rather than out of the myth.

[00:09:30]If that is the kind of history you came for, subscribe before Mardonius falls.

[00:09:35]Remember the head above the pass.

[00:09:38]When the Spartan hoplites saw the Persian assault come down on them, they were fighting for the king whose corpse had been treated that way 11 months before, and whose kinsman now stood among them in command.

[00:09:50]The Persian archers poured arrows into the Spartan ranks, and the Spartans held their formation and did not charge because Pausanias was waiting on the omens from the sacrificial victims, and the omens would not turn.

[00:10:04]The arrows fell for the better part of 20 minutes into men standing still under discipline. A Spartan named Callicrates, whom Herodotus calls the most beautiful man in the whole Greek army, was hit through the side as he waited and carried out of the line to die.

[00:10:20]And he said that his grief was not that he died, but that he died without striking a blow. Then the victims fell right, and Pausanias gave the order, and the phalanx went forward. The Persian infantry met them behind a wall of wicker shields called the spara, planting it in the ground and shooting over it.

[00:10:40]And the wall held the first shock.

[00:10:43]What it could not fix was the difference underneath.

[00:10:47]The Persian soldier fought in cloth and leather against a man sheathed in bronze with a shorter spear against a longer one.

[00:10:55]And once the Spartans forced in among the wicker and tore it down, the exchange became one-sided. The Persian line began to bend backward. Mardonius saw it bending and rode forward on a white horse into the fighting to hold his men in place by being seen among them.

[00:11:13]And a Spartan named Amnestus [music] threw a stone that caught him in the head and knocked him from the saddle.

[00:11:19]Herodotus says he was dead before he touched the ground.

[00:11:23]The whole weight of the invasion turned on the flight of a single stone. The death broke them.

[00:11:28]When the Persian troops saw the white horse go down, the infantry stopped fighting and ran for the fortified camp on the far bank of the Asopus.

[00:11:38]And the Thebans who had fought on the Persian side gave way toward their own city.

[00:11:43]The first Spartan assault on the camp failed because the phalanx was built for open battle and not for storming a stockade. Then the Athenians arrived, found the weak point, and broke the palisade open. What happened inside once the wall was breached, Herodotus sets [music] down in plain words that historians have mostly read as a plain account of slaughter. The men packed inside could not form a line, could not maneuver, could not run. Something like 40,000 died there through the afternoon.

[00:12:15]Herodotus records 260,000 Persian dead in all.

[00:12:20]Though modern historians treat the figure as inflated, what no one disputes is that by evening the Persian army in Greece had ceased to exist as a force that could take the field.

[00:12:30]And on that same day, if the Greek tradition is to be trusted, the last Persian fleet was burning on a beach across the sea. Remember Salamis? The fleet that had won there had spent the months since hunting the ships that survived. And by late summer the combined Greek fleet under Leotychides of Sparta and Xanthippus of Athens had crossed the Aegean to the Ionian coast.

[00:12:54]The Persian ships, damaged and depleted, had been dragged up onto the sand at a headland called Mycale, and the crews had thrown up a stockade around them guarded by a land army of some 60,000 [music] men. The Greeks landed near the position and formed for battle on the sand. And here Herodotus preserves one of the strangest details in the whole account. As the Greek line advanced, a rumor ran through the ranks that Plataea had already been won that very morning on the other side of the sea, and the proof of it had come ashore ahead of them.

[00:13:26]A herald staff lying washed up on the beach where no herald had walked.

[00:13:31]What is not in doubt is that the men believed it.

[00:13:34]They went forward certain the great battle was already won and that their work was only to finish a revenge that was as good as complete. And they fought like men closing a door. They broke the position, killed or scattered the defenders, and burned the beached fleet where it lay. The last Persian naval force in the Aegean went up in smoke on the sand.

[00:13:55]And along that coast, the Ionian Greek cities began to rise against the empire again. That was the end of it. The specific thing that had begun with a head on a stake above a mountain pass.

[00:14:05]But the men who won these battles did not go [music] home to be honored for the rest of their lives. And the way they paid is the part the tradition learned to leave quiet. Consider who preserved the account. Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus, a Greek city on the Anatolian coast under Persian control. Around 484 BC, 4 years before Salamis, and he grew up in the aftermath of the very wars he would later describe. He spent his adult life traveling the Mediterranean and the Near East, gathering accounts and speaking with men who had been there while a few of them were still alive to speak. And he composed his history in the 430s and 420s BC. Books 7 through 9 are the foundation for nearly everything known about these campaigns. He did not write neutral history. He shaped the war into a story about free men choosing to stand together against an empire. But the physical specifics he preserved have held up remarkably well against everything the ground has since been made to yield.

[00:15:07]The plain at Plataea still matches what he described. The Asopus runs along the northern edge. The springs have been located. And the burial mounds of the Greek dead have been surveyed and confirmed.

[00:15:20]Most recently by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in work carried out between 2018 and 2022.

[00:15:29]The Athenians laid in one place, the Spartans in another.

[00:15:33]The Allied Contingents, each in their own ground.

[00:15:36]What has never been found is the Persian dead.

[00:15:39]Herodotus says the Greeks gathered them and left them where they lay on the plain.

[00:15:44]And no mass grave answering to those numbers has been confirmed under the soil.

[00:15:48]Out at Salamis, the strait itself is unchanged. And the narrow channel where the Persian fleet crushed itself lines up with the old account better than it has any right to.

[00:15:59]And here is what both cities that won the war chose to forget. The victory was won by a degree of cooperation the Greek world had never reached before and would not reach again. Athens and Sparta fought together in the strait the full league army marched beside the Athenians onto the plain and the combined fleet burned the ships at Mycale. Yet within 30 years these same cities were tearing each other apart in the Peloponnesian War and each handed down a version of the great campaign that quietly wrote down the other cities part.

[00:16:30]Sparta remembered herself as the avenger of her fallen king. Athens remembered the cleverness of Themistocles as the hinge on which everything turned. And each had a further reason to go quiet because the men at the center of the victory came to ends no city wanted at the heart of its founding story.

[00:16:48]Themistocles, who had built the fleet and sprung the trap, was ostracized from Athens in 471 BC. Seven years after Salamis, he fled first to Argos and then hunted by his own countrymen to the court of Artaxerxes I, son of the very Xerxes he had beaten in the strait. The king received him with honors and granted him three cities in Asia Minor to govern. And he learned the Persian language and lived out his years as a governor under the empire he had defeated. He died in Magnesia around 459 BC at roughly 65 and some traditions preserve that he took his own life rather than lead a Persian expedition against Athens. Pausanias came to a [music] worse end. The regent who had broken Mardonius on the plain became a man his own state could not trust, accused of dealing with the enemy.

[00:17:40]And when the Spartans moved against him, he fled to sanctuary in a temple of Athena. They would not drag him from holy ground, so they walled up the doors instead >> [music] >> and left him inside and they say his own mother laid the first stone. They pulled him out at the very end so that he would not die within the sanctuary and pollute it. And he died the moment they carried him across the threshold around 470 [music] BC. Xerxes himself never attempted Greece again. He was murdered in his own palace in 465 BC and the empire turned to funding one Greek city against another until a Macedonian king pulled the whole Achaemenid structure down >> [music] >> between 334 and 330 BC.

[00:18:24]Before the Battle of Issus, Alexander wrote to the last Persian king and named the burning of Athens among his reasons for the war. Leonidas himself came home [music] in the end. After Plataea, the Spartans sent for the body or what the years had left of it and carried it back and buried it with the honors Xerxes had denied it.

[00:18:43]And the tomb was tended in Sparta for centuries. The plain of Plataea is still there 50 miles northwest of Athens on the edge of Boeotia. The Asopus still runs slow through the fields and there is no monument on the battlefield to compare with the great mound at Marathon. Wheat grows across the ground where the Persian dead lay in the August heat [music] of 479 BC. A farmer works that ground in the summer light turning the same soil and he has most likely never heard the names of the men who died under his furrows.

[00:19:16]Somewhere beneath him lie the Spartan dead >> [music] >> in their mound.

[00:19:20]Somewhere beneath him, if the old account is true, lie the tens of thousands who died packed inside the burning camp. The revenge for Leonidas was completed on this field in the space of a single morning. Herodotus wrote it down. Sparta edited it. Athens edited it differently. And the field itself, which holds the truth more honestly than either of them, is farmed by people who have never been told what it is. The wheat moves in the wind. The river runs.

[00:19:48]The ground keeps what the story forgot.

[00:19:50]Themistocles crossed to the court of the king he had beaten and spent his last years governing Persian cities, learning the Persian tongue, dying in the empire's service. Some say by his own hand rather than march against Athens.

[00:20:06]How the man who saved Greece from Persia ended his life as a servant of Persia is its own story, and it is waiting for you on this channel.