The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [27]
What the Greeks could not know was the affair was beginning, not ending. Another king of Persia waited in the wings, with plans to overturn Greek miscalculations. Xerxes, son of Darius, eventually assembled an army and designed a powerful invasion to subjugate the Greeks. It turns out that angering people such as the Persians, possessing huge armies and vast resources, is a bad idea.
In 480 BC, Xerxes marched against the Greeks. This time the Persian king assembled a huge army, so vast the chroniclers of the day said it was immeasurable.[27] With such a large army, a sea invasion was out of the question. The Persians crossed the Hellespont using a road constructed over a fantastic pontoon boat bridge, an engineering feat for all time, afterward marching around the Aegean Sea toward Athens alerting the Greeks that all of Asia was coming their way.
Figure 9 Persian Wars—Xerxes Attacks
The Greeks decided to unite against this invader from the east.[28] To impede the Persian’s progress, the Greeks sent a small force north to the narrow pass at Thermopylae (hell’s gate—thermo meaning hot, and pylae meaning gate) because this area was very tight, with the sea to one side and sharply ascending mountain cliffs to the other, and a small warrior group could buy their fellow Greeks time.
The resulting three-day stand comes down to us as one of the most noble and enduring clashes of arms in history. At Thermopylae, six thousand Greeks, including men from Athens and Thebes, accompanied three hundred Spartans in the defense of the pass. The Spartans certainly bore the brunt of the fighting, but to say they were alone is simply inaccurate.
The immense Persian army came upon the Greeks holding the narrow pass and began their assault. Because of the nature of the terrain, the fighting favored the Greeks. As at Marathon, maneuver here was impossible. Persian horses and archers were useless, and the heavily armored Greeks with their ponderous shields, stabbing spears, and cleaving swords were in their element. By necessity, the Persians attacked the Greek wall of shields and men head-on, and a slaughter resulted as the lightly protected Persians failed to penetrate the Greek line. The Persian shields were (probably) wicker, their swords light, and they wore little armor in keeping with their philosophy of speed and maneuver to win battles. Like the German Army at Stalingrad in 1942, the Persian army was committed to a battle it was not designed to fight; consequently, the Persians failed to breach the Greek line. Even after two days of hard fighting, the Spartans and their allies held against the gargantuan eastern army. The Persians needed a new approach or they would likely spend a long time, and lose men unnecessarily, fighting for the pass.
Then the Persians got a break. A Greek who knew the area came to Xerxes telling him of a sinuous mountain trail around the pass that would allow the Persians to surround the Greeks and defeat them quickly. Xerxes sent his troops by night through the mountains, but the Greeks discovered the move and most fled the trap. The Spartans, and about one thousand men from Thebes, stayed and prepared for death. The Persians surrounded the remaining Greeks demanding surrender, but the Spartans and their allies refused. Xerxes ordered his men forward. All the Greeks died, fighting to the last man. Legend claims the Spartans fought until their swords and spears were broken, finally dying while scratching and clawing at their assailants. No man surrendered, so he would die free rather than suffer slavery for even a moment. And so it ended after three days. Xerxes and his prodigious army marched on leaving the blood-soaked ground behind. The Greeks erected a marker at the pass, reading, “O traveler, go tell the Spartans that here we lie in obedience to their commands.