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Thermopylae 480 BC Last stand of the 300 Nic Fields | ||||||||||||
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Cena okładkowa: 14.99 GBP
Cena detaliczna: 55.00 zł
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| "To this day the three-day battle for the little rocky pass of Thermopylae remains the stuff of legend, the heroic struggle where Leonidas, the Spartan king and 300 chosen men died bravely in their efforts to delay the Persians. Out of this do-or-die disaster sprung the belief that the Spartans ’obeyed their iron laws and never retreated’. In antiquity the narrow defile of Thermopylae, some 150km north of Athens and the last defensible corridor in Greece above the Isthmus of Corinth, ran between the Kallidromos mountain range and the sea. The heights there descend steeply into the pass leaving only a restricted route along the marshy coast. The pass itself narrowed in several places, and it was at the so-called Middle Gate, where previously the local Phokians had built a defensive wall running down to the seashore, that the Greeks decided to make their stand with their bronze-faced shields and bristling hedge of spears. A force of perhaps some 6,000 hoplites, with Leonidas as the commander-in-chief, held off the army of Xerxes for two days, until a local shepherd offered to guide the Persians to their rear by a mountain track. Informed of this by deserters and scouts during the second night the Greeks divided, probably under orders, some withdrawing. The surviving Spartans, Thespians, and Thebans remained to act as a fighting rearguard. When the Persians attacked on the third and final day, the Greeks first fought with their spears, and when their spears were shattered, they used their swords. When their swords were broken, they went after the Persians with bare hands and teeth. When Leonidas finally fell, the Greeks drove the enemy off four times before recovering his body. Among the Persians to be killed were two of Xerxes’ half-brothers. The Thebans possibly surrendered at the last, but Persian arrows and spears annihilated the rest. When he came upon Leonidas’ body, Xerxes ordered the beheading of the corpse and the impalement of the severed head on a pole at the site of the battle. Thermopylae was the turning point | ||||||||||||