Military - Leonidas I

In 480 BC, Leonidas went to Thermopylae with 300 of his personal guard, all men with male-born sons to carry on their names, with men from other Greek city-states, who put themselves under his command to form an army 7,000 strong. This force was mustered in an attempt to hold the pass of Thermopylae against the hundreds of thousands of Persians under Xerxes I. The reason Leonidas took only his personal guard, and not the whole Spartan army, was that Spartan religious customs forbade sending an army at that time of year. Also, the Oracle at Delphi had foretold that Sparta could be saved only by the death of one of its kings, one of the lineage of Herakles, so Leonidas undertook this task deliberately going to his doom. According to Plutarch, when Leonidas was leaving, his wife, Gorgo, asked him how she could aid his mission. He responded "Make sure you marry some man that will treat you well, bear children from him."

On the first day of the siege Xerxes demanded the Greeks surrender their arms. Leonidas replied Μολών Λαβέ ("Come and get them"). Leonidas and his men repulsed the frontal attacks of the Persians for the first two days, killing roughly 20,000 of the enemy troops and losing very few of their own. The Persian elite unit known to the Greeks as "the Immortals" were held back, and two of Xerxes' brothers died in battle. On the third day a traitor named Ephialtes led the Persians through a mountain track to the rear of the Greeks. When a scout was sent to check on the troops, he returned with the bad news.

At that point Leonidas sent away all Greek troops and remained in the pass with his 300 Spartans, 900 Helots and 700 Thespians who refused to leave. The small Greek force, attacked from both sides, was cut down to a man except for the Thebans, who surrendered. Leonidas fell in the thickest of the fight, but the Spartans retrieved his body and protected it until their final fall to enemy arrows.

"Great moments" may come with a certain frequency throughout history. However, there are very few of these "great moments" where you can take you finger, put it on that point in time, and say: "Here. Here is where the fate of the world was held in the balance." The Battle of Thermopylae was one of those moments. Of those handful of moments in all of history, rarer few are those moments which are caused by a single man. Leonidas was one of those men. Everything we are as Western culture we owe to him and his stand at the Hot Gates. Without King Leonidas I, this hall is nothing.