The Delphic Oracle had said that a Spartan King must fall in battle or Sparta would burn. So when a Persian envoy came with the message, 'hand over your weapons', Leonidas had one response: "Come and take them." This video is brought to you by Total War Arena where you could write your own history in Thermopylae. Download the game with the link below and use the code HOPLITE for extra goodies. The Persians advanced, 200 thousand strong. Leonidas only had an advance force, 7000 Hellenic allies. Men from Thebes, Thespia, and 10 other cities led by a corps of nearly 300 Spartan Hoplites. The main army would follow once the sacred festivals ended if the advanced force was still alive That is though outnumbered the Greeks had chosen good ground the narrow pass meant that the Hellenic allies could fight in shifts Resting their reserves while others stood on the front line shields locked into a wall bristling with spears Perfect terrain for the phalanx First, Persian archers probed the line, arrows glancing off helmets, and sticking in shields But these Persian bows did little against heavy armored hoplites Xerxes, watching from his seat on a nearby hill, pulled them back and sent in his Medes 2,000 light spearmen - veteran campaigners. As they approached, they pulled their head wraps up over their mouths It was August, and the approaching column raised a dust storm from the baking ground The sides met in a moment of fury, spearhead striking and mauling The lines separated then met again Combat was too exhausting to sustain for more than a minute at a time So, they fought in bursts clash retreat clash retreat The Medes fell, their wickerwork shields No match for the long Hoplite Spears This Persian army, which had subjugated and liberated its way through the Middle East, was used to operating on plains and deserts They practiced a light mobile form of warfare That was no help in dislodging a heavily armored phalanx The pass was just too narrow, the seashore too boggy for their cavalry Persian bodies piled against the wall. Flies, omnipresent in the Greeks summer, began to collect in a humming swarm But their numbers began to tell The Greek line retreated and the Medes, roaring with triumph, followed breaking formation and raising their Spears to the Hoplites' unprotected backs And that is when the Greeks wheeled - a feint. The wall of shields hit the ragged Persian formation and tore into them From his seat on the hill, Xerxes lept to his feet, horrified. After several more hours, he withdrew his Medes, frustrated and appalled He sent in another column, the elite Royal Guard that the Greeks called The Immortals Immortal in name, perhaps but not in body, that much was clear by dusk. Though The Immortals did manage to pressure the hoplite line even harder than the Medes, The Greeks still held their ground Leonidas had reason to be pleased that night. The line was holding They were in a good position where they couldn't be outflanked Except, in one spot. On their arrival, locals had told them of a narrow mountain trail that circumvented the pass To take it, the Persians would have to climb a thousand metres and travel single-file, but it was possible Leonidas had dispatched a thousand phocaeans to hold this flank, but had failed to send a Spartan officer with him. He needed every man on the frontline Meanwhile, Xerxes tallied his losses The first day had been expensive There were more battles to fight after this, and he couldn't drain his elite units just to break these Greeks He sent messengers to gather the bravest men of each nation in his army and amalgamate them into a single unit That way, the unit would be an elite one, but the impact would be distributed if it were wiped out But this was not a question of bravery The Greeks were just too heavily armored, and in too good of a position By dusk the next day, the best of the Persian Empire were lying dead, with the tactical balance unchanged And that is when a traitor arrived in the Persian camp, speaking of another way Night comes The phocaeans holding the mountain pass have been sitting guard duty for two days Without a Spartan officer to keep them in formation, They've broken up into an ad-hoc camp, and they've posted no centuries Their only warning is the crunch of dead leaves, and then the mortals are on them Persians have marched by night, noiselessly scaling the mountain, soft-footed and quick This is their version of war The phocaeans run. By dawn, Immortals are exiting the pass and forming up behind the Greeks. "So that's it then, " thinks, Leonidas He asks his diviner to sacrifice a ram The beasts entrails are filthy black - an omen of certain death Leonidas makes his decision: the rest of his army will withdraw to join the Allies The Spartans, and their enslaved helot attendants, will fight a rearguard action to let them escape But they wouldn't fight alone Overcome by emotion, 700 thespians decide to stay, as do 400 loyalists from Thebes It is perhaps the bravest decision of the whole day Unlike Spartans, trained from birth to expect death in battle, these men are civilians giving up lives and family The Greeks form up, vault the wall to engage the Persians directly, and advance With survival impossible, the Greeks lose all fear They stab until their spears break then draw their short swords Shields splinter, men scream Leonidas falls early, his body sprawling amidst the Persians The Greeks line surges forward with new savagery, recapturing his body before it's mutilated And when their swords are blunted or lost, these Greeks - Spartans, Thebans, Helots, Thespians fight with bare hands and teeth But Xerxes has a long war to fight, and there is no sense throwing good men away just so these Greeks can have a noble death He pulls his infantry back, and calls up his archers The victory costs Xerxes dearly He had lost thousands of soldiers and two half brothers, but he was through He swept into Greece, sacking the cities that had refused to submit He entered Athens and fulfilled his father's promise to burn the Acropolis - a punishment for the Ionian revolt But he found the city empty The Athenian Navy had forced a stalemate at Artemisium as Thermopylae raged and then withdrawn and evacuated the city under Themistocles' orders And a month later, that same Athenian fleet baited the Persian Navy into a battle at Salamis and delivered a decisive blow Fearing that the Athenians would target his bridge across the Hellespont and strand him in Europe, Xerxes handed commands to a subordinate and went home He was not present a year later, when a Spartan led coalition force defeated the Persian army at Plataea, ending the war Two great victories Which demands we ask, Why do we remember Thermopylae? Though the Hellenic Allies fought bravely, they failed to stop Xerxes or even hold him long enough to make a strategic difference. He still burned Athens Why does everyone know the Greek defeat at Thermopylae but , victories like Salamis and Plataea remain obscure? It's because Thermopylae helped to define Greek and thus "Western culture," and that is thanks to one man, Herodotus Decades after the Greco-Persian war, Herodotus wrote a pioneering book about it A book that would be one of the first to treat writing history as an investigation rather than myth making And his rousing account of Thermopylae is the story we all know today But it's important to remember that Herodotus had an ulterior motive In his histories, he was arguing for a pan - Greek identity an idea that all of these competing city-states shared a culture, religion, language, and values that existed above their petty squabbles, and as part of this, he constantly contrasted the Greek West, which he portrayed as noble and free, humble, and equitable, with the Persian East, which he considered emotional, despotic, decadent, and obsessed with subservience and slavery As we saw last episode, that doesn't really reflect the reality of ancient Greece and Persia because, well, nothing's ever as simple as that But it did prove an attractive story, and that problematic frame the idea of a global East and West with opposing, incompatible values, persisted in Europe and the areas it settled, and throughout history, the story of Thermopylae would be told and retold as a story of clashing civilizations In the 1960's, that story became about the Cold War, while the graphic novel 300 reframed it as a story about terrorism Early Americans fetishized Sparta so much that Alexander Hamilton made fun of it During World War two, Spartan culture found admirers in both axis and allied nations Some of our etellings even suggests that the Spartans fought to preserve democracy, thereby saving the modern world from being snuffed out which is almost comical, since within a generation of Thermopylae, Sparta actually partnered with Persia to crush Athens and it's democracy The truth is always more complex This contact between Asia and Europe didn't save what we sometimes refer to as Western civilization, But the melding of its cultures and preservation and history books did help to create it The open society of Athens survived long enough for later governments to imitate it Sparta gave many European nations their concepts of service to the state, military professionalism and mandatory public education And when Alexander the Great eventually conquered Persia, he was so enamored with its administration and policies, that he copied them, spreading Cyrus the Great's ideas of professional bureaucracy and multicultural tolerant society No matter where you are, you live in the aftermath of Thermopylae But it's important to remember: neither of those two sides, Greece or Persia, represent any one of us We are all the inheritors of both Thanks again to the folks at total war arena for sponsoring this episode You want to rewrite your own history of Thermopylae? Download the game with the link below this video and use the code hoplite for extra goodies Be sure to tell them extra credits sent you
Οι Ελληνες είναι πιο σκούροι απο τους Πέρσες χαχα
Btw οι αμερικανοί είναι επηρεασμένοι από το εβραϊκό view οτι οι Πέρσες είναι liberal και καλοί επειδή τους ελευθέρωσε ο Κύρος. Στο extra history λένε το ίδιο narrative αλλά με πιο μετριοπαθή τρόπο.
Video in English.
once more, excellent quality
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