Leonidas I of Sparta

“ The deity, in making you the instrument of Greece’s freedom, has placed you far above all your predecessors in glory: in concluding this business so conduct yourself that your reputation may be still increased, and that no barbarian may ever again attempt to perpetrate atrocious actions against Greece. When Leonidas was slain at Thermopylæ, Mardonius and Xerxes cut off his head, and suspended his body from a cross. Do the same with respect to Mardonius, and you will deserve the applause of Sparta and of Greece, and avenge the cause of your uncle Leonidas. ”

“ They were all fathers of families, who had left sons at home to succeed them. At their head was Leonidas, now senior king of Sparta. This small force was expected to be able to hold the pass until the rest were disengaged; for the Spartans were keeping a local feast, and the other Greeks were engaged at the great Olympian festival. Perhaps the very extremity of the danger made the Greeks put their religious duties in the foreground; and, indeed, Leonidas and his men went out as to an expected sacrifice. A Persian scout reported to Xerxes that he found the Spartans busy dressing their hair. ”

“ Leonidas was willing enough to assist the richer class, but he feared the people, who were eager for reform, and would not openly oppose Agis, although he endeavoured secretly to ruin his scheme, and to prejudice the Ephors against him, by imputing to him the design of hiring the poor to make him despot with the plunder of the rich, and insinuating that by his redistribution of lands and remission of debts he meant to obtain more adherents for himself instead of more citizens for Sparta. ”

“ Be sure then, that if thou canst conquer these and all the rest who remain behind in Sparta, there is no other nation which shall dare to raise a hand against thee, for now art thou face to face with the bravest men of all Hellas.’
But Xerxes laughed at the thought of a small band of men like the Spartans daring to fight against his great army. He dismissed Demaratus and sent to demand that the Spartans should give up their arms. But the only answer that Leonidas sent back was to bid the king ‘to come and take them.’ It was plain that the Spartans did not fear the enemy. ”

“ In addition to these, were one thousand Phocians, and a band of the Opuntian Locrians, unnumbered by Herodotus, but variously estimated, by Diodorus at one thousand, and, more probably, by Pausanias at no less than seven thousand.
The chief command was intrusted, according to the claims of Sparta, to Leonidas, the younger brother of the frantic Cleomenes 62, by a different mother, and his successor to the Spartan throne.
There are men whose whole life is in a single action. Of these, Leonidas is the most eminent. ”

“ The devotion of the Spartans.
243.—Now they say that when this was announced Leonidas dismissed the allies, saying ‘that it did not become him and the Spartans to desert the station which they had been sent to guard.’ And I, moreover, am of this opinion (namely) , that Leonidas, seeing that the allies were by no means resolute, dismissed them; but that he considered it dishonourable for him to retire. On the other hand, if he remained, great glory awaited him, and the fortune of Sparta was not (to be) destroyed. ”

“ Chelonis, then, pointing to her mourning habit and her dishevelled hair thus addressed Leonidas. ‘It was not my dear father compassion for Cleombrotos which put me in this habit and gave me this look of misery. My sorrows took their date with your misfortune and your banishment, and have ever since remained my familiar companions. Now you have conquered your enemies and are again king of Sparta should I still retain these ensigns of affliction or assume festival and royal ornaments, while the husband of my youth whom you yourself bestowed upon me falls a victim to your vengeance? ”

“ These men, surprised, and overwhelmed with a shower of arrows, fled up the mountain-side, and left the way open to the Persians, who pursued their course down the mountain, and at mid-day reached the rear of the pass of Thermopylæ.
Leonidas had heard of their coming. Scouts had brought him word. The defence of the pass was at an end. They must fly or be crushed. A council was hastily called, and it was decided to retreat. But this decision was not joined in by Leonidas and his gallant three hundred. The honor of Sparta would not permit her king to yield a pass which he had been sent to defend. ”

“ And while she sat mid the windowless walls there happened without her knowledge the most glorious single deed of Greece.
Sparta was ever grudging. She did not much care to bar the Persians out of all Greece. She would have preferred to meet them on the borders of her own Lakonia. If all her sister states should then perish why should Sparta care?
But one Spartan cared supremely to keep them out of Greece. Her king, Leonidas. So Leonidas, with the few soldiers which the Ephors grudgingly allowed him, marched for Thermopylæ. ”

“ At this point, in accordance with the decision of the Corinthian Congress, was offered the first resistance to the progress of the Persian army. Leonidas, king of Sparta, with three hundred Spartan soldiers and about six thousand allies from different states of Greece, held the pass. As the Greeks were about to celebrate the Olympian games, which their religious scruples would not allow them to postpone, they left this handful of men unsupported to hold in check the army of Xerxes until the festival days should be past. ”

“ Only by staying and fighting could he show that Sparta held by right the place she had won. It had to be done. "So the glory of Sparta was not blotted out."
One may have read, and read often, the description of the battle in the school-room, but he reads it with different eyes on the spot, when he can look up at the hillock crowned with a ruined cavalry barrack just inside the western pass and say to himself: "Here on this hill they fought their last fight and fell to the last man. Here once stood the monuments to Leonidas, to the three hundred, and to the four thousand." ”

“ The three hundred men whom he took with him from Sparta were the royal bodyguard, picked men all, and fathers of families, so Herodotus says. The historian evidently implies that in so desperate a venture Leonidas considered it unadvisable to take with him men whose death would blot out their name from the land of the living. ”

“ The people were transported with admiration of the young man's generosity, and with joy, that after three hundred years' interval, at last there had appeared a king worthy of Sparta. But, on the other side, Leonidas was now more than ever averse, being sensible that he and his friends would be obliged to contribute with their riches, and yet all the honor and obligation would redound to Agis. He asked him then before them all, whether Lycurgus were not in his opinion a wise man, and a lover of his country. ”

“ Only a small force of Greeks was defending the Pass, the main part of the Greek army was kept back further to the south to defend the Isthmus. A small body of about three hundred Spartans had been sent under their King Leonidas to defend the Pass of Thermopylae, and, if possible, to prevent the Persians from advancing further into Greece. These three hundred men were the picked body-guard of the King, a force in which only fathers of sons might serve, so that their families might not die out of Sparta. ”

“ They leave undisturbed the picture of a heroism combined with military skill which, if properly supplemented, might well have kept Xerxes shut out from lower Greece indefinitely, or as long as the Greek fleet, aided by the elements, could have restrained him from moving south by the sea.
The allies of Sparta, both those who fell in the four days before the betrayal of the pathway and those who fell at the end, were duly praised, but Leonidas and his three hundred have always received, and justly, the lion’s share of honour. They represented the Lacedæmonians at their best. ”

“ Leonidas is witness, Sparta's king, who hath left a mighty crown of valor and undying fame."
The antitheses are wrought with consummate skill; the fate of the heroes is glorious, their doom honorable. So far the eulogy is commonplace; then the same thought receives a bolder turn: their grave is an altar. We do not lament for them so much as hold them in eternal memory; our very songs of sorrow become pæans of praise. What follows is a still further expansion of the leading theme: rust and time cannot affect their fame; Hellas confides her glory to their tomb. ”

“ The eternal sower, who is never mistaken, has not opened for those ungrateful lands his hand full of men of genius. Such wheat is not to be confided to the rock.
Heroism, however, is not refused to them; they will have, if necessary, either the martyr or the captain. Leonidas is possible for Sparta, Hannibal for Carthage; but neither Sparta nor Carthage is capable of Homer. Some indescribable tenderness in the sublime, which causes the poet to gush from the very entrails of a people, is wanting in them. That latent tenderness, that flebile nescio quid, England possesses ”

“ King of Sparta, of the line of the Agids, was the son and successor of the heroic Leonidas, who was killed at Thermopylae, b. c. 489. He was a mere child at the time of his father's death, on which account the regency was assumed by his cousin Pausanias, who commanded the Greeks at Plataea. ”

“ Leonidas was worshipped by the people of Sparta for many centuries,36 and the champions of the Persian Wars, the saviours of Hellas, were worshipped by their remote descendants.37 Even in imperial times the inhabitants of the island of Kos still worshipped those who had fallen to secure their freedom centuries before.38 Such individual cases allow us to see what was the general rule: the memory and cult of a Hero lived on as long as the community remained in existence whose duty it was to maintain his worship. ”

“ Since you approve so well of your son's actions, it is fit you should partake in his reward." She, rising up to offer herself to the noose, said only, "I pray that it may redound to the good of Sparta."
And now the three bodies being exposed to view, and the fact divulged, no fear was strong enough to hinder the people from expressing their abhorrence of what was done, and their detestation of Leonidas and Amphares, the contrivers of it. So wicked and barbarous an act had never been committed in Sparta, since first the Dorians inhabited Peloponnesus ”

“ They now armed many of the younger citizens, released the prisoners, and terrified their opponents by threatening a general massacre. No one, however, was killed by them; for although Agesilaus desired to kill Leonidas, and when he withdrew from Sparta to Tegea, sent men to waylay and murder him on the road, Agis, hearing of his intention, sent others on whom he could rely, who escorted Leonidas safely as far as Tegea. ”

“ Simonides of Ceos was esteemed above all other Greeks as a writer of occasional verse in the best sense of the term, so much so that Sparta commissioned the Ionian poet to sing the praise of her Leonidas. With inimitable felicity he immortalised the events of the Wars of Liberation in brief pregnant epigrams [496] inscribed on monuments of every sort, sang the praises of the fallen in elegies, and celebrated the days of Artemisium and Marathon in grand cantatas which were performed by festal choirs.
The state did what it could to advance the cause of art. ”

“ His body was rescued by the Greeks, after a violent struggle. On the hillock in the pass, where the remnant of the Greeks made their last stand, a lion of stone (so Herodotus tells us) was set up in his honour; and Pausanias says that his bones were brought to Sparta forty years after, by one named Pausanias; but if he was the same who commanded at the battle of Plataea, " forty" must be an erroneous reading for " four" (see Larcher, ad Herod. vii. 225) . The later story of Leonidas and his followers perishing in a night-attack on the Persian camp is unworthy of credit. ”

“ This celebrated battle, which happened 480 years before the christian era, taught the Greeks to despise the number of the Persians, and to rely upon their own strength, and intrepidity. Temples were raised to the fallen hero, and festivals, called Leonidea, yearly celebrated at Sparta, in which free-born youths contended. Leonidas, as he departed for the battle from Lacedæmon, gave no other injunction to his wife but, after his death, to marry a man of virtue and honour, to raise from her children deserving of the name and greatness of her first husband. Herodotus, bk. ”

“ Now the manner of the Spartans was this: to die rather than yield. However sorely defeated, or overwhelmed by numbers, they never left the ground alive and unvictorious, and as this was well known, their enemies were seldom eager to attack such resolute fighters.
Besides the Spartans, Leonidas led some three or four thousand men from other cities, and he was joined at Thermopylæ by the Locrians and a thousand Phocians. Perhaps he may have had six or eight thousand soldiers under him, while the Persians may have outnumbered them by the odds of a hundred to one. ”

“ Far below he caught a glimpse of the plain, where miles of troops, horse and foot, were crawling like ants toward the pass. The enemy gave him no time to see more. They raised an exultant shout and dashed upon him with lowered lances. Although Leonidas and his men fought with desperation, the Spartan realized that they were not strong enough to hold their ground. The mere weight of their opponents forced them back, inch by inch, until their horses were struggling on the brink of the slope to the bed of the stream.
"Let us die where we stand!" Leonidas shouted. "Remember that we are Greeks! ”