"TEXT:" "WTC-SWE" "When we think of ancient Greece this is the image that most of us have in mind-- the Part" "This is where the blueprint for Western civilization received its first draft." "Philosophy and science, art and architecture, democracy itself their ro ots here." "And they're all embodied in the serene lines of one of the most famous buildings in the world." "But there's more to the story of ancient Greece than Athens." "This is another kind of monument to a very different kind of Greek city." "It's the burial mound of 300 warriors from Sparta who in 480 BC made a heroic last stand in the pass at Thermopylae, resisting a massive invasion force from the Persian empire." "Surrounded and outnumbered by about 40 to one, they put up a spectacular fight before they were hacked to pieces." "They're interred here and honored by this inscription which still echoes down the centuries." "(speaking Greek)" ""Go tell the Spartans, Stranger passing by," "That here, obedient to their laws, we lie."" "(yelling)" "Unlike Athens, Sparta can't boast of its philosophers and politicians and artists." "It's famous for two things:" "its frugality, which is where we get our word "spartan" from and its fighters." "In everyday Spartan life these two were intimately linked." "The whole of Spartan society conformed to a strict code of extreme discipline and self-sacrifice." "Their aim:" "to create the perfect state, protected by perfect warriors." "The pursuit of perfection made Sparta a strange place, where money was outlawed, equality was enforced and weak children were exterminated." "Male homosexuality was compulsory and women enjoyed a degree of social and sexual freedom that was quite simply unheard of in the ancient world." "Its history is one of ruthless militarism, slavery on a massive scale and a system that can sometimes seem like a premonition of modern-day totalitarian regimes." "But Sparta was the first Greek city to define the rights and duties of its citizens, and it can also claim, alongside Athens, to have saved the Western world from enslavement by the Persian empire." "don't have the charisma of Athenian culture, they've meant as much to Western civilization as the ideals represented by the Parthenon." "Down through the centuries, a huge range of pwn to the Spa rtans." "Anyone with a plan for a Utopia in their heads has cherry-picked their ideas." "Plato, the French revolutionaries," "American pioneers, even Adolf Hitler." "They've all turned directly to Sparta for ideas and inspiration." "So in a sense the story of the Spartans is the story of ourselves, and how some of the ideas that have molded Western civilization were first tried out in a warrior state" "The story of the Spartans takes me on a journey through some dramatic history and there's a setting to match." "Over there is the Peloponnese, a huge peninsula crowned by rugged mountains and scored?" "y deep gorges." "It forms the southernmost part of the Greek mainland." "The ancient Greeks thought of it as an island and you can see why." "It does have a brooding closed-in feel, cold-shouldering the outside world." "But long before the Spartans of our story arrived on the scene this part of the world was making history." "Many of the Greeks who fought in the Trojan war some 3,000 years ago came from here." "Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, ruled over Mycenae in the Eastern Peloponnese and to the south in Sparta was the palace of Menelaus and his wife Helen, for Helen of Troy, whose beauty caused the Trojan War," "was once Helen of Sparta." "The face that launched a thousand ships f of legend, The face that launched a thousand ships the stuf but Helen's world produced things of real beauty-- like this pair of magnificent cups found in a tomb near Sparta" "relics from a golden age which would haunt the people who came after." "The heroes of the Trojan War, their lavish palaces and possessions, the beauty of Helen all offered a standard against which they would measure their own actions and aspirations." "But at some point around 1100 BC it all disappeared." "No one knowse what happened." "Earthquakes, slave revolts, even asteroids have been blamed, but all over the Eastern Mediterranean the world of Helen went under in a cataclysm of fire and destruction." "A remnant clung on for a few hundred years, but finally the Dark Ages came to Greece, and the ory snapped." "And during those centuries of darkness, out of the north, new people came seeking more hospitable lands." "?" "They brought with them a new Greek dialect, their sheep and goats and a few simple possessions." "They settled all over the Peloponnese, and some found their way to the lands that once belonged to King Menelaus." "It was a journey worth making." "(woman singing)" "The people who came here must have thought they'd found a Shangri-la." "Down there is the plain of the Eurotas River, 50 miles north to south of precious fertile farmland, and a river runs through it all year round." "In land-hungry Greece, where 70% of the land can't be farmed, and the rest is squeezed between the mountains and the sea, that's a lot of elbow room." "To the west are the spectacular Taygetus Mountains, rising to across more than 8,000 feet in places." "Patches of snow still linger while down on the plain spring is turning into summer." "The slopes once teemed with game-- deer, hare and wild boar, rich pickings for the new arrivals." "But what statistics can't convey is the striking quality of this place-- a fantastic sense of security." "you're bounded by hills" "It's not claustrophobic, just safe." "You feel that everything you could possibly want is here, if you could just lay claim to it and keep the rest of the world at bay." "And so the herdsmen traded in their sheep for olive trees and settled down here." "A new Sparta came into being and the new Spartans built this temple, the Menelaion to honor the legendary king and his wayward wife." "In the period of renewal following the Dark Ages new cities like Sparta appeared all over Greece." "They varied in size and power, but had one thing in common:" "they were all governed by a set of mutually agreed laws and customs." "The rules by which people agreed to live varied, but the aim was broadly the same:" "to create good order and justice an?" "d to protect against chaos and lawlessness." "Today in Sparta, archaeologists are still piecing together the story of the people who first came here some 3,000 years ago and built an ideal city, a utopia." "It's not an easy task because they left few clues behind them and much of what they did leave was buried or destroyed when the modern-day city was built." "But whenever there's a building program, precious new pieces of the puzzle are revealed." "Every find is precious because the Spartans didn't leave us much in the way of stuff." "Unlike the Athenians, they were famous for not building, for not making things and for not writing about themselves." "Nearly every account we have of the Spartan way of life was written by an outsider." "And nearly all had an ax to grind." "Some resented Sparta's power, while others were in awe of her traditions and achievements-- all of them exaggerated." "And there was much about Sparta that lent itself to exaggeration." "So of all the cities and civilizations in the ancient world, the Spartans remain the most intriguing and mysterious." "Take, for example, Sparta's kings." "Since time immemorial," "Sparta had not one, but two kings at the same time." "Two royal houses, twice the potential for the rows that all monarchies are prone to." "The Spartans explained this unique arrangement by claiming that their kings were direct descendants of the great-great grandsons of Heracles, the strongman of Greek myth." "According to legend, it was this pair of twins who rested control of the Peloponnese from the descendants of Agamemnon." "The stories that people tell about themselves are always revealing, and this tale of a land grab by a pair of aggressive usurpers, themselves descended from the most macho man in mythology, sent out a worrying message to the neighbors." "And it wasn't long before the Spartans seizing control of the whole of the Euratos Vley, enslaving non-Spartans, or categorizing them asperioikoi, meaning "those who live around."" "The perioikoi became a disenfranchised cast of craftsmen and traders-- Sparta's economic muscle." "But sorting out their immediate neighbors was the just the start of Sparta's aggressive expansionism." "Despite the generous acres of the Eurotas Valley," "Sparta, like the rest of the Greece, was a for more farmland." "Other cities dealt with this by founding colonies, satellite settlements that would eventually spread as far west as the Straits of Gibraltar and as far east as the Crimea in the Black Sea." "The Spartans came up with their own take on colonization." "They turned their eyes west and began to wonder what opportunities there were beyond the mountains." "It was there that they would go to satisfy their land hunger, it was there that Shangri-la would reveal its darker side because it was there that a slave nation would be created to serve the Spartan master race." "The journey through the gorges of is as spectacular nows as it must have been some 2,800 years ago when the armies of Sparta headed west in search of conquest." "Several days' hard march through the mountains would bring them to the territory of the Messenians." "The Spartans weren't just coming for their land;" "they wanted their freedom too." "They intended to turn the Messenians en-masse into helots." "The word translates as "captives,"" "but means, more bluntly, "slaves."" "Slavery in ancient Greece was an accepted fact of life, but slaves were supposed to be foreigners, barbarians who spoke no Greek and so were obviously suited by nature to servitude." "The enslavement of fellow Greeks, and on a massive scale, was something else again, and the crushing of Messenia would set Sparta apart from the rest of Greece." "It also shaped the kind of place" "Sparta became: wary of unrest, paranoid about revolt." "Enslaving the Messenians was no easy task?" "." "We know something about the second" "We know something an eyewitness to the events,e one of the first identifiable eyewitnesses known to history." "He was called Tyrtaeus, a Spartan soldier and, just as importantly, a poet." "TYRTAEUS (dramatized):" "It is a fine thing for a brave man to die when he's fallen among the front ranks while fighting for his homeland." "Let us fight with spirit for this land and let us die for our children, no longer sparing our lives." "Make the spirit in your heart strong and valiant, and do not be in love with life when you are a fighting man." "HUGHES:" "Tyrtaeus was a war poet." "His verses were battle cries barked out with the directness of a sergeant major putting backbone into the shirkers and faint-hearts." "Look, if you want this land, you're going to have to fight for it." "TYRTAEUS:" "Spacious Messenia, good to plow, good to plant." "For 19 years, our father's fathers fought unceasingly over it, displaying steadfast courage in their hearts, and in the 20th year, the enemy fled from their home, abandoning their rich farmlands." "stand fast at one another's side and fight, and do not start shameful flight or panic." "HUGHES:" "This is the kind of fighter that Tyrtaeus addresses in his poems." "He was called a hoplite, an infantryman armed with an eight-foot spear and round shield." "By the end of the seventh century, practically all Greek cities had their own contingents of hoplites." "These weren't full-time professional soldiers;" "they were farmers who swapped plows for spears in defense of their communities." "By standing side by side with their neighbors these militiamen demonstrated" "(yelling)" "(yell echoing)" "This is Olympia, home of the famous games." "It was also the unofficial shrine of the hoplite fighter, for this was where you'd come to dedicate your arms to the gods in thanks for victory." "That's the hoplon, or round shield, the cardinal item of equipment for a hoplite and probably where he got his name." "You'd have held it by thrusting your left arm through that central armband and then grasping onto a leather thong at the rim." "It was made of wood and metal and would have weighed around 20 pounds, which is a hell of a weight if you think of carrying that for a day's fighting." "But to let your arm fall and the shield drop was the ultimate disgrace." "(shouting)" "Hoplite fighting was a team effort." "Half your shield was for you, the other half for the man to your left." "The hoplites would form into densely packed ranks called a phalanx." "Seven or eight deep and perhaps 50 shields across." "Coordination and discipline were important, but most important of all was trust." "If your neighbor broke and ran" "When two phalanxes met the tendency was for each line to shift to the right." "Your natural instinct was always to tuck yourself as far as possible behind your neighbor's shield." "At that moment, the discipline of the phalanx threatened to collapse." "To be effective, you just had to grit your teeth and stand your ground." "Tyrtaeus had some typically helpful advice." "TYRTAEUS:" "Those who dare to stand fast at one another's side and to advance towards the front ranks in hand-to-hand conflict, they die in smaller numbers and they keep the troops behind safe." "HUGHES:" "There wasn't much in ticsrs clanging)" "The battlefield all but disappeared in a dust cloud as the two opposing masses of bronze and muscle heaved against each other." "The rear ranks provided the traction pushing forward." "It was in the front three ranks, within range of the enemy's spear points," "that things got deadly." "(shouting)" "It was there that you would have come face to face with this, a gorgon emblazoned on your enemy's shields." "This was the goddess whose gaze had the power to turn men to stone, and in the sweaty stabbing frenzy of the battle," "a literally petrifying expe" "but hoplite fighting had far-reaching consequences." "In the heaving, sweaty, noisy melee, neighbors chose to stand together" "It was an act of citizenship, and to take part in it was as much a privilege as an obligation." "To fight as a hoplite you needed the gear." "Few could manage a getup as magnificent as this, but the basic kit-- a helmet, spear and shield-- was within the reach of around a third of the able-bodied male population." "Being able to afford to fight was terribly important." "Aristotle said," ""Those who do the fighting wield absolute power."" "In other words, if you could fight for your community, you had a voice in it." "So you can imagine on the day of a battle, the landed gentry up at the front in their bespoke armor, and bringing up the rear, some dirt farmer's boy with his gered shield and his uncle's old, dented helmet," "determined to show that his family still qualified as citizens." "Ultimately Sparta would surpass all other Greek cities in the art of this particular kind of fighting." "But first, they had to beat and enslave their neighbors, the Messenians." "This was finally achieved around the year 650 BC." "For the next 300 years, the Messenians would be forced to slave in the fields of their Spartan masters like asses worn out by heavy burdens, according to Tyrtaeus." "But now that Messenia had been won, the critical question for the Spartans became, then, and for centuries to come, "How do we keep it?"" "Elsewhere in Greece, cities were being torn apart by civil war between rich and poor." "With the spoils of Messenia up for grabs, the chances of that happening in Sparta were greatly increased." "To keep their paradise safe, the Spartans chose to act in a totally radical way." "From now on, Utopia was their aim." "They would dedicate themselves to the creation of a perfect society, and it would be modeled on the hoplite phalanx-- disciplined, collective and unselfish." "There was going to be a revolution in Shangri-la." "Every revolution needs its great leader, and this is Sparta's, Lycurgus, the wolf worker." "I can't put my hand on my heart and say that he existed," "For them, he was a miracle worker, someone who created heaven on earth following the advice of the gods themselves." "Whether it was him or a bunch of people or a whole generation, who knows, but someone here embarked on a social experiment that would create one of the most extreme civilizations in the ancient world." "The revolution that transformed Sparta when Sparta's neighbors, the Messenians, were finally defeated and enslaved." "In order to keep the helots quiet and, as importantly, to stop themselves falling out over the spoils of war, the Spartans set out to become the most formidable, disciplined and professional hoplite warriors that Greece had ever seen." "The whole of Spartan society became, in effect, a military training camp." "Spartan men would neither fish nor farm, manufacture nor trade." "They would simply fight, and if they ren't fighting, they were training, and if they weren't training, they were hanging out with their fellow fighters." "The family unit counted for very little." "What mattered was bonding with their male peers, bolstering the solidarity of the phalanx." "It was program that they pursued with typical single-mindedness." "Being born Spartan was not enough." "All male Spartans had to earn their citizenship of competitive struggle and the survival of one of the most grueling training systems ever invented." "The first test came early." "This ravine, a few miles out of Sparta, was known as the Apothetae, or "deposits."" "It was also called the Place of Rejection, because it was down there that a newly born child would be thrown if he didn't match up to Spartan standards of physical perfection." "Infanticide was common throughout ancient Greece." "Unwanted babies, usually girls, were left on a hillside." "Sometimes they'd be placed in a basket or a protective pod so that there was at least a chance of someone, or something, coming along and taking the child in." "In Sparta, as ever, things were very different." "Boys rather than girls were the usual victims, and it wasn't the parents but the city elders who decided they lived or died." "And there was absolutely no possibility of a broody vixen or kindly shepherd rescuing the newborn child once they'd been tossed down there." "The city elders decision was final and absolute." "This state-sponsored eugenics has won Sparta many admirers over the years." "Here's what one 20th century leader had to say on the subject:" ""The abandonment of sick, puny, misshapen children" ""by the Spartans was more humanitarian," ""and in reality, a thousand times more humane" ""than the pitiful madness of our present time," ""where the most sickly subjects are preserved at any price," ""only to be followed by the breeding of a race from degenerates, burdened with disease."" "No prizes for guessing that these are the words of Adolf Hitler." "Surviving the Apothetae was just the start for the boys." "At the age of seven they were taken from their families and placed in a training system called theagoge." "It means, literally, "rearing,"" "and the children were treated little better than animals." "For Spartan boys, this was a classroom-- the wild foothills of Mount Taygetus-- where they'd have spent much of their time." "They were organized intaboui, their Spartan word for a "herd of cattle."" "An older child was put in charge of them, responsible for their discipline and punishment, and he was known as a boy herd." "Emphasis was on surviving, coping on the minimum." "Each child was given just one cloak to last them all year round, which seems fine on an afternoo but in winter here it drops to minus six." "Food supplies were short and they were encouraged" "If they were caught, they were flogged, not for the act of stealing, but simply for not getting away with it." "It was as much a trial by ordeal as it was an education." "(thunder rumbling)" "The mountains also provided the backdrop for one of Sparta's most controversial and disputed institutions, the Krypteia, or secret service brigade, membership of which was reserved for the boys who'd shown particular promise." "The really hard cases were singled out, given a knife and turned loose into the wilds." "By day they'd lie low, but at night they'd infiltrate the valleys, hunting down and murdering any helots that they caught." "Exactly how the Krypteia operated and the kind of hit rate it had has always been a mystery, but the mere rumor of bloodthirsty, adolescent death squads roaming the countryside was enough to institute a reign of terror," "the perfect tactic to keep a slave population quiet and obedient." "Though Sparta encouraged the collective spirit, it placed as high a value on individual achievement." "The boys were tested constantly, against each other and against their own limitations." "This is the site of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, and it was here that the competitive nature of Spartan society had its most extreme expression." "Assuming you'd survived the first five years of the agoge system, aged 12, you were brought here for a brutal rite of passage." "The altar up there was piled high with cheeses." "Your challenge was simple:" "to steal as many cheeses as possible." "In front of the altar, there was a line of older boys, each armed with a whip." "showing neither mercy nor restraint." "Indoctrinated with the tenets of endurance and perseverance, and desperate to excel in a public display, the 12-year-old boys braved the gauntlet again and again and again." "Meeting the whips face-on, they sustained the most horrific injuries and some, we are told, were beaten to death." "It's easy to find yourself reeling back at the sheer brutality of a system that seems as alien and violent as these clay masks found at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia." "And it's not just modern audiences that find the Spartans shocking." "The philosopher Aristotle argued that they turned their children into animals, while other Greeks pictured them as bees swarming around a hive," "creatures stripped of their individuality." "It's been a popular conception of Sparta through the centuries, but one that misses an important point." "Being a part of any mass activity can be fantastically liberating." "If you've ever been in a Mexican wave in a football ground or sung in a choir or taken part in a protest march, you'll know that being part of a crowd doesn't diminish you, it makes you stronger, your reach is greater," "your sense of self is magnified, and that was the fundamental attraction of the Spartan system:" "the possibility of transcending your limitations as an individual and becoming part of somethingr and better." "From the age of 12 onwards the boys' training became, if possible, even more exacting." "Reading and writing, we're told, were taught no more than was necessary, but music and dancing were regarded as essential." "The battlefields on which hoplites clashed were once memorably described as the dancing floors of war." "And a phalanx that was able to move together in a coordinated way made for a formidable dancing partner." "So the Spartans spent many hours perfecting what was known as war music-- a rhythmic drill in which changes in direction and pace were communicated musically." "The Spartans earned the reputation for being the most musical and the most warlike of people." "Music and muscle were equally important in the Festival of the Naked Youth, orGymnopedie." "Young boys, stark naked, and covered from head to toe in olive oil, would try and outdo each other in intricate war dances." "They'd battle it out for hours and hours on end, in the baking heat of the sun." "The Greek word for this kind of thing isagonor "competition,"" "which makes it sound a bit like a school sports day, until you realize thatagonis the root for our word "agony."" "At the age of 20, with their training nearing completion," "Spartan males faced their most crucial test:" "n to one of the common Spartan males faced tmesses or dining clubs,ectio where they'd be expected to spend most of their time when they weren't training or fighting." "But entry to these exclusive gentlemen's clubs was not guaranteed." "Election to the common mess was by the vote" "If you failed to measure up, you could be blackballed and then that was that;" "you were a failed Spartan, publicly humiliated, excluded from the society into which you had been born." "you were given a big fat Iportion of land by the statell." "and a quota of helot slaves to support you and your family." "You were now one of thehomoioi, the equals, the warrior elite at the top of Sparta's hierarchy." "The common messes, which lay a mile or so out of the center of Sparta were an essential part of the city's social engineering, intended to keep discord and civil strife at bay." "Old and young mixed here, easing generational conflicts, a constant source of friction elsewhere in Greece." "More importantly, rich and poor met on an equal footing, the differences between them hidden by a rigorously enforced code of conspicuous non-consumption." "In egalitarian Sparta the rule was:" ""Even if you have got it, don't flaunt it,"" "from houses to clothes, even to food." "Elsewhere in Greece, rich men would lay on a couple of prostitutes, crack open some amphor of wine and invite their mates round to feast on larks' tongues and honey-roasted tuna." "In Sparta there was no time for fine dining." "In the common messes the dish of the day, every day, was a concoction made of boiled pig's blood and vinegar known asmelas zomos, "black soup."" "An old joke goes," ""There's a man from Sybaris, in southern Italy, a town infamous for its luxury and gluttony, who was told the recipe for black soup." ""Ah," he said, "now I understand why the Spartans are so willing to die."" "Spartan frugality may have shocked their contemporaries," "?" "] but to a modern audience, their diet, leaving aside the black soup, sounds nutritious and healthy." "The land round here is fabulously fertile so locals would have enjoyed pomegranates and mulberries, figs and quinces." "The rich hunting grounds of Mount Taygetus produced steaks galore." "Most other Greeks had a diet that was 75% vegetarian." "For Spartan men, meat was the norm, which was probably why they were so fighting fit." "?" "d Judging from the contented expression on the face of this Spartan diner, Lycurgus' system paid off." "Well-nourished and free from the need to make a living or keep up with the neighbors, this is someone who, despite the demands of Spartan society, knew the good life." "It's also the face of an entirely new kind of human being: a citizen." "Spartan society was one of the first to introduce a form of social contract where the duties of an individual were balanced by certain privileges and rights." "It's a profound concept, and one that was current in Sparta a hundred years or so before any other Greek city was even beginning to think along similar lines." "The myth of Lycurgus ends on a prophetic note." "Having persuaded his fellow citizens to adopt his radical rule book, he made them swear not to meddle with anything until he returned from a pilgrimage to consult the gods." "The oath was given, Lycurgus departed, but he never returned." "He starved himself to death to force the Spartans to keep their promise forever." "As explanations go, it's hardly convincing, but the fact remains that having embarked on a radical social experiment," "They must have thought that the utopia they'd created was quitct, and that change, in any form, was the enemy." "But change was coming." "In the year 480 BC, disturbing news reached Sparta." "The Persian empire was on the move." "A huge invasion force was heading west by land and sea." "The time had come to see whether Sparta's celebrated warriors would live up and save the Gek world from destruction." "Archaeology came relatively late to Sparta." "It wasn't until 1906 that a British team began the first systematic digs." "?" "In 1925, there was a major find, a striking life-sized bust of a Spartan warrior dating from the fifth century BC." "These lantern slides record the moment of discovery." "When the bust was inched out of the earth and it became clear he was a magnificent warrior, one of the Greek workmen said, without a moment's hesitation," ""This is Leonidas."" "Leonidas was Sparta's superhero, the king who, with 300 warriors, de a doomed last stand against the might of Persia in the pass at Thermopylae." "There isn't any hard evidence for that identification, although he is from the right period, but I think we can forgive the wishful thinking." "After all, everyone wants a legend to have a face." "These days the warrior presides over the museum in Sparta." "They still call him Leonidas, the name is safely in quote marks." "But whoever he was, he remains an impressive piece of work." "That enigmatic smile is typical of sculpture of the period, and it gives him a "Mona Lisa"-like quality." "His eyes are blank now, but in their day, crystal and sea shells, and would have glittered out of the stone." "His torso is fantastically fit and toned, his hair is very elaborately dressed and his upper lip is clean-shaven." "It was one of Lycurgus' more fussy reforms that Spartan men should not have mustaches." "So if you want a picture of the ultimate Spartan, here he is." "of the real Leonidas.ittle" "He was a member of the Agidai, one of the two aristocratic families that supplied Sparta with her kings." "He'd been on the throne for ten years when the Persian juggernaut began to roll west." "Persia was the regional superpower of the eastern Mediterranean, a vast empire stretching from present-day Afghanistan to the Aegean Sea." "The Greeks were an insignificant but increasingly troublesome presence on the western limits of their empire, inciting rebellion among the king's Greek subjects in the cities of Asia Minor." "In the year 499, a major rebellion culminated in the destruction of the royal city of Sardis." "Enough was enough." "The Persians demanded oaths of loyalty from all the cities on the Greek mainland." "Some caved in, but others looked to Athens and Sparta for a lead." "When Persian heralds came there, demanding water and earth as tokens of submission, they were executed-- an act of sacrilege and a declaration of war." "It was the Persian king Darius who made the first move." "He sent punitive forces to land at Marathon," "The king died before he could avenge the insult, and it was left to his son Xerxes to sort out the troublesome Greeks once and for all." "rsians set out by land and sea The Pe early in the year 480." "The army was so vast that, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, it drank whole rivers dry." "Herodotus also reckons the combined Persian forces at more than one and a half million." "A more sober estimate would put the ceiling big enough to crush the minnow-like cities of Greece." "When the Spartans learned a Persian invasion was on its way, they sent for advice to the oracle at Delphi." "Oracles were thought of as messages from the gods, delivered through the mouth of a possessed priestess." "The Spartans were deeply pious and they treated oracles as though they were military orders." "On this occasion, the orders made for sobering reading." "ORACLE (dramatized):" "Hear your fate, O dwellers in Sparta of the wide spaces;" "Either your famed, great town must be sacked by Perseus' sons or the whole land must mourn the death of the king of the house of Heracles." "Beneath the flowery language a simple choice was on offer:" "capitulate or fight to the death." "The Spartans, being Spartans, chose the latter and put themselves at the head of the resistance to the invasion." "As the Persian Army swung south towards the Greek heartland, a Greek force, under the command of King Leonidas, headed north to stop their advance at Thermopylae, the gates of fire." "In 480, Thermopylae was a natural bottleneck." "Now the sea has receded miles in that direction but then the road south was squeezed between the shoreline and these mountains." "It was here that between 7-8,000 hoplites came from all over Greece." "The first thing they did was to rebuild a wall that crossed the most narrow point of the pass, hunkering down behind it they aimed to stop the Persian advance in its tracks." "The Greeks werehopelesslyoutnumbered but they did have geography on their side." "?" "If they could just slow down the Persians it would allow others to organize more formidable defenses on land and sea." "But for Leonidas, and for the 300 Spartan warriors who'd accompanied him," "Thermopylae was more than a strategic strong point, it was the place where they intended to show the world what it meant to be a Spartan." "As a whole, the Greeks made a great deal of noise about the nobility of dying for your country but for Spartans, it was far more than just a platitude." "In battle, they were ordered to seek out akallos thanatos a "beautiful death."" "It encompassed everything that the poet Tyrtaeus spoke of-- advancing calmly to meet your enemy, never fleeing the battlefield and embracing death like a lover." "In fact, on campaign, the Spartans would make offerings to Eros, the god of love." "The beautiful death was a sacrifice in the true sense of the word, turning something mortal into something sacred." "The men that Leonidas chose to do the job for him here" ", and with sons. der" "He knew none of them would be coming back." "The Spartans who fought at Thermopylae were a 300-strong kamikaze squad." "For three days, the Greeks (held off the Persian advance, sheltering behind their wall and then counterattacking in hoplite formation." "Three times the Persians attacked, three times they were beaten back." "Xerxes had almost given up and then he was told about a secret pass that went through the mountains and came out behind the Greek wall." "When Leonidas discovered the Persians were on their way," "Before long, the Greeks would be surrounded." "While there was still time for them to escape," "Leonidas dismissed most of the Greek allies, setting the stage for one of history's most celebrated last stands." "(man shouting)" "You won't see any sign of them in this heroic vision of Leonidas and the 300 concocted by David, the glorifier of the French Revolution and the Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte." "Leonidas made sure that Thermopylae was Sparta's show and the part played by others, willing or unwilling, was bound to be overshadowed." "On the final morning, the Spartans followed their normal prebattle rituals." "They stripped naked and exercised, they oiled their bodies and combed each other's long hair." "They wrote their names out on little sticks dog tags so their bodies could be identified later." "Pers;kian spiemos observing these strange nnactivities w?" "reported them back to Xerxes, who found them laughable." "?" "It was said it looked as though they were getting ready for a party." "In fact, they were making themselves (speaking Greek)" "(man chanting rhythmically)" "(metallic scraping)" "Herodotus describes the final act." "HERODOTUS (dramatized):" "In the morning," "Xerxes poured a libation to the rising sun and then ordered the advance." "(man chanting rhythmically)" "The Greeks, under Leonidas, knowing that the fight would be their last, pressed forward into the widest part of the pass." "(man shouting)" "They fought (ywith reckless desperation, with swords if they had them and if not, with their hands and teeth until the Persians, coming in from the front and closing in from behind, overwhelmed them." "(yell echoing)" "HUGHES:" "Militarily speaking, Thermopylae was insignificant." "The Persian advance, delayed for less than a week, was soon rolling south again." "Shortly afterwards, another battle took place here in the Bay of Salamis led by Athens, t, destroyed the Persian ships." "It was a scrappy hit-and-miss affair but Salamis finished what Thermopylae had started and the following year the Persians were finally driven out of Greece." "In the aftermath of victory, it was the doomed heroism of Thermopylae that captured the imagination of the Greeks." "upon which the Spartans played out the role they'd spent their lives preparing for." "They'd shown the world the kind of place Sparta was and the kind of men it produced, they'd fulfilled the ideals of their city and justified the claims of their utopia." "And by doing that, according to Herodotus, they had "laid up for the Spartans a treasure of fame in which no other city could share.""