Thermopylae

Thermopylai (`Hot Gates,’ after its sulphur springs); also known as Pylai (`Gates’)

A defile in eastern Greece, between the steep north side of Mount Kallidromon and the south side of the Aegean Sea's Gulf of Malis. Early in the first millennium BC the temple of Demeter at Anthela near Thermopylae was the meeting place of the famous Amphictyony (`dwellers round about’), a religious confederacy consisting of small Greek tribes of the vicinity (which later transferred their center to the shrine of Apollo at Delphi). Thermopylae belonged to Phocis—which fortified the pass—but by the early fifth century BC had come to form part of Malis instead.

It was the principal point of entrance into Greece for any large body of troops, along a road which passed between steep cliffs and the sea. But there is easy ground above, and the pass could be outflanked, so that, in the words of Edward Gibbon, Thermopylae `seemed to protect, but had so often betrayed, the safety of Greece.’ The Thessalians overpowered the Phocian fortification in the sixth century BC, and it was here, in 480, that the Spartan King Leonidas offered his heroic resistance to the invading Persian army of Xerxes I. Against an enemy force estimated at 300,000, Leonidas—owing to the unwillingness of his fellow-Spartans to fight north of the Corinthian isthmus—was only able to muster between 7000 and 8000 armored men, including the Spartan royal guard of 300 men (each accompanied by seven helots [serfs], of whom perhaps three apiece were armed), 2,120 Arcadians, 680 from the Argolid, 1,100 Boeotians, and contingents from Phocis and Locris. When it was learned that the Greek position, on the advice given to Xerxes by Ephialtes of Malis, had been turned—by an outflanking route that has recently been identified—Leonidas (according to a tradition that soon became distorted from patriotic motives) ordered his Peloponnesian troops to leave him, so that they could fight another day; and some of the Boeotians allegedly surrendered, although seven hundred from Thespiae stood firm. After a final ferocious stand on the semi-isolated Colonus hill, in which two of Xerxes' young brothers perished, all the Greeks who remained fell fighting, including the entire body of Spartans and about nine hundred helots. Their grave mound is pointed out, but its attribution is dubious.

In 323, during the Lamian War between Alexander the Great and the Greeks, Thermopylae was seized by the Macedonian general Leosthenes. In 279 it was evacuated by its garrison, and abandoned to invading Gauls. In 191, 10,000 soldiers of the Seleucid King Antiochus III the Great failed to hold the pass against 40,000 Roman legionaries. By this time, the silting of the river Spercheius had already begun to cause the sea's recession (it is now nearly three miles away). In AD 257 the defile was successfully manned against the Goths, but succumbed without resistance to Alaric the Visigoth in 395. Remains can be seen of its numerous defences, culminating in a strong wall erected by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (539/540). Traces of the Pylaean Sanctuary of Demeter, where the Amphictyonic Council held its meetings, have been discovered at Anthela. The shrine itself has not yet been located, but a stoa (portico) and stadium, which were apparently attached to it, can be identified.