Dum sanctis patriæ legibus obsequimur.”
Cicero, translation of a Greek Epitaph.[[33]]
Thermopylæ lies due north from Delphi, less than twenty-five miles distant in an air line, but between them lie “many o’ershadowing mountains,” as Achilles might say, or, to be more exact, the great Parnassus cluster and the continuation of the Œta range, the watershed between the Bœotian Cephisus and the Malian Spercheius. Just where Doris and Phocis on the south meet Trachian Malis and Epicnemidian Locris on the north Mount Kallidromos is set like a boundary stone. The ridge that unites it with Mount Œta proper is now pierced by the Larissa railway-tunnel, opened in the summer of 1908, through which the northern express carries the traveller into the gorge and along the steep cliffs of the Asopus, the river that flowed down between Xerxes and Leonidas. To the east of the river’s outlet into the Malian gulf was the narrow gangway between cliffs and water, called “Hot-Gates” from the local “Thermal,” or hot springs, and the “Pylai,” or fortified gateways.
It is not unnatural that the story of Thermopylæ should have found in the imagination of men a place more secure than have even the victories at Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa. The very tragedy of defeat stands out more conspicuously against the background of the moral victory. The physical surroundings, too, are more picturesque. At the narrow entrance between cliffs and sea individual daring emerges, as in the defence of a mediæval portcullis, and in the memory remain the details of the by-path over Mount Kallidromos; the leaves under foot rustling in the darkness and betraying the ascent of the Persians to the Phocian rear-guard; the dawn breaking over the blue sea at the foot of the cliffs; and the Persian Immortals descending swiftly upon the rear of the few resolute men below. Then the long struggle in the narrow pass comes to an end and Leonidas and his men move out into the wider part before the pass. The “strength of the hills” was rendered futile by the traitor guide; the water, faithful ally during the preceding days, would now vainly strive to engulf the invaders. The Sun, god of both armies, beat down indiscriminately upon the Oriental worshippers of his heavenly fire and on the heaps of dead Greeks. Somewhere amongst them lay the unaffrighted soldier Dieneces, who had welcomed with Laconic humour the sun-obscuring Persian arrows as a grateful shade in the heat of battle.
It is disappointing, indeed, that now on the spot the actual scene requires certain stage directions. The modern coast line has been pushed far out into the bay by earthquakes and the detritus of the streams. The Spercheius now flows through a plain some two miles wide between the precipices and the sea. But the configuration of the land was still essentially unchanged when, under Brennus and his Gauls, in the third century B. C., there was another invasion hardly less formidable than that of the Persians. Before the Gauls reached Delphi there was here at Thermopylæ a repetition of the more famous struggle. The coast line still lay close to the cliffs. The Athenian fleet stood in near enough, despite the rapidly shoaling water, to harass the flank of the enemy, while the other Greeks in the narrow pass repeated the stubborn resistance of the Spartans and their allies just two hundred years before. Other details, too, were duplicated. The Gauls, unable to force the pass, resorted, as had the Persians, to the mountain path. Again it was the Phocians who strove to stop them, but the invaders, pushing by, descended on the rear of the Greeks, who were saved from the fate of Leonidas only by the presence of the Athenian fleet.
The exact topography of Thermopylæ is still a matter of controversy, and a liberal discount has long since been made from the fabulous total, given by Herodotus, of Xerxes’s host. Just who and how many of the allies remained and died after Leonidas sent the others away is also uncertain. Among those remaining with the Spartans of their own free will Pausanias mentions only the seven hundred Thespians and the eighty men from Mycenæ. The inscription written avowedly for all the Peloponnesian soldiers exaggerates the number of the Persians and fails to state definitely that all of the four thousand fought to the finish:—
“Here on a time four thousand of men from the Peloponnesus,
Meeting three millions of men, struggled in battle and fought.”
But all restrictions, made in the interest of historic truth, only serve to eliminate the miraculous element. 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. The moral prestige that the Spartans had temporarily forfeited by their absence from Marathon was now regained, to be still further emphasized at Platæa. Over the Spartans buried at Thermopylæ was inscribed:—