No, this is not about
Thermopylae. This is about Leonidas’ entire military career.
First and foremost, Leonidas was
one of the few Spartan kings, who was a professional military man. Unlike the
Spartan kings before and almost all the Spartan kings after him, Leonidas
“enjoyed” the complete program of military training imposed on Spartan citizens
from boyhood through ten years of active service, and a lifetime in the
reserves thereafter. Thus, Leonidas was
one of the only Spartan kings as familiar with every formation and drill
employed by the Spartan army as his troops, and as adept with the use of
weapons as his fellow citizens. Equally important, having been an ordinary
ranker, he knew exactly how they thought, felt and reacted. Leonidas was as
much a soldier as he was a commander. This was a significant advantage. It was
what made other Spartan commanders like Brasidas and Lysander effective as
well.
Nor was his experience confined
to the drill-field. Although Sparta in
the late archaic was not a city perpetually at war (though readers of Steven
Pressfield’s novel Gates of Fire can be forgiven for being misled into
believing this), in Leonidas’ lifetime Lacedaemon was engaged in a number of
significant military campaigns. Thus, while Leonidas never fought the more than
20 campaigns Pressfield fantasizes about, he would have gained second- or
first-hand experience from a more limited number of wars.
First, when Leonidas was still a child
or youth (depending on his date of birth), Sparta made an unsuccessful attempt
to drive the tyrant Polycrates out of Samos. Notably, this required deployment of a
considerable force by sea and involved a forty day siege as well as an assault
in which some of the Spartans managed to break into the city, but were then cut
off and killed. The rest returned. The
failure and the loss of life must have been the topic of many discussions in
syssitia across the city for many years of come – probably with recriminations
and a lot of “Monday-morning-quarterbacking.” Leonidas, as a young Spartan
male serving in the syssitia as part of his upbringing, would undoubtedly have listened avidly to the accounts of this campaign
as told by the veterans, who took part.
Roughly ten years later,
Leonidas’ half-brother Cleomenes undertook an invasion of Attica, again by
sea. Once again, Sparta’s expeditionary
force was defeated and driven back to their ships, this time by Thessalian
cavalry. Leonidas was by this time very
likely in his late teens, if not already a young man. Conceivably, he even took
part in this expedition, but if so only in a subordinate capacity as an
ordinary ranker. Whatever his age and role, Leonidas would have learned a
valuable lesson, at least second hand, about the capabilities of cavalry and
the advisability of not under-estimating it.
Cleomenes undertook no less than
three additional campaigns against Athens.
In the first, he successfully dislodged the Athenian tyrant Hippias, but
in the second, in which he sought to drive out Cleisthenes and restrict
Athenian democracy, he found himself bottled up on the acropolis by the
outraged Athenian masses and had to negotiate a truce to withdraw – with his
tail between his legs. Given the small and evidently informal nature of these
first two campaigns (Herodotus suggests both campaigns were conducted with
small volunteer forces), it is unlikely that Leonidas was an active participant
in either of these expeditions.
Burning from the humiliation of
his second defeat, however, Cleomenes called up the full Spartan army and
the allies of the Peloponnesian league. Spartan
law at this time, however, did not allow the full army to deploy outside of
Lacedaemon without both kings in command, so Cleomenes was accompanied on this
fourth campaign against Athens by his co-monarch Demaratus. Demaratus was not as enthusiastic about
invading Attica as Cleomenes – and nor were the Peloponnesian allies.
Cleomenes’ army got as far as Eleusis, but there the Corinthians drew the line.
They had no quarrel with Athens, and they refused to continue. Demaratus sided
with the Corinthians. The allied army disintegrated, and the conflict
between Cleomenes and Demaratus hog-tied the Spartan army as well. The Spartans
had no choice but to return, undefeated but humiliated again.
Leonidas was almost certainly present
with the Spartan army during this last campaign against Athens. Depending on
his date of birth, he might already have been a junior officer. Regardless of his military rank, as Cleomenes
half-brother and heir apparent, he almost certainly knew what was going on in
the command tents, if not directly, then indirectly. While the campaign would have provided him
with no combat experience, it would certainly have taught him a great deal
about operations involving multi-national forces – a lesson that would be very
important for his later life.
The next major military campaign
of Leonidas’ lifetime was the campaign against Argos that culminated in the
dramatic Spartan victory at Sepeia. This campaign again involved the entire
active Spartan army, so Leonidas’ participation is almost 100% certain. Significantly, it also contained a nautical
component: the Spartan army was ferried across the Gulf of Argos from Thyrea in
Lacedaemon to Nauplia in the Argolid. There followed a massive confrontation
with the full Argive army that was at least as numerous if not larger than the all-Spartiate force facing it.
Although the Argives had learned how to read the Spartan signals,
Cleomenes cleverly took advantage of this to mislead the Argives into thinking
the Spartans were standing down for a meal. As soon as the Argive phalanx broke
up, he attacked. The ensuing slaughter
allegedly deprived Argos of a generation of fighters, but Cleomenes singularly
failed to follow up his battle-field victory with the occupation of the
undefended city of Argos. The “lessons learned” for Leonidas would have started
with the flexibility of deployment offered by seaborne transport, and included
the importance of intelligence (the Argive familiarity with Spartan signals), and, of course, the advantages of
surprise.
What Leonidas thought of his
brother’s slaughter of prisoners and the burning of a sacred wood is
unrecorded, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we should assume he
shared popular Spartan opinion – and this was to put Cleomenes on trial for
treason. The accusation was that he had
taken a bribe not to take Argos when it lay undefended before a victorious
Spartan army -- probably because the prosecution could think of no other
plausible reason why such a splendid opportunity would be wasted after over two
hundred years of bitter hostilities.
Herodotus specifically says that Cleomenes was charged by his “enemies”
and that he was acquitted because he convinced the ephors that he could not get
favorable signs from the gods.
By this time, Lenoidas was
probably already married to Gorgo, and he was Cleomenes’ heir. It is unlikely that he would have been
counted among Cleomenes’ enemies. It is
almost equally improbable that he approved of Cleomenes behavior. Cleomenes was
acquitted of taking a bribe and he defended himself with weapons (the will of
the gods) against which the ephors were helpless; that is not the same thing as
saying his actions were applauded even by his supporters. Furthermore, Leonidas will have taken careful
note of the fact that failure to exploit a victory – much less defeat -- could
put a king in jeopardy.
The next significant military
engagement of Leonidas’ lifetime was one in which Sparta played no direct role
and yet it may have been the most decisive military moment in Leonidas life
prior to Thermopylae: the Battle of Marathon. To summarize, Leonidas very
probably led the two thousand Spartiates that arrived in Marathon after a
dramatic forced march that enabled them to cover the distance from Sparta to
Athens in less than three days -- but one day after the decisive battle had been
fought. He would have toured the battlefield in company with Athenian
commanders and fighters, gleaning a great deal of information about the
Persians, their weapons, armor, tactics and morale. He would also have gained considerable respect
for Athenian (and Plataean) fighting capacity. Leonidas would have seen first-hand at
Marathon that Greek hoplites could withstand Persian missiles and Persian
cavalry and inflict dramatically higher casualties than they suffered. However, it would
also have left a psychological scar: the sense of having come too late.
And so we come to Thermopylae. Leonidas’
determination to deploy when he did, even if he could take only 300 Spartiates
with him was, I believe, dictated by his experience at Marathon. Leonidas, who undoubtedly appreciated the
military importance of Thermopylae and Artemisium, was determined not to come
too late a second time.
This is not the same thing as
believing he was undertaking a suicide mission.
Leonidas had no reason to believe that the force he took north was not
sufficient to hold the Pass until Sparta and other cities, the Karneia and the
Olympic Games over, could deploy their main forces. Leonidas did not, after
all, march north with just 300 men. In addition to the Spartiates, he had
perioikoi troops, allies from the Peloponnesian League, Thespians, Thebans and
Phocians. Leonidas had between 6,000 and 7,000 Greek hoplites at Thermopylae, a
pass that at that time narrowed down to a cart track at two places.
To be sure, Leonidas allegedly knew
from the Delphic oracle that his own fate was sealed. He presumably expected to
die, but there was no reason to assume his death would be futile. On the
contrary, Delphi had promised to save Sparta, if one of her kings fell in
battle. Leonidas most likely believed
(or wanted to believe) that although he would die, his army would be
successful. Nor did he expect all the
Spartiates he took with him to die. The fact that he took only the fathers of
living sons north with him was not because he expected them all to die, but
because he expected some of them would die. He did not want to risk the
extermination of even a single Spartiate family – not when he had so many men
to choose from.
Leonidas’ tactical competence at
Thermopylae has been questioned primarily because of his failure to put
Spartiates on the mountain trail by which the pass was turned. The argument is that he failed to take the
risk to his flank/rear seriously, and the positioning of Phocian troops on this
critical route was amateurish. Hindsight is always clearer than foresight. But
even with hindsight, it is not completely convincing that Leonidas should have
risked splitting his already very small force to send, say, 100 Spartiates to
guard what was essentially a goat-trail.
Furthermore, one thousand men out of a force just six to seven thousand
strong, represents a very significant commitment of troops available, and
suggests Leonidas took the threat seriously indeed. To imply that a hundred
Spartans would have been better than a thousand Phocians reflects modern
fascination with the Spartan military myth, but can hardly be conisdered a serious
military assessment. Leonidas’ evident assumption that the locals with the
greatest stake in a successful defense of Thermopylae and the best knowledge of
the terrain would be the best defenders of the flanking path is more convincing
than modern dismissals of such logic. It is tempting to judge a strategy
by its result – but that is not always fair.
Otherwise, Leonidas appears to
have developed a highly effective strategy for defending the Pass, one that
effectively neutralized the superiority of numbers on the Persian side and
enabled a comparatively small number of defenders to hold the overwhelming
might of Xerxes army for two days. Although – or rather because -- Herodotus
does not give us the casualties of the first two days, we can presume that they
were not inordinate. The defense of the “Middle Gate” which was wider than the
“Eastern” or “Western Gates” appears to have given the Greeks the optimal
opportunity to reduce Persian pressure but bring sufficient of their own troops
to bear. Equally impressive, Leondias evidently welded the diverse contingents together and succeeded in getting them to cooperate. Herodotus says that the allies fought in
relays, or turns, so that the troops from each city had time to rest, refresh
themselves and tend their wounds between taking their turn at the front. While
this sounds logical and reasonable, it is far from self-evident. It would also
have required considerable skill in execution – or each change would have
produced confusion that the Persians could have exploited.
Leonidas' military career is described in books II and III of the Leonidas Trilogy.
A Peerless Peer
A Heroic King
