Thermopylae - Paul Cartledge

To the ancient world, this time; to be exact a small mountain pass near Mt Callidromos, Greece, during the high summer of 480 B.C. A force of roughly 6 to 7 thousand Greek hoplites face down an immense Persian army under Great King Xerxes and do so with striking (and presumably Xerxes found it maddening) success for 3 days, before most were dismissed or fled as their flank was turned, leaving the Spartan contingent under King Leonidas to fight and die.

So far, so 300. The actual battle itself and the end result are of course well known - forgone conclusion would not be stating it too obviously - and even better documented from the writings of Heroditus right up to the present day, so much so that one could justifiably argue that everything that could be written already has been.

Paul Cartledge begs to differ. Instead of the who, what, where or when he seeks to give us the why.

Professor of Greek History at Cambridge for the last 29 years and author or editor of at least 20 books to with his chosen subject he is the acknowledged authority on all things Spartan and therefore qualified perhaps beyond any other to give surely the most complete account ever. Not that he glosses over the difficulties however; the least of these being that we have only 1 real source for the events that occured and he was ardently biased. There is no Persian historian to match Heroditus and certainly no impartial chronicler of the facts. What makes this book so interesting is that Cartledge goes into great detail to explain exactly why this is. If it was from any lesser author you might justifiably call this an exercise in excusing himself but it's done in such detail and draws such sharp contrasts between the Greeks and the Persians that it's most engaging.

Indeed, for a book of some 198 account pages (there are another 100 or so of sources and afterwords) only 14 of them are dedicated to the actual fighting. This could be decried as a cardinal sin for a history of a battle and may give rise to cries of "Well, why are you reviewing it then, doofus? It's hardly very Military is it?"
- quite true and yet beyond an actual battle, or to be more precise before it, there are the three overarching questions of why it was fought and what led to it? More important still in this case is: what happened afterwards?
Cartledge answers these questions by giving a potted history of Sparta and it's system - a system that gave the world the first true standing army, something never achieved before - and why that system was as radically different from the recieved wisdom of Greek society as Greek society was from Persian Empire. Much has been made of the contrast between Sparta and Athens and there was a deal of fighting between the pair both before and after 480 but the bottom line was that they shared so much - language, gods, customs and methods - almost unity, but not quite.

Just as tellingly he also provides two sections dealing with the aftermath and what it meant, both in the ancient world and in the modern as well. Sometimes this makes for uncomfortable reading - Hitler clearly saw his last gasp at Berlin in the same mould as Thermopylae - and sometimes frankly amusing; an Athenian ambassador was escorted from Sparta to Athens by an honour guard of 300 warriors, just to ram the point home a little.

Indeed it is this combination of retrospection, absorption and digestion that makes this book so worth reading.

7 out of 10