Original subtitles

Heroic music

There were 300 of them.

The proudest fighters of Greece

and the most feared.

Spartans led by their king, Leonidas.

300 warriors who, according to legend,

they held out for three days against an army of 2 million men.

The army of Xerxes, the king of kings.

Sovereign reigning unchallenged

across the vast expanses of the Persian Empire.

At Thermopylae, we lost,

But the glory gained is a victory for Sparta.

and even for the world.

We know this story in detail

thanks to the account of an ancient author.

Herodotus, the father of History.

But how much credence should we give to his account?

Where does historical reality end?

And where does the myth begin?

Adventure music

...

Mountains that rise abruptly

along an alluvial plain bordered by the sea.

Hot springs gush from the rock there.

to the delight of the bathers

that is not deterred by the strong smell of sulfur that emanates from it.

These springs gave the place its name.

The Warm Gates in Ancient Greek,

Thermopulai.

A narrow passage located in northeastern Greece,

along the Malian Gulf on the shores of the Aegean Sea.

A parade nestled between sea and mountain

where the Battle of Thermopylae took place .

The Battle of Thermopylae

was not decisive.

It is a battle with an emblematic character

given the way the Spartans fought

facing the Persians.

It all began on the evening of August 13th,

in the year 480 BC.

On that day, the vanguard of the formidable Persian army

who arrives from Thessaly in northern Greece,

reached the entrance to the pass of Thermopylae.

Facing her,

A contingent of fighters occupies the entire width of the parade.

Heavily armed and helmeted Greeks

and firmly resolved to hold the passage,

the only one on this steep coast

which would allow the Persian hordes to continue south

and reach Athens. Neighing

It's difficult to recognize the landscape where this confrontation took place.

The shores of the Aegean Sea are now 5 km away

from the site of Thermopylae.

2,500 years ago,

The waves came crashing at the foot of the mountains.

Constantinos Lagos is a historian,

specialist in military history.

For the past 15 years, he has dedicated himself to the study of the Persian Wars.

which pitted Greeks against Persians in the 5th century BC.

This is a reconstruction of the landscape of Thermopylae

in 480 BC.

The sea was close to where the battle took place, right here.

What we see here is the pass that the Persians were crossing.

in order to be able to cross Thermopylae.

The narrowness of this passage is an opportunity for the Greeks.

It's a natural lock,

ideal for blocking the Persian advance

with a smaller workforce.

At -480,

We would have been in the sea at that spot.

That is why, in the sources, Persians fall into the sea.

They fall during the battle.

This shows that the passage was not here, down below.

The written sources that Constantinos refers to,

We owe them to a single author, the Greek Herodotus.

His major work, "The Stories",

It was written 40 years after Thermopylae.

He gives a detailed and accurate account of the battle.

However precise it may be,

Is this report true to reality?

He conducted what is called an investigation. Historia,

That's the root of the word, it's the investigation.

He will conduct this investigation

with those who experienced the event.

If we give credence to Herodotus,

It's because we trust him, he's the only one

to have provided testimonies from people who lived through these battles.

He should be taken with a grain of salt, because he has a Greek look.

But it's the only source and he has this desire for objectivity.

When he takes stock of the forces present at Thermopylae,

Herodotus, however, puts forward some astonishing figures.

Thus, he believes that the Persian army

it is estimated to have had over 2 million fighters.

According to modern researchers,

We're talking about 150,000 to 300,000 fighters

front line.

This already represents not 10 times the Athenian army,

but 10 times the total number of men in Athens.

That's already huge.

It is also Persian propaganda that exaggerates his strengths

so that the Greeks would submit

and do not have the ambition to confront them.

Persia was a true superpower in the 5th century.

The largest empire the world had ever known.

It extends from east to west across the borders of India

all the way to the Mediterranean.

To the north, it borders the Caucasus. To the south, it encompasses Egypt.

A centralized state,

ruled with an iron fist by a dynasty

whose monarchs call themselves the kings of kings.

All imperial power

struggles to stop its expansion.

as long as there is no obstacle.

The Persians continued their expansion

until the moment they found themselves confronted

to men who, rather than submit,

they wanted to live free.

These men, lovers of freedom, are the Greeks.

Unlike the Persian Empire,

The Greek world was made up of independent city-states.

and often rivals.

Greek politics is chaos.

There are many city-states that are at war with each other

and who have diverging interests.

These Greek city-states are on both sides of the Aegean Sea.

On the European side, within the territory of present-day Greece,

Sparta and Athens were the most powerful.

On the Asian side in Ionia,

Miletus, Ephesus or Phocaea have nothing to envy them for.

At the end of the 6th century BC,

The Persian Empire expands westward and subjugates one by one

the Greek cities of what is now the Turkish coast.

In 500 BC, they revolted,

refusing the authority of the king of kings,

Darius the Great.

Two cities,

Athens and Eretria will come to the aid of this revolt.

one year after it began.

This is not a significant help.

We are talking about a few ships and thousands of men.

When the revolt was crushed after 6 years of war,

Darius, king of kings

launches a punitive expedition against Athens

who had had the audacity to support the rebel cities.

It's a failure. They've barely arrived,

The Persians were repelled by the Athenians at Marathon.

and must retreat in disarray.

This Persian defeat made Athens

a heroic, glorious city.

Everyone shared this point of view.

Poems from that era say

"Athens shines with glory because of Marathon."

The Persians are not finished yet.

Darius assembles another expeditionary force,

but this time more important and still against Athens.

It took 10 years for this expedition to be launched.

In the meantime, Darius died.

When the Persian army set out in 480 BC,

It was his son Xerxes who took the lead

and comes up against Thermopylae.

This gigantic army is composed of contingents

they came from all over the empire.

Around the Persian fighters,

Egyptians and Ethiopians mingle with Scythian horsemen from the Caucasus,

the Bactrians of Afghanistan

or the Hindus of northern India.

A motley collection

in which everyone brought their own fighting culture.

its logistics and its weapons.

The Persians have equipment that puts them at a disadvantage.

compared to the Greeks.

Their spears were shorter.

If their spears are shorter,

This indicates that they are less experienced in warfare.

It is more difficult to wield a long spear with precision

than a short spear.

These Greek fighters were armed with longer spears

who face the myriad Persians,

These were the elite troops of the Greek cities, the Hoplites.

A hoplite is a warrior citizen who fights for his city.

He will pay for his equipment. In ancient times,

when the Greek city-states were autonomous,

He is the one who will defend his city and his political system.

This is the main fighting type

of all cities. There are no Greek cities without Hoplites.

The Hoplite is the one who possesses the full set of equipment.

Pan-hoplie, that is to say, a complete set of combat equipment.

First, weapons, a long, double-pointed spear

often complemented by a short sword

and protective elements forming an armor.

Bronze leg guards called greaves,

a breastplate, a shield, a helmet.

Very few of these sets of armor have survived complete to the present day.

but many elements of it can be seen in museums.

Like the one in Mougins in Provence

who owns the largest private collection

of ancient weaponry in the world.

This is the iconic helmet of the Persian Wars.

The face of war in the Greek world.

This model was used by the majority of Greek Hoplites.

At the back, there's a neck cover that goes quite far down here.

and which will allow the fighter to be protected from head to neck.

From the front, there are openings

at eye level and widening outwards.

When we're going to have

Spear blows, here, we have finely drawn guides.

which will guide the blade towards the outside of the eyes

and not inwards.

Some said the helmets had melted.

because it was said that we were going to melt and cast the bronze.

In reality, most helmets

and archaeological pieces are being hammered.

The hammering action

will allow the metal to be stretched

And above all, it will help to consolidate and solidify the bronze.

They stretched the metal to make the helmet lighter.

If it exceeds a certain weight,

It can cause neck problems .

This allows you to modify and adapt each helmet

depending on each soldier.

Dimitris Alexandrou works

for the main archaeological museums of Greece.

In his workshop,

He seeks to uncover the manufacturing secrets of ancient armorers.

by recreating their tools and reproducing their actions.

At the base of a helmet, there is a bronze plate

which will have to be hammered home for hundreds of hours.

We start hitting like this in a circle.

until we obtain this result.

To achieve this shape, 80,000 hammer blows are required.

This type of anvil is used

And we hit in a circle like this.

Once completed,

Dimitris' works are exhibited in various museums.

This experimental practice allows archaeologists and historians

to better understand the use of equipment by the Hoplites.

The Greeks' equipment was ergonomic.

They had studied the human body.

They followed the anatomy of the skull to construct their helmet.

The helmet became an extension of their body.

That's why they were so well protected.

and that they had few deaths during the fighting.

That's how they won in the end.

Wearing helmets and covered in ergonomic armor,

Hoplites were heavy infantry units,

ideal for holding a position.

That is precisely what they intend to do against the Persians.

The Greek hoplites, with their defensive equipment,

will be able to hold a pass for a long time

facing Persians who will be unable to deploy their forces.

They had learned the lesson of Marathon.

Never send the cavalry into this kind of terrain.

They will not be able to use their firepower.

all their archers, their javelin throwers.

It's an impenetrable wall; they'll have to be moved by hand-to-hand combat.

On the morning of August 14, 480,

Xerxes sends a scout to observe the Greek camp.

What he reports to his king surprises him greatly.

The Greeks do gymnastics

And most importantly, they comb their hair.

Not understanding,

Xerxes consulted an expert.

He was a former king of Sparta, Demaratus,

who was in exile with him.

Démarate told him: "Be careful , they are the best on the other side.

They would rather die than surrender."

These warriors, ready to die , who paint their hair,

They are Spartans.

The most feared Hoplites in all of Greece.

If the Spartans paint themselves

before they die, because they know they are going to die,

It's because they want to make beautiful deaths.

The more beautiful the corpse, the better.

The more respectable the man will be

who will have died.

Why did Xerxes fight Sparta and not Athens?

as he comes to avenge his father Darius,

beaten 10 years earlier by the Athenians at Marathon?

This is the first time in their history,

The turbulent Greek city-states united in the face of the threat.

The size of the army assembled by Xerxes

suggests that he wants to conquer all of Greece.

The Greeks said to themselves: "Now,

"He threatens us all." The cities send ambassadors

on the Isthmus of Corinth to decide what to do.

At the conclusion of this congress, a panhellenic union was founded.

31 city-states pledging to unite their forces

against the Persian invaders.

Persians whose army is advancing from the northeast,

skirting the Aegean Sea to rush towards Athens

and beyond to the Peloponnese.

At sea, a fleet of 1,200 ships accompanies him.

following a parallel path.

Far fewer in number,

The Greeks have only one solution.

Utilize the country's rugged topography

to block Xerxes' advance at all costs .

At sea, it's Cape Artemision

which offers the best configuration.

A narrow passage between the island of Euboea and the mainland,

at the entrance to the Malian Gulf

where the Persian fleet will not be able to deploy its full power.

Directly opposite, to the west,

an unmissable parade on the road south,

Thermopylae.

This is where the Greeks will have to send their fleet and army.

Land operations

and the maritime operations are combined

And those at sea need to know what is happening on land.

and vice versa.

According to Herodotus, 271 warships

half of which is supplied by Athens

they head north to cut off the route of the Persian fleet.

The ground troops set out towards Thermopylae.

There are critics of this strategy

who refuse and drag their feet. What excuse?

They will take it? The holding of the Olympic Games

to say that there are gods to fear

and they are more to be feared than the invaders.

We honor the gods and we will go and confront our adversaries.

In ancient Greece,

The Olympic Games are more than just a sporting competition.

They have a religious, sacred character.

And above all, they constitute a period of truce.

during which the cities are forbidden to take up arms.

Armed with this argument, the reluctant cities

obtain that the contingent which goes to defend Thermopylae

that is, a small contingent, barely 7,000 fighters

of which only 300 were Spartans.

However, it was a king of Sparta who commanded the expedition.

It is very interesting to note

that the Greeks recognize Sparta as the preeminent power.

No one tries to argue against the fact that a king of Sparta

lead the Greek army.

This king of Sparta is Leonidas.

He is the one who stands at the head of the Hoplites

at the entrance to the parade when Xerxes' army appears.

The battle does not begin immediately.

For four days, the fighters will remain in their positions.

Xerxes seems convinced that he won't even have to fight.

When Xerxes asks the Greeks

To surrender their weapons, Leonidas would have responded with a laconic statement.

a very short, very impactful sentence .

He reportedly replied "Molon labê", "Come and get them".

Leonidas belongs to one of the two royal dynasties of Sparta.

He is believed to be a descendant of the demigod Heracles.

However, he was not destined to be king.

He ascended to the throne in 489 BC.

by imprisoning his predecessor, his half-brother.

Despite this questionable power grab,

Leonidas seems to inspire profound respect

both to the citizens of Sparta and to those of other cities.

Leonidas has a strong personality.

He is not just a king, he is a leader of men.

The Spartans follow him as their king.

but above all because of his personality.

Leonidas, our heroic king,

was a pure product of the Spartan political-educational system.

Like all male children in Sparta,

As a child, Leonidas had to submit to agoge,

the terrible Spartan education.

We're going to get these kids used to it from the start.

to live in adversity.

We're going to deprive them of shoes.

so that they get used to walking barefoot in all circumstances.

We're going to give them a garment that's too cold in winter.

and too hot in summer.

An education based on bullying and deprivation

whose ruins of the ancient city still bear the marks.

As seen here, in front of the temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis

where an initiation rite took place that the Spartans had to undergo.

These young Spartans

will be brought in front of the temple

and will have to go and get some cheese from inside the temple.

The problem is that on the road and in the temple, men

armed with whips will beat them

and prevent them from reaching the cheeses.

These men must go through, endure the blows

and collect the cheeses to bring them back to their community.

They are taught that it is through effort and suffering

that one acquires an important social status in the city.

The goal of education

is to make young people more resilient so that they can

to act more effectively in war.

The goal is to turn them into effective warriors.

After 4 days of negotiation and observation,

The fighting begins.

On this first day of battle,

Xerxes launches a frontal assault.

Opposite them, Leonidas positioned his 300 Spartans in the first line.

They occupy the entire width of the pass,

protected on their left by the mountain slopes

and on their right, by the sheer drop of the cliff

surmounted by the remains of an ancient fortification.

One of the main strengths of the Persians is their archers.

It is likely that the assault began with a barrage of fire.

raining arrows down on the Greeks.

An episode mentioned in Herodotus' account.

Someone makes a remark

according to which the arrows launched

The Persians have so many that they block out the sun.

The Spartan Dienekes remarks:

"So much the better, we'll fight in the shadows."

Xerxes orders the infantry to charge.

I'm sure the Greeks will crumble at the first sign of trouble,

He ordered that these arrogant Spartans be brought to him alive.

On this narrow battlefield,

The gigantic Persian army cannot unleash its full power

and breaks against the wall of spears and shields of the Hoplites.

This works in favor

The Greeks, it's their experience in war

and it's the fact that they are capable

to take cover behind a wall of shields

and to have few losses, unlike the Persians.

On guard!

1st line, launches from a high position.

This impenetrable wall of shields is the phalanx.

In a phalanx formation!

A tight, perfectly coordinated combat formation

that the Greeks developed and that they alone master.

Vincent Torres studies the history of gesture.

Specialist in the phalanx,

He seeks to reconstruct the movements of the Hoplites.

during a combat phase.

Press the fingertip firmly. Caution.

On guard! In phalanx formation!

In this position, the left-hand fighter's shield

wraps the shield of the neighbor on the right.

The two shields are linked. If I push, I push both.

When there is going to be an impact with another line,

even if the spears don't touch me

And as I pass between them, I will push two fighters aside.

If, thanks to my training, I manage to push,

the second line will come and push

and become denser, and then the third line.

When the training progresses... Gentlemen.

Forward march!

One, two, three. One, two, three.

In this training program,

The one who is most exposed is the leader.

All the people on the right have their sides exposed.

Only one person is on display; this is the place of honor.

This is where Leonidas stands at Thermopylae.

One by one, the waves of Persian assault

crash against the Greek phalanxes

who will not give an inch.

Exasperated, Xerxes orders the elite of his troops

to move up to the front line.

Xerxes sends the immortals, his personal guard.

They go everywhere the king goes.

They are called immortals, because if one of them dies,

He will always be replaced. They are the elite of the elite.

And in this respect, they are no better than the other contingents.

The immortals embody the power of the king of kings.

The entire empire fears them.

And 10,000 of them failed to dislodge the Spartans

who hold the pass.

For Xerxes, it was a personal humiliation

and a perilous situation.

Xerxes nearly fell off his seat three times .

That means the power is faltering.

He's even afraid that, ultimately,

The Greeks broke through his army and reached him.

The battle thus lasted all day.

The Persian units are repelled.

without a fight from the Greek phalanxes.

When the fighting stops,

The Persian army left behind a large number of dead.

The Greeks, almost none.

The battle resumed the following morning.

The Greeks are rotating their staff.

You don't have the same soldiers from morning till night.

This allows the Greeks to rest,

as long as the Persians do not break their lines.

Herodotus' account does not provide details of the battles.

on the second day of the battle.

He simply states, "The Persians were no happier."

Herodotus also mentions a tactic used by the Spartans

which consists of simulating a retreat in order to be able to kill

as many Persians as possible.

You don't simply have an unbreakable line,

at certain times,

This line seems to give way, but it's a feint.

It's simulated, it's a trap.

This Spartan maneuver,

Another ancient author, Xenophon, described it in detail.

This is the Lacedaemonian conversion.

To be fully effective,

It must be executed in a perfectly coordinated manner.

The Hoplites first broke through the shield wall,

the front-line fighters, turning their backs on the enemy,

they move to the rear of the phalanx by slipping between the ranks.

The second line follows suit, and so on.

until the phalanx is reconstituted with its back to the enemy.

At the moment when the enemy

He's changing his troops; that's where they're going to simulate a retreat.

And the guys facing them think they have to attack.

because they are showing their backs.

That's when they rush forward and lose their ranks.

that the Spartans turn around and close their phalanx.

Phalange!

We do it slowly,

But they will do it quickly; these movements are ingrained.

and bam, impact the opposing formation.

This maneuver, says Xenophon, is impossible to accomplish

in the urgency of the battle.

Except for Greeks raised under Spartan laws.

The unique characteristic of Sparta

lies in the fact that the citizen soldiers

are men who wanted to specialize their activities

in the political and military sphere.

Sparta, the warrior city,

possesses a political system without equal

among the Greek cities.

The citizens call themselves Homoi,

literally the same.

They gather in the agora to vote on their laws.

Laws proposed only by the Gerousia,

a college of 28 old men.

5 magistrates elected for one year

will be responsible for enforcing these laws.

At the very top of the hierarchy, two kings

whose sole role is that of war leaders.

Sparta, within its own borders, will create laws

which promote total martial cohesion.

There is a redistribution of land,

a socialist organization that divides

the entire territory of the region in 9,000 plots.

Each receives a plot of equivalent value.

Plots of land that will be cultivated by slaves,

the Helots.

In return for the generosity of the city of Sparta,

Citizens are prohibited from working.

to trade or to get rich.

A garrison life where those like them share everything

up to and including their meals, which they must eat together.

The Spartans devoted themselves solely to preparing for war.

their sole reason for living and dying.

"Gorgopas in polemos".

Here, we have funerary stelae.

with the names of fighters who died in combat.

In Sparta, only men who died in battle and women

Those who died in childbirth have their names engraved on their gravestones.

Why? Because they gave their lives for the city.

For men, in war. For women, in childbirth .

future warriors.

When King Leonidas left for Thermopylae,

Everyone told him: "You're only leaving with 300 men,

"That's not enough."

He replied: "As for what we have to do,

That's more than enough. We're going there to die."

However, on the evening of the second day of battle,

Leonidas and his Hoplites are the masters of Thermopylae.

Xerxes, powerless, ordered his troops to retreat.

His only hope,

that its fleet follows a route parallel to its army,

manages to outmaneuver the Greeks

and to land reinforcements to take them from behind.

But a Greek fleet led by the Athenians

closes the Artemision cape and blocks their route.

Even before confronting it,

The Persian ships were caught in a huge storm

which destroyed a third of them.

When the naval battle begins,

The Persians, exhausted and disorganized,

fail to break the Greek blockade.

After 3 days of fierce fighting, without a clear winner,

They decide to sail around the island of Euboea to the west.

to head south.

Doubt is setting in within the Persian camp .

Xerxes, who can no longer count on the support of his fleet,

is no longer so sure of his victory.

However, it was at that precise moment, on the evening of the 2nd day

that fate will turn in his favor.

There will be an almost divine intervention

which will allow him to outmaneuver his opponent,

He is a traitor in the eyes of the Greeks.

A Greek, an infamous traitor

mentioned by Herodotus,

He pointed out a passage through the mountains to them.

A passage that could allow forces of the Persian army

to take the Greeks who were at Thermopylae by surprise .

The Greeks were aware of the existence of this passage.

Leonidas even stationed troops there

at the beginning of the battle to hold it.

It takes about ten hours on foot

to travel this path to Thermopylae.

As night falls,

a contingent of Persian fighters sets out

guided by the traitor.

We know that the immortals were there

because Hydarnes, their leader, was leading this expedition.

There were the immortals and a total of 20,000 soldiers.

As they progress along the path,

Xerxes' soldiers fall upon the detachment

Posted by Leonidas.

A thousand Hoplites faced them,

alerted by the sound of footsteps of the Persian multitude.

When they saw those 20,000 Persians arrive

they thought they were coming

to confront them.

They formed up to fight.

They took up a defensive position.

but the Persians left them aside

to achieve their goal

which was the shore. They came back down the mountain

and they were able to reach the Greeks from behind.

The Hoplites, kept at bay by the Persian archers,

manage to send a messenger to Leonidas.

Upon being informed, he made a radical decision.

What is Leonidas doing?

He made the choice that any leader would have made.

The pragmatic choice to abandon the position,

It makes no sense to hold it.

These men are not sacrificed for nothing.

They dismissed most of the Greeks.

Leonidas sends all the Hoplites back to Athens,

sparing them certain death.

They will be more useful alive in defending the city.

Everyone except the 300 Spartans who accompanied him.

They will stay and fight with him until the end.

He received orders. His city ordered him to hold the position.

Unless otherwise ordered, he cannot deviate from this.

to the laws of Sparta.

Perhaps he is influenced in his decision by a prophecy.

delivered by the oracle of Delphi before the battle.

In this war, Sparta would either lose a king,

either it would be destroyed.

Myth or reality?

One thing is certain, on the morning of the 3rd day of battle,

Leonidas and his 300 Spartans chose to remain

and to face the multitude of Persians to the death

who are preparing to attack them from two sides.

What Herodotus indicates is that, alongside the Spartans,

There were also Thespians and Boeotians.

There were 800 of them in total. You have 300 Spartans.

and Thespians

in comparable numbers. But there is a difference.

The Spartans represented a small percentage

of their army.

For the Thespians, it was their entire army.

A thousand Hoplites surround Leonidas for the final battle.

Hoplites, perhaps also Helots,

these slaves of the Spartans

Archaeology tells us that they also went to war.

And sometimes, they even participated in the fighting.

Here we have an army on the march. We can see the warriors.

We mostly see their porters, the aides-de-camp

who will have a helmet and sometimes, a javelin.

In the case of Thermopylae, that's it.

The Helots served as aides-de-camp.

During marches, the Spartans carried their weapons

and the Helots brought what was needed for camp life.

The number of Helots present at Thermopylae is unknown .

Greek troop strength on the last day of the battle

were far superior to those of the 300 Spartans

which the legend of Leonidas has preserved.

Even if it's 1,500 or 2,000 Greeks

who on that day faced the Persians,

They are 150 to 200 times fewer in number than their opponents.

Yet,

rather than waiting for the clash and defending their position,

Leonidas orders an attack.

When he saw the flanking army approaching from behind him,

He launched his forces into a frontal attack.

He didn't stay to defend himself, he counter-attacked.

This offensive by Leonidas, doomed to failure,

is not a final act of panache.

It's a perfectly calculated tactical decision .

By leading this attack northward,

It forces the flanking troops to pursue him.

Thus, he protects the retreat of the rest of the Greeks.

whom he had dismissed a few hours earlier.

The fighting is so fierce that in this confrontation,

even before the bypass had been completed,

King Leonidas dies.

In doing so,

He fulfilled the prophecy given to Sparta.

In the minds of the Spartans, at least in Herodotus' account,

He saves Greece through his sacrifice.

The Greeks, at the cost of a fierce hand-to-hand struggle,

They retrieved his body and retreated to Kolonos,

a small hill located to the south

at the exit of the Thermopylae pass.

It is at this spot that Herodotus places the final battle

which he describes in these terms.

"In this place,

They defended themselves with their swords, for those who still had them.

with their hands, with their teeth."

"When only the very last ones remain ,

They finish them off with arrows.

And that's it."

This quote

is world-famous. It says: "Go tell the Spartans

that we rest here in obedience to their laws."

After the battle,

Xerxes demanded that Leonidas' body be identified.

Having found him, he had him beheaded

and had the head of the deceased king planted on a stake.

Then he resumed his journey south towards Athens.

When he entered the city, it was empty.

Thanks to the sacrifices of the Spartans at Thermopylae,

The residents had been evacuated.

Furious, Xerxes had the few Athenians left massacred.

who had not wanted to flee and raze the Acropolis.

A few days later,

Greek ships annihilated the Persian fleet at Salamis.

One year later in Plataea,

the Hoplites of all the allied Greek cities

inflicted a final defeat on Xerxes' army.

An unexpected outcome for the turbulent Greek city-states

were only able to achieve this thanks to the 3 days

during which Leonidas and his Hoplites

held the Battle of Thermopylae.

At Thermopylae, we lost, but the glory

that we won there is a huge victory for Sparta.

Even for the rest of the world.

The Persian Empire was never to return to Greece.

And 2,500 years later,

The figure of Leonidas still embodies the eternal struggle

between freedom and oppression.

Heroic music

...

Subtitles: VDM