The Harvest of War by Stephen P. Kershaw

Author:Stephen P. Kershaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Spartans advanced slowly and to the rhythm of the many flute players deployed in their midst. This was […] to maintain a steady rhythm as they advanced, and to avoid their good order being broken, which often occurs when large formations go on the offensive.62

Other states also used flute players, as the famous Chigi vase63 shows, where a musician is embedded in a Corinthian hoplite phalanx, but as with so much else in the military sphere, the Spartans took this to another level.64 And when push came to shove, as it literally did in the othismos, their prowess was incomparable.65

However effectively the Spartans ‘brandished their murderous ashen spears’,66 their numbers were still small. Diodorus tells us that when Leonidas announced his plan to take 1,000 Lacedaemonians to Thermopylae, the ephors simply told him that he should take more. But the king told them, ‘They are indeed a small number to prevent the Barbarians transiting the passes, but they are plenty for the task they are now setting out to accomplish.’67 This is enigmatic but illuminating, as is his laconically terse statement that the manpower of the whole of Greece would not be sufficient if he were just relying on numbers, but since he was relying on courage, he had all that he needed.68 This raises questions about what was Leonidas and his troops’ ‘task they are now setting out to accomplish’. Some 400 years later Diodorus praised the Spartans for being the only people he knew of who chose to preserve the laws of their state rather than their own lives,69 and dramatised an exchange between Leonidas and the ephors where he told them in secret: ‘On the face of it I am leading them to guard the passes, but in reality to die for the freedom of everyone.’70 He added that however many Spartans he took, every single one would die in battle, because no one would turn and run. Around 150 years later Plutarch repeated the story: Leonidas was quizzed by the ephors, who were wondering whether he had decided to do anything apart from block the pass, to which he responded, ‘No. Not in theory. But actually, my real mission is to die for Greece.’71 Plutarch also records an exchange between Leonidas and his wife Gorgo as he left Sparta. She asked him whether he had any instructions and was told to marry good men and bear good children.72 Statements like these, allied to the fact that Leonidas only took Spartans who had living sons,73 who were therefore expendable, and Plutarch’s statement that the Spartans held their own funeral games in front of their parents before they went off to war, have generated the idea that this was a suicide mission.74 But although the expedition was high-risk and the attrition rates would doubtless be high, Leonidas and the 300 were neither expecting nor seeking to die to a man for no perceptible strategic gain. They were prepared to give their lives for the cause, but that was not their objective.

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