The Monument to the Spartans at Metéora

by Patrick Totty

The monument: Located near Metéora, 100 miles northwest of Athens, this small monument is something a casual visitor might exhaust in only a few minutes. But for the more discerning visitor, it would be useful to linger here because it commemorates an event upon which the history of the whole world later hinged.

Why to Go: In 480 B.C., a huge Persian army, advancing south towards Athens, encountered a band of Spartan soldiers – probably no more than 300 – at the pass of Thermopylae. (The landscape has changed so much in the intervening 2,500 years that nobody today is quite sure where it was.) It is said that the pass, crucial to the Persians’ advance on Athens, narrowed so much at one point that it could be blocked by a small, determined group of defenders.

The Spartans, trained from boyhood to be stoic soldiers, stood shoulder-to-shoulder at Themopylae’s narrowest point and methodically repulsed Persia’s finest troops. Because only so many Persian soldiers at a time could pinch in to face the Spartan line, the superbly trained Spartans, trying to buy time for their Athenian allies, were able to methodically dispatch their adversaries by resting their own troops in the rear then rotating them back, refreshed, into the front line.

They did this for hour after hour. Perhaps they would have blocked the Persians forever. But the story goes, a Greek traitor revealed a way to bypass the Spartans and approach them from the rear. A cadre of crack Persian troops sneaked behind the Spartans and fell upon them. Three days after the Spartans began their heroic defense, the path to Athens lay open.

But thanks to the Spartans’ self-sacrifice at Thermopylae, the Athenians successfully evacuated their city and then defeated the Persians decisively at the great naval battle of Salamis. Eventually the Greeks drove the Persians from their homeland. Had they not, the history of the West would have been far different. Perhaps the West, with its science, its skeptical philosophical frame of mind, its Romans, Christians and Germans, would have never arisen. The bravery of 300 soldiers decreed otherwise.