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Originally posted by Tarrasque:
<STRONG>Yes, but, you undestand how much less impressive it sounds if none of the highly trained and elite soldiers die if they have three thousand other Greeks there as fodder. 
Although, as I said, there was only a small number of soldiers on the field at one time and the area was totally horrible for the attacking force. I really do not see how the Persians expected to overrun the position without extremely heavy losses. Hrm, perhaps they hoped for a failure of morale.
300 was a movie, about a graphic novel about an event in history. Needless to say the graphic novel embelished a lot of facts and the movie just emblesished things more.</STRONG>
Xerxes didn't much care about heavy losses. The Persian army massively outnumbered the Greeks The greeks had, on the first two days of the battle, an army of some 7000 men. Xerxes had around 200,000. On the second day, most of the Greek army retreated (they were losing quite heavily), leaving 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians, and around 1400 assorted other troops, (mostly Helots, Spartan slave soldiers).
That was when the Greeks retreated to the Hot Gates, where the terrain (a 14m wide pass between the mountains and the shore of the Gulf of Malis with three actual gates along it, and a defensive wall at the middle gate, which barricaded the pass, and from which the Greeks fought). The narrow pass meant that the Greek army could cycle it's front line troops as they began to tire, keeping them fresh and able to fight.
That was why it took the Persian army so long to break through, it wasn't because they were fighting better trained or equipped enemies, because Xerxes' army was no slouch either, but because they were assaulting a naturally defensive position where their numerical superiority meant nothing.
And at the end of the day, they still won, and probably would have conquered Greece if Themistocles (the Athenian leader of the Greek fleet, and an extremely cunning individual) hadn't managed to trick Xerxes into fighting at the Strait of Salamis, allowing him to destroy most of Xerxes' fleet, and forcing him to withdraw his land army from Greece, as he couldn't supply it without his ships. Thermopylae was one of those epic and bloody military follies, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, that killed a lot of people to no real tactical advantage.
The Battle of Salamis was the one that saved Greece.
Also, contrary to what you might think, the Persian army was well used to the Phalanx, it being the dominant form of infantry warfare for everyone in the ancient world for the last three centuries (And even further back, the earliest recorded evidence of a shield wall/spear hedge is a Sumerian carving from around 2450BCE). The Greeks, particularly the Spartans, just happened to be better at it than anyone else. The Persians knew that as well, the last attempted invasion having been headed off at the Battle of Marathon in 490BCE by an Athenian army using a wide but shallow phalanx which encircled the Persian army at engagement and slaughtered them wholesale.
Their equipment would not have been quite as good, but that was because of the size of the army, it was hard to find that much bronze, though the persians were just as good at working it. (probably better, in places. The Persian empire was, at the time, the largest that had yet been carved out).
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Topic: Replicating Sparta (Read 3328 times)