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August-September 480 BCEReputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

300 Spartans buy Greece the time to win at Salamis

On the timeline · around August-September 480 BCE · The Classical PeriodThe Archaic PeriodThe Classical Period300 Spartans buy Greece the time to win at Salamis600 BCE550 BCE500 BCE475 BCE450 BCE

What happened

A decade after Marathon, the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece with the largest army the Greeks had ever faced. At the narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae, the Spartan king Leonidas held the invasion back for two full days with a force of only a few thousand men, before a Greek local named Ephialtes showed the Persians a mountain path around the Greek position. On the third day, Leonidas sent most of his army away and made a final stand with his remaining 300 Spartans and roughly 1,100 Thespian and Theban troops, all of whom were killed. Weeks later, the Athenian commander Themistocles lured the much larger Persian fleet into the narrow straits of Salamis, where the lighter, more maneuverable Greek triremes trapped and destroyed the crowded Persian ships, whose crews, unlike the Greeks, mostly could not swim.

Why it matters

Thermopylae was a battlefield defeat that Greeks nonetheless treated as their defining act of collective courage for the rest of antiquity, a story of free men choosing to die rather than submit. Salamis, weeks later, was the real strategic turning point: it broke Xerxes's naval supply lines and forced his retreat, clearing the way for the last Persian army to be destroyed on land at Plataea the following year.

How we know

Herodotus interviewed veterans and their descendants within living memory of the battles, and the epitaph inscribed at Thermopylae itself, go tell the Spartans, you who read, we took their orders and here lie dead, was seen and recorded by the traveler Pausanias centuries later, physical confirmation that the Spartans were memorialized on the actual site.

Sources

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