As a certified classical history buff, I'm fascinated by the Persian Wars as recorded by the historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and for years I wanted to create a piece based on his landmark work. My first reading of “Les Histories” was in 2003, and ever since my imagination has been illuminated with visions of this monumental conflict. But, for years in the interim, I went back and forth between being obsessed with the subject and then feeling it was an exhausted topic considering all the movies and comics and so forth. In the end, despite my trepidation, I felt Thermopylae warranted a more thoughtful piece than what Frank Miller has made popular recently, and as well as a more realistic treatise than the ridiculous neo-classical version Jacques-Louis David put forth a few centuries back. Somewhere between these two interpretations lies the real occurrence. One of my loftier goals as an illustrator is to generate works as if I was a war-photographer participating in classical history – capturing frame by frame occurrences not since studied from such a candid perspective. After years of research and contemplation, I decided I would begin my classical series with Leonidas and his Spartan retinue.
Months of drafting went into each figure. I sourced as many actual archeological artifacts as possible to place in the composition: swords from the Museum at Persepolis; the famous calf-skin leather shoes of the Persians (found in warriors’ graves throughout Asian minor); textile patterns from the stone reliefs at Babylon, Susa and Persepolis; the legendary Corinthian helmets of the Peloponnesians with their distinctly Laconic sideways plums; and popular iconography of Laconic heroes such as Hercules from coins and armor of the 5th century BC. I made every effort from my novice historical study to be as accurate as possible in the creation of this composition.
Thermopylae looms large in the collective consciousness of history buffs world-wide, and as a result, every generation a new Hollywood epic is financed and released reimagining the legendary conflict (and all are equally, ridiculously inaccurate). However, by the numbers (troops engaged, casualties accounted for, etc..) Thermopylae was nothing more than a minor skirmish. Many historians even argue the battle was tactically insignificant. Therefore why do these three days echo so loudly throughout history?
The first factor is Thermopylae is factual history that plays out like an ancient myth. Herodotus’ work “Les Histories”, in which this battle was first transcribed, actually gave our language the word "History," and hence the entire era surrounding this conflict quite literally straddles the sacred precipice between historic and prehistoric human occurrences. Conversely it is this straddling that leads the Persian Wars to also be one of the most questioned and debated events of the Classical world. Herodotus’ accuracy has been in question since antiquity, and remains so to this day. Even if Herodotus exaggerated or fabricated large portions of his history, Thermopylae is still a watershed for Hellenic culture, and this brings us to our second reason, which is the propaganda significance of the Spartan sacrifice. Even if the engagement was tactically insignificant, the affect of the story was a cornerstone example of Hellenic virtue throughout the ancient world, in the similar fashion as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 are to modern Americans. Thermopylae inspired the likes of Xenophon, Alexander, Pyrrhus, Hannibal, Caesar and countless others. The legend touted Western virtue from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.
However, the general popularity of this battle has led to far reaching misinterpretation and contemporary projection upon the unworthy Spartans. Laconic culture is a mixture of sadistic and ignorant overindulgences, fueled by violence and hatred. Modern western people would view their practices as an equal mix National Socialism and the Spanish Inquisition. Almost everything that was innovative about ancient Hellenism was taken to radical and unhealthy extremes in Spartan hands. Spartans didn’t breed and train soldiers, they engineered and enfranchised an entire class of killers; individuals more animal than human in terms of moral function and emotional range. The entire ancient world was terrified of these armored sociopaths. It was only in this singular function, as hired killers repelling a foreign invasion horde that the Spartans truly served greater Hellas. Eventually, Sparta’s failure to produce fully functioning human-beings doomed the entire Hellenic world when they took power of the Aegean in the wake of the Peloponnesian War, some 50 years after the events of Thermopylae. I would argue, one of the only positive contributions of Laconic culture to antiquity, aside from being a motivational opposition to the innovative Athenians, was the three days the Spartans held the pass at Thermopylae in the autumn of 480 BC.
Despite this vital role of the Spartans in the eventual Hellenic victory, I lament that my work could bolster the wide-spread but misplaced worship of Laconic heroism. Spartans as a culture were the most successful slavers in the history of western civilization, and were outnumbered by their slave population (labeled the Helots) by nearly ten to one. This population imbalance is the real reason for the Spartan's consistent and highly developed combat acumen and martial skill; without which, they would have simply been over-run by the masses of this subjugated class. Spartans were unimaginably cruel to their slaves. They waged an annual war of terror on the Helots, as a celebrated tradition, and random lynching and tortures were daily occurrences. For a Spartan to murder a Helot was not described as “killing” in the ancient Greek common tongue, but rather “culling” as if the Helots were livestock. Helots hated the Spartans so much, Thucydides described them as “ready and willing to eat the Spartan’s raw.” Once an individual was designated a member of the Helot class, there was only one reprieve available and that was to assist their Spartans masters in combat (See Figure H1).
My composition, therefore, is not a celebration of Peloponnesian virtue, but rather a terse recognition of the crucial role these killers played in the founding of our civilization. We should study the Spartans as they were, not project on them what we want them to be – and to that end, I wished to convey both the glory and the gore in an honest treatise of this distant event.
Classical history is a minefield littered with this dichotomy between virtue and shame. On the one hand, civilization in its infancy can be forgiven certain over-indulgences, but at the same time historians both novice and professional should be wary of being either overly forgiving or accusatorial when debating Classical culture. All participants are equally savage and primal to the modern perspective. Yet our physicality in comparison to these ancient people is nearly exact. Meaning, the human animal has not changed, only human behavior and culture has evolved. This makes it very easy to be judgmental and lament their base logic but it also makes it fascinating to image your own participation in these ancient events – for the humans that did participate were almost identical to yourself. Only unlike yourself, they lacked the many shoulders of the many cultural giants who existed between then and now and hence, you see the world from a significantly better vantage point, if even while utilizing the exact same eyes as our ancient ancestors.