Thermopylae

Thermopylae — Θερμοπύλες, "hot gates" — takes its name from the sulphur springs at the foot of its hill, which still run there. Greek myth placed one of the entrances to Hades at the pass, and one version of the Labours of Heracles held that the waters ran hot because the divine hero tried to cleanse himself of the Hydra's poison in them. The surrounding country was called Malis after the Malians, a Greek tribe settled near present-day Lamia at the delta of the Spercheios; their main town was Trachis, and the Malian Gulf is named after them.

At Anthela, close to the pass, the Malians kept a Temple of Demeter Amphictyonis, the centre of the first known Amphictyony — a group of religiously associated Greek tribes whose delegates were called the Pylagorai, the "gate-assemblers"; Demeter's older cults carried chthonic associations, and the title may point to the gates of Hades.

In 480 BC a Greek force numbering perhaps 7,000 — 300 Spartans, 500 warriors from Tegea and 500 from Mantinea, 120 from Arcadian Orchomenos and 1,000 from the rest of Arcadia, 200 from Phlius, 80 from Mycenae, 400 Corinthians, 400 Thebans, 1,000 Phocians, 700 Thespians and the Opuntian Locrians — met the invading Persians under Xerxes at the pass. When most of the army withdrew, over a thousand remained: the surviving 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians, and 400 Thebans whom the other Greeks held by force as hostages. Gaius Stern has argued that earlier fighting had already cost the defenders more than a hundred men, putting the true figure nearer 1,250 than 1,400.

For three days they held the narrow route between the hills and the sea against Xerxes' far larger cavalry and infantry, until on the third day the Persians came round behind them by an obscure goat path, the Anopaea Pass. Greek legend named the man who showed it to the invaders as a traitor, Ephialtes of Trachis. The epitaph Simonides of Ceos wrote for the monument reads: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie."

The Third Sacred War of 353/352 BC set the Delphic Amphictyonic League — represented principally by Thebes, and latterly by Philip II of Macedon — against the Phocians, in a quarrel begun by the heavy fine imposed on them in 357 BC for cultivating sacred land. In 279 BC a Gallic army under Brennus engaged the Aetolians, who were forced into a tactical retreat, and was finally routed by the Thessalians and Malians at the river Spercheios. In 191 BC Antiochus III the Great of Syria attempted in vain to hold the pass against the Romans under Manius Acilius Glabrio.

At an uncertain date in the mid-3rd century AD a Roman force sent to stop the Germanic Heruli defeated them in the area. In 997 the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, returning from an invasion that had carried him as far as the Peloponnese, was met by a Byzantine army under Nikephoros Ouranos at the Spercheios; the river was in flood and both sides encamped on opposite banks without action, and the Bulgarians, confident that the Byzantines could not cross, were taken by surprise when Byzantine scouts discovered a ford further upriver.

In 1821 a force of Greek fighters under Athanasios Diakos made a stand near the pass to stop 8,000 Turks marching down from Thessaly to put down the revolts in Roumeli and the Peloponnese. Diakos made his last stand at the bridge of Alamana with 48 of his men; he was captured and killed.

In 1941 ANZAC forces delayed the invading Nazi forces in the area enough to allow the evacuation of the British expeditionary force to Crete, a fight also called the Battle of Thermopylae. German documents of the period referred to the sabotage of the Gorgopotamos bridge in 1942 as "the recent sabotage near Thermopylae".

The ground fought over in 480 BC now lies under 20 metres of soil, buried by sediment from the Spercheios and travertine from the hot springs. The narrowest point of the plain, where the battle was probably fought, would then have been less than 100 metres wide, with the path below the hill itself about twelve metres across; since 480 BC the shoreline has advanced by as much as 9 km in places, eliminating the narrows altogether. Registered as an archaeological site and lying in the municipality of Lamia, the pass is split by the A1 motorway from Athens to Thessaloniki, which follows the ancient shoreline; a monument to Leonidas I of Sparta stands on its east side, across the road from the hill where Simonides' epitaph is engraved in stone at the top.