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Halo

• The Halo 2 Volume 2 Soundtack has a song titled "Finale: Thermopylae Soon." Also the book, "Halo: The Fall of Reach" by Eric Nylund refers to the Thermopylae battle, in [[Media:book the Spartans come out victorious, as Nylund has used the battle as propoganda in a brain-washing program. Having the Spartans lose would not be satisfactory to the purporse of conditioning the perfect soldiers.

I can't really word this properly, but Nylund doesn't make a mistake about the battle, he does it purposely to show that ONI (something from his book) is willing to lie to the Spartan IIs to train them.

The allusion to Thermopylae in the soundtrack probably refers to the battle over Earth, similar ot the historical battle. That track is the one that plays during the annoying cliffhanger cinematic at the end. Mindgiver 01:33, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

== Poem by Lord Byron ==]]I don't know if this is relevant enough, so I won't add it to the article myself. Never the less it's a striking poem about the battle of Thermopylae.

Earth! render back from out thy breast

A remnant of our Spartan dead!

Of the three hundred grant but three,

To make a new Thermopylae!

(Don Juan. Canto iii. Stanza 86. 7)

--BeSherman 19:23, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

More Anti Greek Lies

Every time I check this page, I see an English or Turk has tried to lower the number of Persian Soldiers in the Box. There are NO estimates as low as 170,000 - Every Historian I have read has given the estimation of their own at a quarter of a million, perhaps a little lower, perhaps a little higher. Stop lying, as my dad says, the english will never forgive us for inventing civilization.

Is it not equally possible that you are just blindly pro-Greek? Adam Bishop 01:09, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

There are estimates 170 000 and lower, so I've restored it, but I've also kept the new maximum of 250 000. This is something there is a lot of uncertainty on, and we really need to provide some discussion and references, instead of just throwing out a number. Josh

Ok, maybe you are not anti-Greek. But I have never read anything which cites 170,000 as an estimate, that is why I Wondered, all of the books I have read (and I will admit I have only read about 6 or 7 on the subject and the wider Persian Wars), say that most probably there were a quarter of a million Persians.

Will you PLEASE stop badmouthing the English? Bloody hell. I may not be English (American) but I do know that the British studied Greek battles like these for Hundreds of years including names like Nelson, Wellington and Mongomery. I doubt that anyone is really anti-Greek enough to try and change them. Second, even though I am severly not fond of Hitler's Germany, I don't try to go around changing numbers until suddenly the blitzkreig was conducted by 180 million Germans, so please state your problems in a reasonable voice, ok? Cannot use Sig. Not Registered. Is there a reference for this number? 280,000 seems excessive.

40 times 7000?

"...an army of some 7000 Greeks, led by 300 Spartans, stood to receive the full force of the Persian army, numbering perhaps some forty times its size."

A brisson 22:26, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There are a number of references, none of them particularly reliable. I believe Herodotus tries to claim that there were two million men, that they drank entire rivers dry, blah, blah. Most historians nowdays believe that the numbers were around a quarter million or so the article is reasonable. ChrisU 08:05, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The Spartan soldiers had mastered the phalanx formation

I really don't like this sentence at all..

One: it's misleading - it makes phalanx formations seem like a tactic particular to the Spartans, which is untrue. Phalanx warfare was a hallmark of all Greek warfare of the time, and had been for centuries. Also, I'm not debating that the Spartans were masters of phalanx warfare, but the other city states of the time were far from novices either; Athens in particular had a long history of giving Sparta a run for its money.

Two: The sentence feels clumsy and breaks the flow of the narrative. I'm not questioning that more emphasis needs to be placed on the fact the the Greeks met the enemy in a phalanx, it was the major reason that so much carnage was inflicted and that the Greeks lasted as long as they did against a so much larger force, but I think that that needs to be done elsewhere.

This article is reaching a level of maturity that makes me hesitant to arbitrarily change it without checking to see if others agree with me. Unless anyone raises any major objections, I'll take this sentence out and perhaps see if I can work in a better mention of phalanges elsewhere.

---Phalanx.

At the time, the Spartans were the best. The only other armies that could (if matched) hold their own agianst them (from what I read) were thebes, and macadonia. Although they were of differnt time periods completely.

Battles compared to Thermopylae

I want to remove the "see also" section here because every country has its lists of battles which it likes to compare to Thermopylae and I don't think that such as list is enlightening. Unless there is realy strong objections I shall remove the two in the see also section. If there is to be one (sigh!) then I suggest that it is kept to one per country. --Philip Baird Shearer 07:21, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

• Battle of the Alamo Texan/American
• Battle of the Tennis Court British/Indian (turning point of Burma campaing).

Yeah, I wasn't sure what to do with those, but I don't think they are particularly relevant either. Adam Bishop 16:49, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

removed See also

• Battle of Wizna
• Battle of Zadwórze

--Philip Baird Shearer 13:22, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Other various issues

This page probably will eventually need disambiguation from the other Battles of Thermopylae (notably that of 279 BC). I might have a go at writing a page about the 279 BC battle when I have a moment free.

Secondly, about the epitaph:

ἀγγέλλειν should read ἀγγέιλον (angeilon), if I can remember my Greek correctly. A quick check on Perseus should solve this.

Not really. All the Greek history books that I've read speel this as ἀγγέλλειν (aggelein). I'll ask someone who is more proficient with ancient Greek though and post a followup here. Keramida 02:37, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

The "literal" translation isn't particularly literal either. Following the text closely, you would get:

O foreigner, tell the Lacedaemonians that here we lie, obeying those words.

ξεῖν' carries more the connotation of "foreigner" rather than "stranger" here (remember they've just lost everything North of the Isthmus of Corinth to the Persians). It definitely does NOT mean "traveller" (that would be "hodoiporos")! ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα can only mean "that here we lie". There is no relative pronoun to make it "that we who lie here" (and that would mess up the hexameter anyway). Likewise πειθόμενοι is a Present Middle Pariciple. κείνων literally means "those" not "their", although it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference here - "those" puts the emphasis more upon the words being Leonidas's, "their" attributes

Herodotus 7.228.9:

Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. (10) Λακεδαιμονίοισι μὲν δὴ τοῦτο, τῷ δὲ μάντι τόδε· Μνῆμα τόδε κλεινοῖο Μεγιστία, ὅν ποτε Μῆδοι

Σπερχειὸν ποταμὸν κτεῖναν ἀμειψάμενοι,

Miskin 16:23, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

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