Episode #227 - What is the Spartan Mirage? (Part III)

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I'd like to tell you a story about 300 Spartans.

And

no, it's not those 300 Spartans.

Believe it or not, it's a different group of 300 Spartans.

You see, about two generations before the Battle of Thermopylae made the Spartan group who fought the Persians the most famous 300 in human history, there was another battle that involved the exact same number of aristocratic Spartiate hoplite soldiers.

It's kind of amazing that this earlier Battle of 300 is not as well remembered, because it has an absolutely amazing name.

Historians call this engagement the Battle of Champions.

I just got chills.

The battle took place in the middle of the 500s BC while Sparta was expanding its power over Greece's Peloponnesian peninsula.

The Spartans had earned a reputation for having an impressive army, but they were far from unstoppable.

Indeed, many cities had resisted Spartan domination and even scored battlefield victories over the aggressive city-state.

But the Spartans were nothing if not tenacious.

They were unable to conquer and enslave the rest of the Peloponnese in the way that they had their neighbors in Messenia.

But through decades of military pressure, the Spartans were able to steadily strong-arm most nearby cities into joining their Peloponnesian League.

This league more or less turned Sparta's neighbors into vassal states.

Member cities were obliged to provide soldiers for any military engagement Sparta wished to undertake, and as a result, their foreign policy became completely dominated by Sparta.

But part of the deal was that Sparta was also obliged to protect a league member if it was threatened.

So it was vassalship, but with a touch more dignity.

Nevertheless, not all of Sparta's neighbors were enthusiastic about this arrangement.

The city that most aggressively pushed back against the complete Spartan domination of the Peloponnese was Argos, an important port city and trading center in the northeast of the peninsula.

Tensions between the two cities came to a head around the year 546 BC, when the Spartan army marched to the strategically important coastal city of Thyria and insisted that that town come into the Spartan political orbit.

With the Spartan army at the gates, this was one of those offers they couldn't refuse.

But Argus had its own designs on Thyria, and so that city mustered its own army and marched to meet the Spartans on the Thyrian plain.

What ensued was the Battle of Champions.

Now, absolutely everything about the Battle of Champions sounds like a historical myth.

Our main source for this battle is our old buddy.

Father of history, father of lies, Herodotus.

And this is one of those tales where it really feels like Herodotus is fathering some lies.

But it should be known that later writers, like Plutarch and Pausanias, also attest to the reality of the Battle of Champions.

But, you know, those guys can also be pretty unreliable.

So, who knows?

But here's what we're told.

When the army from Argus arrived at Thyria, the Spartans agreed to a parley.

In the course of negotiations, both sides agreed that they did not want to lose their entire armies.

So, they decided that each side would pick 300 of their best warriors and would have them face off in a mini-battle.

The leader for each side swore that they would abide by the result of this battle of champions.

Whichever side won the mini-battle would be respected as the victor, and the rest of the defeated army would retreat back to their home city.

So the 300 Spartans and the 300 Argives lined up and proceeded to go at each other.

Now, these 300 Spartans were obviously not the super soldiers we might expect 300 Spartans to be.

The Argives were just as good.

So good, in fact, that both armies completely destroyed one another.

After hours of fighting, only two soldiers from Argus were left standing on the field.

All 598 others appeared to be dead.

So, the Argive Hopalites left the field of battle and went back to the main body of the army to share the good news that they had won the Battle of Champions.

Little did they know that a badly wounded but still living Spartan soldier was still on the battlefield.

This was a man named Arthraides.

When the two Argive soldiers left, Arthraides got himself to his feet and started stripping the armor from the Argive corpses that were strewn around him.

He then took the armor and fashioned it into a traditional war trophy that he then dedicated to the god Zeus.

This then was presented as evidence that the Spartans had actually won the battle.

Now,

this is where our sources diverge.

The later Roman era writer, Plutarch, tells us that the ultimate outcome of the battle was decided by an apparently unbiased religious society known as the Amphictyons.

After touring the battlefield, these amphictyons determined that Orthraides' trophy proved that he was the last man standing.

and that the remaining two Argive soldiers must have fled the battlefield as a form of surrender.

So, the victory was handed to the Spartans.

Now, Herodotus, the earliest source, actually gives us a more believable story.

He tells us that after the Spartans claimed that Orthraides' trophy meant that they were the real winners, the Argives were incensed.

They had clearly won, and the Spartans had played a dirty trick by playing dead.

They obviously would not concede that the Spartans had won the battle.

So, the whole thing descended into a pitched battle between each of the full armies, the very thing that the Battle of Champions was supposed to avoid.

Over the course of the real battle, the Spartans got the upper hand.

The Argives were forced to retreat, and Thyria was brought under the Spartan yoke.

Now,

what should we make of this story?

Well, the truth in this case is deeply unclear.

As you might expect, most modern experts treat this story fairly skeptically.

The author Mike Cole, who's a popular writer on ancient military tactics, has pointed out that many Archaic-era Greek battles usually began with skirmishes between light infantry forces before the main armies formally clashed.

He believes it's possible that what may have been a prelude skirmish between Spartan and Argive auxiliary troops may have been mythologized as the battle of champions in oral tradition, a tradition that was later recorded and given the weight of history by Herodotus.

But

that is just a guess.

The truth remains unknown.

But what I find interesting is how the story of the Battle of Champions messes with the Spartan mirage.

In the Herodotus account, the Spartans act totally un-Spartan.

A group of the best Spartan warriors, 300 no less, are almost completely wiped out by some fighters from little old Argus.

The Spartans only win by trickery.

Far from nobly dying on his feet like a character from a Tertius poem, Orthraides plays Possum and then tries to steal a victory with a clever arts and crafts project.

This was not the warrior ethos the Spartans were famous for.

In this story, the Spartans are tricky double dealers who try to win on a technicality.

Perhaps that's the reason the 300 Spartans of the plain of Thyria are not the most famous 300 Spartans.

Thyria and the Battle of Champions have been more or less ignored by everyone except devoted students of archaic Greek history.

No, it's the Battle of Thermopylae that really forms the centerpiece of the Spartan mirage.

Thermopylae is one of those battles that has become bigger than its historical context.

It lives in the popular historical imagination outside of the context of the Greco-Persian wars and even the greater context of ancient Greece.

The word Thermopylae has become a synonym for heroic but doomed last stands.

It has also been held up as a parable about commitment to duty.

All those supposed Spartan virtues that we have been interrogating throughout this series were apparently on display at Thermopylae.

The Spartan king Leonidas and his 300 Spartans have been venerated as something like military saints.

This attitude was perhaps best summed up by the chair of ancient history at the University of Berlin, Eduard Meyer, in 1902, when he wrote that the Spartans' sacrifice was, quote, a shining example, showing the nation the way it had to go.

This example made men realize more deeply and more vividly than any words that the choice was to gain victory or to die with honor, end quote.

Victory or death with honor.

That is the Spartan way.

Or, you know, just fake your death, hide, and then win on a weird technicality.

You would think that the chair of ancient history at the University of Berlin would have heard of the Battle of Champions.

But jokes aside, Edward Meyer's declaration perfectly encapsulates the attitude of many generations of laconophiles, that is, lovers of all things laconic.

For them, Thermopylae was the most Spartan moment in all of Spartan history.

So, before we put our examination of the Spartan mirage to rest, we need to tangle with the hot gates.

Was Sparta's most celebrated battle as epic as we have been led to believe, or is it what author Mike Cole has called a bronze lie?

Let's see what we can find out today on our fake history.

Episode number 227:

What is the Spartan Mirange?

Part 3.

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story.

It simply must be told.

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Now, if you've not already put it together, you are currently listening to part three in a trilogy of episodes on the ancient Spartans.

If you've not listened to the first two parts, then I strongly suggest that you go back and give those a listen now.

In the first part, I did my best to introduce the concept of the Spartan Mirage, which was first defined by the French classicist François Ollier in the 1930s.

Put simply, the mirage is a bundle of myths, misconceptions, and idealizations that have affected how the ancient city of Sparta has been remembered in the centuries since the Greek classical period.

One of the cornerstones of the Spartan Mirage is a body of mythology concerning a figure called Lycurgus the Lawgiver.

According to tradition, Lycurgus was a Spartan aristocrat who gave the city its distinctive constitution and code of laws.

We're told that Lycurgus outlined the division of powers in the Spartan government, redistributed the land of Laconia, devised a system of Spartan education, and promulgated a code of laws that governed everything from how one should walk down the street to how often one should be intimate with their husband or wife.

In other words, everything that made a Spartan Spartan was supposedly set down by Lycurgus, the lawgiver, at some point in Sparta's distant past.

But as we saw, Lycurgus almost certainly did not exist.

The so-called Lycurgan Constitution was an unwritten set of directives that likely developed over the course of many centuries.

Further, the modern popular understanding of the Lycurgon Constitution and the supposed cultural practices of the Spartans have been largely shaped by the Roman writer Plutarch.

Plutarch's biography, The Life of Lycurgus, was written roughly 500 years after the peak of classical Sparta.

As a result, the text is filled with legends and distortions.

The problem is that for centuries, many people read Plutarch uncritically and simply trusted that his descriptions of Spartan culture were accurate.

They were not.

In many ways, the myth of Lycurgus helps explain the entire Spartan mirage.

It's an invented tradition that helps explain the creation of an impossible set of ideals that the real Spartans rarely lived up to.

In part two of this series, we looked at the structure of the Spartan government and reckoned with the philosopher Aristotle's many criticisms of it.

In particular, I underscored spots in Aristotle's work where he criticizes the supposedly incorruptible Spartans for having a system that was shot through with bribes and corruption.

I also busted the myth of Spartan land equality.

We saw that the story from Plutarch that tells us that each Spartiate was given an equal share of land by the state was completely out of step with the reality of classical Sparta.

The work of Spartan expert Professor Stephen Hodkinson has quite convincingly demonstrated that land was not distributed equally among Sparta's ruling class.

Some Spartans were were able to amass huge estates, while others watched their holdings diminish over the generations.

In fact, by the late classical period, wealth inequality was a huge problem in Sparta, as fewer families were able to contribute to the common mess halls.

This meant that many families lost their Spartiate status.

Fewer Spartiates meant a smaller corps of well-trained soldiers at the heart of the army.

Now, one thing that I was hoping we could dive into a bit more deeply in this series was the treatment of Sparta's slave class, known as the Helots.

Now, sadly, I could not fit my helot research into the main body of this series.

But this is the nice thing about these new bonus episodes.

I plan on getting deeper into the helots on that bonus show.

So there's another reason to tune in.

Finally, we left off by looking at the Spartan system of education known as the Agogae.

Interestingly, this part of Spartan life was better documented by our historical sources than most aspects of Spartan culture.

Much of what has been documented about the rigorous, sometimes brutal Spartan education system was likely true.

However, stories about young Spartans training and fighting wild boars and killing their favorite puppy were likely myths.

Similarly, stories about young Spartan boys needing to scavenge and steal their food have also been exaggerated.

Specifically, the story of the boy hiding a fox under his cloak and then being chewed to bits while trying to conceal his theft is almost certainly a historical myth.

Today, I want to focus on Sparta's military reputation and specifically the famous Battle of Thermopylae.

It is true that the Spartans were known to produce some of the best heavy infantry in all of Greece.

The Spartiate lifestyle meant that the elite corps of upper crust soldiers who formed the nucleus of the Spartan army were easily the best trained in the classical Greek world.

This was because in the Archaic and classical periods, the Spartans were the only Greek army who trained with any regularity.

The rest of the Greek city-states fielded armies of amateurs, most of whom had learned the basics of fighting with swords, spears, and shields, but were otherwise learning how to be soldiers on the job.

The slave-supported Spartiate lifestyle meant that Sparta's aristocratic warriors had time to practice as a group.

This meant that the Spartans could do things on the battlefield that other Greek armies struggled to do.

Not only were the Spartans particularly good in the tightly packed phalanx configuration, but they could pull off tactics that involved a higher level of coordination.

For instance, the Spartans were known to use the feigned retreat tactic.

This was where an army pretended to retreat or run away in hopes of getting the enemy to break ranks and pursue them.

Then the retreating army would sound a signal and quickly turn around and form up again, catching their disorganized pursuers by surprise.

This was a famously risky maneuver, but it could pay dividends if executed properly.

It was the kind of thing you needed to practice, and only the Spartiates had the kind of time in their day to perfect this kind of battlefield tactic.

The Greek sources are more or less unanimous in their praise of Spartan battlefield skills.

Everyone recognized that they were good.

However, the Spartan mirage would have us believe that they were unbeatable, a fighting force so much better than their Greek contemporaries that all other armies paled in comparison.

But even a cursory examination of the historical evidence demonstrates that this was not the case.

The Spartans lost just as often as they won, and they often avoided battle when they could.

Many of their greatest successes came through diplomacy rather than dominance on the battlefield, and many of their most storied battles were not necessarily Spartan victories.

The ultimate example of this is, of course, the Battle of Thermopylae.

This battle has been remembered as the ultimate example of a noble defeat.

It's hard to overstate just how much hyperbole has been used to describe this famous last stand.

In fact, the early Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria believed that the story of the sacrifice of the Spartan king Leonidas and his 300 Spartans could help early Christians better understand the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Whoa.

This historical episode has been given serious mythological significance.

But how much does the Thermopylae myth match the facts?

Well, it's about time we got into it.

So let's head back to the four hundreds BC and talk about the Greco-Persian Wars.

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The Greco-Persian wars hold an interesting place in what we call historiography.

That is, the history of history writing.

This conflict is one of the central events covered by our old buddy, the Greek historian Herodotus, in his landmark work, The Histories.

Now, as we have spoken about many times on this podcast, Herodotus is generally regarded as the first proper historian in the Western tradition.

Hence his title, Father of History, Father of Lies.

As such, the Greco-Persian wars are one of the first events to be fully historicized.

that is, researched and then reconstructed by a historian for posterity.

The importance of the Greco-Persian wars in Herodotus' writing has meant that subsequent generations were influenced into believing that this conflict represented an incredibly important moment in world history.

Because Herodotus covered it, it became a big deal.

And it certainly was a big deal for the Greeks.

The issue is that a pivotal moment in Greek society has since been blown out and celebrated as a watershed moment in the development of quote-unquote Western civilization.

But it's important to understand that the idea that Western civilization is something that is distinct and different from Eastern civilization is a concept that took centuries to develop and arguably only hardened into a commonly accepted way of conceptualizing the world in Europe's early modern period.

The West was an idea that was created through discourse.

We're talking art, literature, and of course, history writing.

That made the case that the West was a geographically ill-defined but vaguely European place that had a distinct set of values and institutions that differentiated it from the quote-unquote East.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, thinkers in the so-called European Enlightenment started to identify their values as Western values, i.e., a belief in the progress of humanity, a rational scientific approach to the world, a love of liberty, and a belief in the primacy of the individual.

The East, on the other hand, was presented as the opposite.

It was backwards, superstitious, and despotic.

Now,

Of course, we have discussed this concept before on the podcast.

It came up recently when we were discussing the Arab sieges of Constantinople.

And as always, I need to point out that this phenomenon of creating the East and West in European discourse was perhaps best described by the influential historian Edward Said in his seminal work Orientalism.

I'm bringing it up again because the Greco-Persian wars, and in particular, the Battle of Thermopylae, are often understood through this ideological prism.

This war has been characterized as the first major conflict between East and West and has been held up as a moment where the Western values of freedom and individuality triumphed over oppressive Eastern slave drivers.

This was certainly the message sent by those revolutionary era French plays about Thermopylae that I mentioned in part one.

As you might remember, the Spartan warriors in those plays declared things like, quote, insane despots, you will finally know that a few free men are enough to fight and conquer a whole world of slaves, end quote.

This meta-narrative also runs through Frank Miller's 300 and its subsequent film adaptation.

In 300, the Persians are presented as an unthinking mob, urged forward either by mindless religious fanaticism or the slave master's whip.

In the film, Xerxes, the Persian king, is the ultimate Eastern stereotype.

He's decadent, wears effeminate jewelry, is obsessed with royal comforts, and seeks to dominate all free people.

Meanwhile, the Spartans are cast as a squad of rugged individuals, free men content with simple pleasures, bound together by a code of honor who would rather die on their feet than live on their knees.

Or, as Gerard Butler's King Leonidas memorably says in the film,

The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant,

that few stood against many,

and before this battle was over,

that even a god-king can bleed.

It's a good line.

But what I'm arguing is that this entire way of perceiving both the Greco-Persian Wars and the Battle of Thermopylae is deeply misleading and totally out of step with the historical facts.

First, let's dispense with the idea that the Greeks and the Spartans were Westerners and the Persians were Easterners.

This is not how either side perceived of themselves.

In the 400s BC, the Greeks did not see themselves as having more in common with other Europeans than they did with people living to their east.

Europe had barely coalesced as a geographic idea in that era.

In fact, key to this whole conflict were the Ionians, culturally Greek people living in Asia.

The classical Greeks did not conceive of there being a monolithic West that they were defending, because as far as they were concerned, the people living to the north and west of them were the worst kind of barbarians.

They had considerably more in common with people living in what is today modern Turkey.

By the same token, the Persians did not perceive Greece as a distinct western state.

From the Persian perspective, the Greeks were a troublesome collection of city-states on the fringes of their empire, an empire that bordered an untold number of small states on all sides.

It's also clear that the Greco-Persian wars were not as big a deal for the Persians as they were for the Greeks.

The Persians did not see this as an apocalypse clash of civilizations.

For them, it was an expedition meant to punish some city-states that had supported a rebellion.

Now, it would be easy to get lost in all the details of the Greco-Persian wars here.

And I really want to keep the focus on the Thermopylae myths.

So forgive me if I move quickly through some things here, but I want to keep us on track.

The Greco-Persian Wars came about as the result of a series of rebellions that broke out on the fringes of Persia's vast empire as the 500s turned into the 400s BC.

Significantly for our story, a number of these rebellions happened in the culturally Greek city-states within the Persian Empire known as the Ionian cities, which are located in what is today western Turkey.

These rebellions had been supported by a handful of other Greek cities, most significantly Athens and Eritrea.

Athens and Eritrea not only supported the independence of these Ionian cities, they actively took the fight to the Persians.

In the year 498, troops from those Greek cities managed to capture and sack the Persian regional capital of Sardis.

I think it's worth underscoring the fact that Athens and Eritrea were instrumental in the burning of a Persian city.

Arguably, it was the Greeks who poked the bear at the start of this conflict.

Often, the Persian advance into mainland Greece is characterized as a megalomaniacal quest by despotic rulers who coveted the lands of the Greeks and despised the independent Greek spirit.

But in reality, the primary goal of the Persian invasions was to punish those states who had supported the Ionians and burned Sardis.

Now, it's worth asking, was that all just an excuse for the Persians to do do some conquering?

Well, our guy Herodotus thought so, and said as much when he wrote, quote, These two cities, Athens and Eritrea, were the excuse for the expedition.

But the true intention was to conquer as many Greek cities as possible along the way.

The people of Thassos found this out the hard way.

They had done nothing against the king of Persia, and the island was nonetheless taken by naval force.

⁇

So there is some debate around what the Persian war goals truly were.

Obviously, the Persians were looking to conquer what they could.

What's less clear is if they ever intended to roll over all of Greece.

It seems to me like if they could have, they probably would have,

but that was not the stated intention of the whole campaign.

And if the Athenians and Eritreans had not burned Sardis, it's highly likely that the Persians would have never marched on the Greek mainland at all.

Remember, the Achaemenid Persian Empire of this period was a massive multi-ethnic state that stretched all the way from the borders with India through what we today consider the Middle East and down into Egypt.

The Greeks were certainly a nuisance, but there was nothing particularly attractive about the rocky and barely fertile soils of the Peloponnesian and Attic peninsulas.

The first proper Persian expedition against Greece came in the 490s and was directed by the Persian king Darius I.

But this first invasion only got as far as the northern border with Macedonia, or Macedonia, if you like.

Turns out there's more than one way to pronounce that.

The northern Thracians and Macedonians submitted to Darius and became his vassals.

But a larger invasion further south was stopped by a brutal storm that wrecked a huge contingent of Persian transports while they were at sea with hundreds of troops.

Still, this initial show of force was enough to spook most of the Greek city-states.

In 491, King Darius sent ambassadors across Greece to get the formal submission of as many cities as possible.

A show of submission was traditionally done through a ritual gift of earth and water to the Persians.

And this is where we get one of the more famous stories about the Spartans.

You see, Herodotus tells us that these ambassadors were sent everywhere except Athens and Sparta, because, on an earlier occasion, his ambassadors had met with a horrible fate when they visited those cities.

Apparently, in Sparta, after asking for the ritual gift of earth and water, the Persian ambassador was thrown into a well and quote bidden to obtain their earth and water for the king from this location.

End quote.

I know you know this moment.

This is the famous kick into the pit.

This is Sparta!

Now In the pop culture version of this story, this kick is presented as an especially Spartan thing to do.

The tough guy defiance in this moment fits perfectly with the Spartan mirage.

But it should be noted that Herodotus tells us that the Athenians did the exact same thing.

They also threw the Persian ambassadors into a pit.

Now, The fact that the exact same thing happened in two places does raise a few red flags concerning the truth of this story, but I think it's notable that even in the ancient sources, throwing ambassadors into a pit was not presented as a particularly Spartan thing.

According to Herodotus, the Athenians were just as intense.

Still, the defiance of Athens and Sparta meant that Darius came back to Greece in force a few years later.

This culminated in the famous showdown at Marathon.

Now, Marathon is a fascinating battle in its own right, but unfortunately we can't get too bogged down in the details of it here, because the Spartans famously sat it out.

You might remember from our series on the Olympics that as Darius' forces began to gather at the plains of Marathon, the legendary runner Phydipides was dispatched to Sparta from Athens to call for aid.

But when he arrived, the Spartan leadership said that they would love to help, but they simply could not because they were in the midst of an important religious festival called the Carnea.

It would have been deeply impious for the Spartans to leave on campaign campaign at that moment.

But once the festival was finished, certainly they would march to Athens' aid.

So,

how should we interpret this?

Why did the Spartans not fight at Marathon?

Well, we could take the Spartans at their word and trust that they were just too damn pious to consider defying the gods during the Carnea.

But most scholars have a hard time buying this.

This is because the future Battle of Thermopylae also happened during the Carnea,

and on that occasion, the Spartans were able to make an exception and fight the Persians.

The Spartan choice to keep their army at home may have been out of fear of a helot revolt.

Herodotus mentions in another section that Sparta's helots had been emboldened by the arrival of the Persians, who they may have seen as liberators from the Spartan yoke.

But so little is said about that in the sources, it's hard to pin that down as a certainty.

Spartan expert Philip Metisic offers his own interpretation, writing, quote, ideally, what would suit the Spartans best was for the Athenians to fight the Persians to a standstill on their own, and for both sides to get severely mauled in the Fracas.

Then, the Spartans could bring up their army, take on the Persians while they were licking their wounds, and hopefully defeat them.

Therefore, the Spartans would appear as the liberators of Greece, and their Athenian rivals would be crippled.

⁇

That interpretation makes a lot of sense to me.

This was likely a calculated bit of strategy meant to best serve Spartan interests.

But yet again, this punctures the Spartan mirage.

The myth would have us believe that the Spartans were the implacable anti-Persian defenders of Greece.

They were supposed to charge bravely into the breach and not shy away from a fight.

Spartans were not supposed to be the type of people who let Athenians do the fighting for them.

But if we go with the interpretation of Philip Metisik and many others, that is exactly what they did during the Battle of Marathon.

But amazingly, the Athenians scored an unlikely victory at Marathon.

Despite the fact that they were enormously outnumbered by the Persians, potentially 10 to 1, the Athenians not only put up an admirable fight, they won the day, completely blunting the Persian invasion.

How did they do this?

Well, most experts believe that this came down to Greek equipment and tactics.

The Greek hoplites were better armored than the more lightly outfitted Persian forces.

The thick Greek shields also proved incredibly effective at defending against the more lightly constructed Persian arrows.

Now this was significant because the main Persian battle tactic involved softening up the enemy with arrow fire before moving in for the kill.

The strong Greek armor and thick shields provided excellent protection against the Persian arrows.

This meant that the Persian archers did considerably less damage than they were used to.

Finally, the phalanx formation of tightly packed Greek hoplites protecting one another with their large shields and attacking with their spears was new to the Persians, who were at a loss at the best way to counter it.

Marathon, in many ways, set the stage for Thermopylae, because it demonstrated that an outnumbered Greek force could win against the Persians.

This was doubly true if the Greeks could force that battle into a location where the phalanx was particularly effective, and the Persians were less able to use their cavalry.

From the Greek perspective, Marathon was an absolutely massive military, cultural, and historical event.

For the Athenians, it would be remembered for generations as an identity-defining moment.

For the Persians, Marathon was an annoying setback.

The army retreated back to Asia, but plans were quickly made to return in force.

But the next twist of Persian history I think helps us to right-size the importance of the Greeks to the Persian Empire at that moment.

You see, Darius returned returned to Asia and started building an even larger army with which he hoped to punish Athens and her allies.

But right then, a revolt broke out in Egypt, and that immediately became the Persian priority.

All the resources of this massive army were redirected to Egypt.

because Egypt was a rich and strategically important part of the empire.

Keeping Egypt in the fold was considerably more important to the Persians than conquering the Greeks.

But then, another twist.

While marching to quell the revolt in Egypt, the Persian king Darius I

died and was succeeded by his son Xerxes.

Now, experts will of course litigate the many differences between the reigns of Darius and Xerxes.

But what matters for us is that Xerxes' policy towards the Greek city-states was virtually identical to his father's.

Those city-states that had aided the Ionian rebels and burned Sardis needed to be punished.

And any conquest that could happen along the way was a welcome bonus.

Okay, so let's pause here.

And when we come back, we will get into the second phase of the Greco-Persian War and discuss the battle that the Spartans actually showed up for.

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And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

What a performance by Team California.

The power is ours.

Everything from the Battle of Marathon through the Egyptian revolt to the refocusing of Persian attention on the Greeks took a solid decade.

In that time, the usually fractious Greek city-states, who had not already submitted to the Persians, banded together in something that became known as the Hellenic League.

Or

did they?

Herodotus tells us that Athens and Sparta managed to set aside their many gripes with one another and came together to lead a loose alliance of Greek states to resist the renewed Persian threat.

However, I should point out that some scholars like Adrian Tronson have argued that the Hellenic League is actually a historical myth.

She argues that the real resistance came from Sparta's already forged Peloponnesian League, with Athens joining in as was necessary during the peak of the crisis.

She is argued that Herodotus may have exaggerated Athens' role in the group, and as such may have invented the Hellenic League.

This would have been part of the historian's larger project of forging a pan-Hellenic or Greek identity.

So whether or not this league was truly pan-Hellenic is up for debate.

But it does seem clear that Xerxes' invasion prompted a new level of Greek cooperation.

By the year 480 BC, the Persian army was on the move, and the Greeks started debating the best way to blunt their progress.

Now, as in the first invasion, the Greeks were helped by geography.

An army moving from the north to the south of Greece needed to either brave the treacherous mountain passes of the Olympus mountain range, or they had to take their chances moving their army by sea.

And this brings us to an important part of the Thermopyla myth, and that is the size and composition of Xerxes' Persian army.

Herodotus famously wrote that after Xerxes crossed the Hellespont, that's the narrow strait that divides Europe from Asia, the king's army drank the nearby Ichiodorus River dry.

Now,

even other ancient writers seem to understand that that was a bit of scene-setting hyperbole.

Is it even possible for millions of people to drink a river dry?

Do rivers work that way?

That colorful description of the Persian army usually gets paired with a comment found in Plutarch, where a Spartan soldier complains that, quote, because of the arrows of the barbarians, it is impossible to see the sun, end quote.

Yes, apparently the Persians had so many archers that a volley of arrows could block out the sun.

Plutarch then gives the Spartan king Leonidas the quippy little reply that, quote, won't it be nice then if we shall have shade in which to fight them?

End quote.

Once again, all of the best color comes from our latest and least reliable source.

But all of this raises the question of how big the Persian army truly was, especially considering that the myth of Thermopylae hinges on how just 300 Spartans fought off an impossibly huge Persian force.

Our ancient sources provide us with wildly different numbers for the size of Xerxes' army, all of which are roundly dismissed by modern experts.

On the high end, we have Herodotus, who claims that there were as many as 2.6 million military personnel in the Persian army, accompanied by an equivalent number of support personnel.

That number is bonkers, bananas, crazy, even by modern standards.

By way of comparison, the army that Napoleon used to invade Russia, the Grand Army, that was at most 600,000 soldiers strong.

The force that Germany used to invade Belgium and France in World War I

was around 750,000 soldiers strong.

So, 2.6 million soldiers in 480 BC?

I mean, forget it.

Ancient logistics simply could not sustain a force like that.

Even sophisticated modern supply lines would strain to sustain that kind of an army in the field.

With that in mind, we should also write off the the Greek poet Simonides, who tells of an impossible 4 million Persian soldiers.

Modern scholarly estimates are that Xerxes invaded Greece with between 120,000 and 300,000 soldiers, based on what ancient supply lines could handle.

Now, Even if we go with the smaller number, this is still a staggering force.

In an era when most states had a hard time putting 10,000 soldiers together in one place, an army of over 100,000 is a notable feat.

The Persians still had a huge force,

but it was considerably less than the millions described by Herodotus.

The next thing we should ask is, was this an army of slaves?

As I mentioned earlier, in popular retellings of the Thermopylae story, the Persians are usually presented as slave masters.

It's assumed that most of this giant army was made up of slaves who were forced to fight by violent overseers.

But This image is out of step with the facts.

The Persian force was a multi-ethnic army made up of at least 40 different distinct cultural groups who had been absorbed into the Persian Empire.

While these people had certainly been conscripted, for the most part, these were not what we would think of as slave soldiers.

In other words, these were not people who were owned by the king or other Persian nobles.

These were mostly free people.

Unless, of course, you consider conscription to be a form of slavery, and I leave that to you to figure out for yourself.

While slavery certainly existed in the Persian Empire, it was not particularly common.

The Persians were known to enslave prisoners of war, but household work and agricultural labor was done overwhelmingly by free people.

There were certainly slaves among the Persian army, but they were likely used as porters and servants rather than soldiers.

So we shouldn't think of Xerxes' army as slave-free, because there were definitely slaves in the mix, but it would be wrong to characterize it as a slave army.

Or, let's put it this way.

The Persian army was no more of a slave army than the Greek force.

Let's not forget that the Spartans were some of the ancient world's most brutal slave masters.

Herodotus tells us that many helots were forced to fight alongside their masters at Thermopylae.

I would argue that the Spartans were considerably more invested in the institution of slavery than Xerxes Persians.

This then brings us to the Greek force.

Now, of course, we have our myth.

The story goes that when word reached the rest of Greece that the river-drinking Persian army had crossed the Hellespont, the resolve of the Hellenic League was shaken.

The only Greeks brave enough to face certain death in defense of their homeland were a small contingent of 300 Spartans led by their king, Leonidas.

And so it was that 300 men stared down an army of millions.

This is completely wrong, and even manages to distort the already distorted ancient sources.

The story of the 300, of course, has its roots in Herodotus.

Now, it's kind of strange that Sparta, which was known to regularly field an army of thousands, only chose to send 300 men to Thermopylae.

Well, Herodotus tells us that the looming Persian invasion was once again complicated by bad timing for the Greeks.

First, the Olympics were on.

This meant that many of the Greek city-states were disinclined to participate in any battles while the sacred athletic competition was underway.

Secondly, back in Sparta, it was once again Carnea season, that sacred festival that had provided the excuse for the Spartans not to fight at Marathon.

Man, that Carnea just keeps on falling on the worst possible days, doesn't it?

But this time, the rules for fighting during the Carnea were loosened, given the nature of the threat.

Herodotus also tells us that the king himself, Leonidas, advocated for the Spartans to fight, albeit with a small force that would nod to the city's religious obligations.

Now, perhaps I should say a word on Leonidas.

I've been throwing his name around a lot, but we haven't really introduced him.

Leonidas was a king from the Aegeid line, who had only gotten the job after the death of his notorious brother, Cleomenes.

Cleomenes has gone down as one of Sparta's most erratic and frankly crazy kings.

Leonidas is presented in the sources as the opposite of Cleomenes.

If his brother was rash and irreverent, Leonidas was sober and pious.

Now, I can't help but notice that this tale of two brothers seems to fit quite quite nicely within Sparta's larger mythical twins motif.

Did that affect how the historians told the tale?

I don't know.

I just couldn't help but notice that it was right there in front of me.

It's also worth noting that the real Leonidas was nothing like the guy Gerard Butler played in the movie 300, a Schveldt 30-something in peak physical condition.

The real Leonidas was in his 60s, an age that technically made him too old for Spartan military service.

By Spartan standards, he was an old man, an old man who never expected to be king.

Now, Herodotus also gives us the idea that Leonidas and his 300 Spartans knew that they were embarking on a suicide mission.

This was largely due to an ominous oracle that had come from Delphi, which Herodotus tells us said, quote, Hear your fate, O dwellers in Sparta of the wide spaces.

Either your famed great town must be sacked by Perseus' sons, the Persians,

or if that be not, the whole land of Lacedaemon shall mourn the death of a king of the house of Heracles.

⁇

That was a rarely unambiguous prophecy.

Either a king will die at Thermopylae or Sparta will be sacked.

It's so unambiguous, in fact, that many modern experts have guessed that the specifics of the oracle were likely invented after the battle to better fit the facts of the encounter.

Still, Herodotus tells us that this ominous oracle, paired with the legitimately long odds of success, inspired Leonidas to pick only 300 men who had already fathered sons.

So, if and when they died in battle, their family lines would not be extinguished.

But the idea that there were only 300 Spartans at Thermopylae who knew that they were doomed is contradicted by a whole raft of other sources.

For instance, the later historian Diodorus Siculus tells us that Leonidas led a contingent of 1,000 Lacedaemonians, of which 300 were Spartiate peers.

So, who were these other 700?

Likely this was a mixed force of Perio Koi, Sparta's free working class, and Helots, Sparta's slaves.

Later in his book, Herodotus makes mention of Helots who died while at Thermopylae.

So, it seems likely that the Spartiates brought along their slaves.

Exactly how many slaves each Spartiate brought with them is unknown.

We know that at the later Battle of Plataea, each Spartiate was responsible for bringing seven helots with him.

If the same was true for Thermopylae, there could have been as many as 2,100 helots fighting with the 300 Spartiates.

But that cannot be confirmed.

But perhaps more significantly, Herodotus tells his reader of a huge force of Greek allies who fought alongside the Spartans at this battle.

They were not on their own.

According to Herodotus, the Spartans were supported by 500 Tygeans, 500 Mantineans, 120 Orchomenians, 1,000 Arcadians, 400 Corinthians, 200 Philasians, 80 Mycenaeans, 400 Thebans, 700 Thespians, 1,000 Phocians, and 1,000 Locrians.

So even if we just use Herodotus' numbers, there were 6,200 Greeks at Thermopylae.

If we accept Diodorus Siculus' numbers, we get over 7,000 Greek soldiers at Thermopylae.

If you favor the big count for the helots, there were over 8,000 fighting men at that battle.

So let's bust a big myth right here.

This battle has been presented as 2 million Persians versus 300 Spartans.

It was more like 200,000 Persians versus 7,000 allied Greeks, most of whom were not Spartan.

The Battle of Marathon had proved that an army of around 9,000 Greeks could win against a Persian force of over 100,000.

And this time at Thermopylae, the Greeks were able to choose the best possible geographic location for a battle.

The slow progress of Xerxes' massive army meant that the Hellenic Hellenic League had time to strategize about exactly where they were going to make their stand.

The very size of Xerxes' army was, ironically, its greatest weakness.

If that army didn't keep moving, it would run out of food, as it exhausted everything that could be robbed or scavenged in a particular area.

The longer it stayed in one spot, the more vulnerable it was.

The Greek strategy was to pin this massive army down in one of the twisty mountain passes one needed to take to move from the north into southern Greece, or to force the Persians onto their ships and make them contend with the treacherous Aegean Sea and the recently beefed up Athenian navy.

An earlier plan to face the Persians in Thessaly was abandoned, and thanks to some clever maneuvering, the Greeks were able to force a showdown at the Pass of Thermopylae.

Thermopylae roughly translates as the hot gates, and were so named for the nearby hot springs in the area.

But the hot gates was essentially a mountain pass between two large cliffs that opened up to the northeast coast of Greece.

That pass led into the interior and the rest of the Greek mainland.

Now the fact that the Greek allies were able to push the Persians towards this particular pass was a bit of a coup because

it was exceptionally defensible.

The pass of the hot gates was only about 50 yards or 50 meters across, and according to Herodotus, at its thinnest point it narrowed to being only as wide as an ox cart.

This pass was also protected by a wall.

This meant that far from being an obvious suicide mission, Thermopylae seemed like the kind of place that could be defended by a small force.

The Persians' massive numbers, even if we give them the large estimate of around 300,000 troops, would not matter in such a tight pass.

From this perspective, 7,000 Greek soldiers should have been more than enough to hold the hot gates.

In fact, it seems that the Greeks did not expect Thermopylae to be much of a land battle.

This is evidenced by the fact that the overall leader of the Spartan and allied forces at Thermopylae was not with the land army.

He was positioned at sea with a fleet of ships, most of which were supplied by Athens.

They were positioned at the end of a nearby strait by a town called Artemisium.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

Wait, the Spartan king Leonidas was actually at sea?

There's a twist.

Well,

no.

The truth is that the Spartan king Leonidas was not the supreme commander of the Greeks at Thermopylae.

That was actually the Spartan naval commander, a man named Eurobiades.

The fact that overall command was placed with the commander of the fleet and not the land army suggests that the Spartans believed that this battle was going to be decided at sea.

They assumed that that the Persians would not be able to take the pass and would likely try to move their army by sea after having been frustrated.

So, this was not a suicide mission.

The Greeks had a good strategy that they likely believed would work.

We're told that when the Greeks arrived, they re-fortified the wall at Thermopylae and waited for the Persians.

And once again, we get a couple colorful stories.

We're told that when the Persians arrived, a scout was sent forward to suss out the Greek numbers.

There he saw both the rebuilt wall and also a group of Spartiates working out in the nude and combing their characteristically long flowing hair.

When Xerxes was told about this, he was apparently amazed by how nonchalant this tiny force was was being in the face of such a massive Persian army.

It was then explained to him by a Spartan informer in his ranks that these grooming rituals were a Spartan custom before war, and that these men he was seeing were the most fearsome fighters in all of Greece.

Now, once again, this scene is a key part of the Spartan mirage.

The Spartans are presented as these unfussed badasses whose pre-battle ritual is so chill it spooks the king of the Persians.

Now, there's a good chance that this story is just some classic Herodotus color, but it could also be read as more evidence that the Spartans did not think that they were totally doomed.

We also get another pre-battle story that has become especially important to Sparta's modern admirers on the far right of the political spectrum.

The story goes that before the battle commenced, a message was sent from Xerxes to Leonidas, demanding that the Spartans and their allies lay down their weapons.

To this, Leonidas supposedly replied in typically terse, laconic style, Molan Labe,

which in Greek translates to come,

take them.

This phrase has gone on to be adopted by various gun rights groups and some far-right militias in the United States and Europe.

Now, the parallel is easy to draw.

If you want these weapons, just try to come and take them.

But interestingly enough, this particular quip is almost certainly a historical myth.

How do we know?

This story does not appear in Herodotus.

And Herodotus loves stuff like this.

If this story existed during Herodotus' time, most experts have a hard time believing he would omit it.

He loves a pithy comeback.

His work is full of them.

This story comes to us from Plutarch, the source for so many of the historical myths we've looked at in this series.

As I've said countless times now, Plutarch was writing 500 years after the fact in the Roman era.

This story is likely a colorful legend that developed between the time of Herodotus and the time of Plutarch.

Also, Plutarch's story has Leonidas writing his response in a letter, which, you have to admit, admit, is considerably less badass than imagining him saying, come take them, to the face of a Persian messenger.

But I'm glad we get to take this one away from the far-right militias.

Molan Labe is a historical myth.

If you're feeling brave, feel free to pass that along the next time you see someone waving a Molan Labe flag.

Actually, don't do that.

Keep your distance.

I don't want my people getting hurt out there.

Now for the battle itself.

As for the details, well, for that we have to rely almost exclusively on Herodotus.

Frankly, he doesn't tell us too much.

He begins by telling his reader that even before the battle began, a massive storm whipped up and sank hundreds of Persian ships off the coast of Thermopylae.

This greatly evened the odds between the Persian and Athenian navies.

This weather-related disaster gave Xerxes an even greater impetus to try and break through the hot gates.

Herodotus tells us that for three straight days the Persians tried and failed to make any progress against the Spartans and their allies.

They held the gates.

On day two of this encounter, the Spartans even used their sneaky feigned retreat maneuver, which Herodotus tells us momentarily got Xerxes excited before the Spartans turned as a group and cut through their disorganized pursuers.

On the third day, the Spartans apparently held their own against 10,000 of the king's elite troops known as immortals.

Now again, this can sound incredible, but when you remember that the Greeks likely had 7,000 troops, a wall, better armor, and a highly defensible position, this no longer sounds so wild.

Meanwhile, at sea, the Persians and the Allied Greek navy fought each other to a stalemate.

Luckily for the Greeks, a large contingent of Athenian ships were able to safely retreat and would fight another day.

Then came the Great Betrayal.

Herodotus tells us that a local Greek man named Ephialtes presented himself to the King of Kings, saying that for a price, he would show the Persians another path through the mountains.

This would allow the Persians to outflank the Spartans and their allies and attack them from the rear, making Thermopylae indefensible.

Those of you who have seen the movie 300 or read the graphic novel might know that in those tellings, Ephialtes is portrayed as a monstrously deformed Spartan who was rejected by his countrymen because of his disabilities.

This is used to give his treachery a bit more of a poetic twist.

Isn't it ironic that the Spartans who supposedly destroyed all disabled children were undone by a disabled child?

You know how it goes.

But you should know that none of that is in the historical sources.

And believe me, if Herodotus could tell you a tale so rich in irony, he would.

In fact, some modern experts question the historical historical existence of any Ephialtes.

For instance, ancient military author Mike Cole points out that the Persian army typically enlisted huge teams of locals to act as guides and scouts when they were in unknown territory.

He thinks it's more likely that the typical Persian scouting protocols discovered the pass around Thermopylae, rather than it being revealed by one treacherous Greek.

Either way, the Persians found the pass and managed to turn the flank of the Spartans.

When word reached the Greeks that the Persians were now approaching from a new direction, Herodotus tells us that many of the Spartan allies fled.

Other later tellings have it that Leonidas graciously told the Greek allies to retreat while he and his 300 Spartans would stay and fight.

Hopefully this would slow down the advancing Persian army so that the escaping Greek fighters might be able to fight another day.

This rearguard action may have also helped Athens and the other cities of central Greece evacuate before the Persians arrived to sack their cities.

This final act of self-sacrifice often gets presented as the ultimate expression of Spartan military virtue.

Leonidas and the 300 stayed and fought when they could have ran because honor and the code of Lycurgus demanded as much of them.

In the popular imagination, this is the historical moment where all the myths about the Spartans were proven to be true.

Now, interestingly, no one denies that the Spartans stayed behind and died at Thermopylae that day.

They did.

Archaeologists have found the arrowheads that likely finished them on the hill where they made their last stand.

But the Spartan mirage would have us believe that in this moment they were doing something that no other Greeks had the bravery to do.

And that is simply not true.

First, let's remember that the Spartans only sent a token force to Thermopylae.

They did not commit their full army.

They sent only 300 Spartiates, supported by perhaps 700 more Periokoi and helots.

300 men, I will remind you, who were deemed to be the most expendable of all the Spartiates.

Secondly, according to Herodotus, the Spartans were not the only ones who chose to stay and fight that day.

300 soldiers from Thebes fought alongside them, and 700 men from the small city-state of Thespis also fought to the last man.

The Thespians are particularly interesting because their history has more than one example of their army making a desperate last stand where every last fighter was killed.

The ancient sources tell us of two other occasions where the thespians committed themselves to a thermopyla-like last stand.

So, arguably, this kind of desperate rearguard action was really more of a thespian thing than it was a Spartan thing.

In fact, it's possible that the Spartans were influenced into staying behind because they knew that was what the thespians would do.

That group of 700 was not going to leave the field of battle.

The Spartans may have been shamed into following suit.

Now, all of that, of course, is pure speculation, but it's worth considering.

With that in mind, it's criminal that the Spartans have been given all the glory and honor for the final moments of Thermopylae.

Justice for the Thespians.

Then there's the question of what Thermopylae actually achieved.

The myth would have us believe that Thermopylae slowed the Persian advance enough that Athens had time to evacuate.

The doomed Spartans sold their lives so that the Greeks might fight another day.

But

that isn't really true.

At best, Thermopylae slowed the Persian advance by four days.

The Persians forced their way into Greece and proceeded to raise the countryside.

They got the submission of nearly every Greek city-state north of the Peloponnese, and they sacked and burned Athens.

In this way, the main goal of the Persian invasion was achieved.

Thermopyla didn't really change anything.

The author Mike Cole goes so far as to call the whole event the speed bump at Thermopylae.

The real turning point for the Greeks came later with their naval victory at Salamis, and that was largely an Athenian triumph.

By dealing a severe blow to the Persian navy, that victory made it extremely challenging for Xerxes to continue to supply his giant army in Greece.

It was the Greek victory at Salamis, paired with the fact that Xerxes had already achieved his main goal of punishing Athens, that contributed to his decision to pull the main force of his army out of Greece.

But despite the fact that Thermopylae was a Spartan defeat that did little to affect the overall outcome of the Greco-Persian War, it has been remembered as the most heroic last stand in all of history.

The memorable description of the battle provided by Herodotus went on to be combined with that larger body of Spartan myth that we have explored throughout this series.

It all fused together around the time of Plutarch to create the Spartan mirage that persists to this day.

In many ways, our misremembering of Thermopylae is the Spartan mirage in miniature.

It's based on something real.

It is true that 300 Spartans died in an admirable but doomed rearguard action.

But that fact has been buttressed by tales of oracles, stories of badass one-liners, and exaggerated army headcounts.

The popular understanding of Thermopylae also ignores many other pertinent but complicating facts.

The Spartans were late to the fight with the Persians, and when it came time to show their worth, they only sent a token force.

At Marathon, the Athenians had demonstrated that Greek armor and hoplite tactics gave the Greeks an edge against their more lightly armored Persian opponents.

The Spartans' success during the first three days of Thermopylae was arguably more of a Greek hoplite thing than anything specifically Spartan.

In the end, their sacrifice was shared by those 700 thespians and 300 Thebans.

But history has not immortalized those thespians.

No high school is making the thespians their mascot, unless you're going to a drama school, and that's a very different kind of thespian.

Now, of course, the Spartan story does not end after Thermopylae.

The Spartans would play an important role in the Battle of Plataea, which would expel the final remnants of the Persian army from Greece.

The Spartans would go on to dominate the other Greek city-states after emerging victorious against Athens and her allies in the Peloponnesian War.

After that, they hit a steep decline and quickly lost the empire they so recently

But Thermopylae is what made the Spartan mirage something that endured.

It's what so fascinated the Romans, who turned Sparta into something like a living museum in the first century AD.

It's what enthralled the Renaissance humanists as they revived and translated the work of Plutarch.

It's what inspired the French revolutionaries, the Greek independence fighters, fighters, and then, darkly, the Nazis.

But what they loved was a fable.

The Spartans told themselves a story about who they should be.

This story was woven into the poems of Tertius and repeated in the myth of Lycurgus the Lawgiver.

But the Spartans only rarely lived up to those ideals.

Their society was was built on the backs of slaves, and despite their high-minded rhetoric, the Spartiates were just as greedy, power-hungry, and venial as any of their ancient Greek contemporaries.

They could also be just as cowardly.

So the next time someone tries to sell you on the idea of ideologically pure Spartan super warriors, perhaps remind them of the Hellots, the corrupt Ephors, the wealth inequality, the 700 thespians, and the dirty tricks at the Battle of Champions.

Because

this,

this is Sparta.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in one week's time for a very special bonus episode.

If you've got questions about things you heard today or at any point during this series on Sparta, please send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com with your question or comment.

And patrons, send your message through the Patreon system.

Then a week after that, we will be back with an all-new episode of Our Fake History.

And if you want to hear even more of my voice, then you should check out my appearance on a podcast called FDR's Wheelchair.

I was recently on there with those guys discussing Canadian-American relations.

Yes, if you ever wanted to hear me weigh in on the complex relationship between our two countries at this particular moment, then check me out on that podcast.

It's called FDR's Wheelchair.

As always, before we go this week, I need to give some very special shout shout-outs.

Big ups to Cassius James Dio.

Nice.

I don't think I fully appreciated the pun going on in that name the first time around.

Smashing up Cassius Dio and Ronnie James Dio is brilliant.

You're awesome.

All right.

Big ups to Freddy Castillo, to Joel Mark Harris, to Lee Nelson, to Ethan Roa,

to Timothy Richard,

to

Peter,

to Alex Lowe, to Mark Gracer,

and to Graham.

All of these folks have decided to pledge at $5

or more every month on Patreon.

So you know what that means.

They are beautiful human beings.

Thank you to everyone who pledges at every level on Patreon.

You will be getting a brand new extra episode, the long-promised Bronze Age Collapse episode within the next few weeks.

I promise this.

It is almost done.

I've finally got a little bit of time to finish it off, and I'm just really happy to have that off my plate.

I really hope you like that extra episode.

It's coming so soon.

Now, as I already said, you can send me an email anytime you want at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

You can also find me on Facebook.

You can find me on Instagram.

You can find me on TikTok.

You can find me on YouTube at our YouTube channel.

Just search for Our Fake History.

You can find me on Blue Sky at OurFake History.

I'm out there on the internet, and I love hearing from all of you.

As always, the theme music for our show comes to us from Dirty Church.

Check out more from Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember: just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, five.

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