Today’s athletes have nothing on the ancients
Two and a half thousand years ago the cities of Greece faced the greatest crisis in their history. The invasion force led by Xerxes, the King of Persia, in 480 BC was on a stupefying scale. Europe would witness nothing to rival it until 1944, and the summer of D-Day. The best chance of keeping the Great King at bay, it seemed to the Greek high command, was to occupy the narrow pass of Thermopylae, where the terrain would serve to neutralise the Persian weight of numbers.
