Expert: Maria - 11/25/2007

Question
Is the idea behind fighting at Thermopylae that the Persians had to come through there, and it provided a good bottleneck through which to pick them off? The mountains reach down to the sea with only a narrow path between mountains and sea? Why couldn't the Persians go behind the mountains, to the landward side (Northern Greece had Medized)?

Answer
Hello,

Actually the Persians was obliged to go through the Thermopylae narrow pass which  linked Greece with the north, between Thessaly and Locris, and had then the sea close by  on one side, while on the other side  there were the steep cliffs of Mount Oeta which fell  sheer to the sea.

The Persian army in fact needed to proceed not so far from the  coast since it was mostly from their navy that  the Persians could receive food supply. Hence the necessity to go through the Thermopylae pass (literally, “hot gates” from hot mineral springs) which  in ancient times was used exactly as an entrance into Greece from the north, since it controlled the only road between Thessaly and Central Greece, where is Athens.

Today however this narrow coastal passage which existed in antiquity did not exist anymore as  silt accumulation has gradually widened the once-narrow pass so that the coastline is not so close to the mountain like in 480 BC, when Xerxes' fleet of Persian ships sailed along the coastline from northern Greece into the Gulf of Malia on the eastern Aegean Sea towards the mountains at Thermopylae, while the army proceeded by land.

As for Northern Greece, it had not been so “medized “, though some ‘poleis’ (city-states) had become Persian sympathizers.

To conclude it was an unavoidable choice  that of passing through the Thermopylae where the Greeks however could have repelled the Persians, if it hadn't been for a Greek traitor, Efialtes, who showed the Persians a secret passage to the Hellenic flanks.

Best regards,
Maria