TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 519
existence, or even cripple the fighting-power, of a Lacedaemonian Com-
monwealth whose combatant strength was estimated to have been, at
this time, about eight thousand Spartiates, all as good soldiers as the
three hundred, without counting the fighting men from the perioecic
Lacedaemonian communities, who were 'good enough soldiers, even
though they mig;ht not be the Spartiates* equals'.1 As for the future of
the Lacedaemonian body politic, the Lacedaemonian Government were
said to have received an oracle from Delphi assuring them that, in the
current war with the Achaemenian Empire, Lacedaemon would not be
wiped out by the enemy if a King of Sparta were to forfeit his life, and
this was afterwards supposed to have been one of the decisive considera-
tions in Leonidas' mind when he took his decision to stand fast at Ther-
mopylae and die there.3 Leonidas and the rest of the three hundred thus
believed, on the day on which they went to their deaths, that, if they did
lose their lives, there would infallibly still be a Sparta in being to receive
the news that they had died in carrying out their countrymen's orders;
and this is, of course, the theme of the Cean poet Simonides' immortally
ambiguous couplet.3 They could also feel sure that these surviving
countrymen of theirs would not forget either their deed or their names.4
The self-sacrifice of Leonidas and his three hundred in the year 480
B.C.5 was thus rational, as well as heroic, under the technological con-
ditions in which War was waged in that year and at any later date down

* See the words that Herodotus puts into the mouth of the exiled Spartan King
Damaratus, who was serving on Xerxes' staff, in Book VII. chap. 234.

2 Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 330.

3 Quoted by Herodotus in Book VII, chap. 228.

4 Some thirty or forty years after the event a complete list of the names of the three
hundred was obtained at Sparta by Herodotus (see Book VII, chap. 224).

s G. B. Grundy, the distinguished Modern Western historian of The Great Persian
War (London 19.01, Murray), argues, in his chapter on, Thermopylae (pp. 257-317),
that, -when Leonidas, after receiving the intelligence that his position had been turned
by an enemy force, took his decision to continue to hold his ground, between the'moun-
tains and the sea, with the Lacedaemonian, Theban, and Thespian contingents of his
own force, amounting to rather more than one half of his total effectives, he was not
wittingly and deliberately sacrificing his men's lives together with his own, but was
dividing his force with the intention and expectatio_n that the contingents which he was
sending to the rear would not take the opportunity, as they actually did take it, for
decamping, but would occupy and hold a position on the path over the mountains along
which the enemy turning-movement was being made, in time to be able to bring to a
halt the enemy's advance from this quarter, while Leonidas, with^ his half of the con-
federate army, continued to block the passage of the enemy's main body through the
pass of Thermopylae itself.

This masterly and persuasive interpretation of what was in Leonidas* mind at that
moment postpones the hour of the Lacedaemonian and Thespian contingents' witting
and deliberate sacrifice of their lives without cheating these heroes of the glory of having
performed their heroic act of self-sacrifice at a later hour of the same memorable day;
for indisputably they did deliberately sacrifice their lives when, upon receipt of the news
that the enemy turning-force had now succeeded in debouching_out of the mountains on
to the coastal plain in their rear, athwart their only possible line of retreat, they took
their decision to retire to the famous hillock and make their last stand there, instead of
taking a decision to lay down their arms, which was what the Thebans did in this now
quite desperate situation.

Thus Grundy*s theory, if accepted, leaves the Lacedaemonians and Thespians still
eventually sacrificing their lives as deliberately as they are said to have sacrificed them
according to the Herodotean rendering of the traditional story.

In the interests of his own reconstruction of the course of events, Grundy casts doubt
on both the story of the oracle and the story that Leonidas did not take with him anyone
who had not a son to leave behind him at Sparta. Yet the second, at least, of these two
stories is surely credible, since Leonidas' expedition must, from the outset, have been
one in which all participants will have faced the likelihood that they were going to lose