520 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
to the 6th August, A.D. 1945, when an atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima. Let us suppose, however, that the Babylonic, Egyptiac, and
Syriac civilizations had been 2,425 years ahead of a latter-day Western
Civilization in the development of Military Technology. The supposi-
tion is not fantastic, considering that, in some branches of Technology,
these older civilizations were at least that much in advance; and, if we
allow this licence to our imagination, we may find ourselves puzzled to
estimate how Leonidas and his three hundred would have acted in circum-
stances that would have stultified most of the considerations that are
attributed to them.

Suppose that Xerxes' invading army had not been constrained, as it
was, by the state of Military Technology at the time, to kill Leonidas
and his three hundred companions in hand-to-hand combat with swords
and spears, or at short range with arrows; suppose that they had had a
stock of two atomic bombs, one to drop on the Greek force at Thermopy-
lae, and another to drop simultaneously on Sparta—or, better still, that
they had had a single hydrogen bomb whose explosion would instan-
taneously have destroyed all life in Continental European Greece and in
the Aegean Archipelago before the Achaemenian expeditionary force had
started cautiously to advance from its assembly-point in the interior of
Anatolia: in those then inconceivable circumstances there would have
been no perpetuation of the three hundred devotees' families, since the
sons whom they had left behind at home would have been killed at the
same instant as their fathers; there would have been no Sparta to receive
the news of the three hundred heroes' faithfulness unto death1 and to
remember their deed and their names; no Simonides to compose an
epitaph; and no monumental mason to engrave it. The presupposition
of the three hundred Spartiates' self-sacrifice was an assurance—which,
in these hypothetical circumstances, would have been denied to them—
that, in giving their lives, they were saving their country's existence; and
this was likewise the theme of another epitaph composed by Simonides
in commemoration, not of Spartiates who had fallen in defence of Sparta
against Achaemenian aggression, but of Tegeatans who had fallen in
defence of Tegea against Lacedaemonian aggression some years later.
TcDvSe Si* a.v&pa)ir<xyv dp€Tav ovx IKGTO KO.TTVOS

al&epa Bato/iei^s1 evpvxopov Teyeas1*
ol fiovAOvro TroAtv fjLev eXevOepicL redoXvlov

iraial Anrew, avrol S* ev irpofLdxpLcrt, davelv.2

their lives, even if they believed that the Lacedaemonian Government genuinely intended
to reinforce Leonidas' little army, and even if they were unaware that the position at
Thermopylae could be turned via a path over the mountains. On the last day, when the
position had in fact been turned by the enemy before any reinforcements had reached
the Hellenic army, the normal human reaction was either to decamp (as was done by the
contingents which, according to Grundy's hypothesis, had been detached by Leonidas
to check the advance of the enemy turning-force) or thereafter to surrender (as was done
by the Thebans). Even if Leonidas did go into action that day, with little more than one
half of his total force, with the intention of still holding his position while the other half
of the force checked the enemy's turning-movement, the decision in these circumstances
to continue to hold his ground instead of withdrawing while the coast was still clear was
heroic enough; and the Spartan and Thespian survivors' subsequent decision to die
fightiog after the enemy turning-movement had been reported to have achieved success
was just as heroic as it has always been deemed to be. * Rev. ii. 10.

2 Anth. Pal. VII. 5ra; Bergk, PX.<?., 4th ed., iii. 459.