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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Leonidas Biography LEONIDAS I (Lat., from Gk. Aewvķδas}. King of Sparta, son of Anaxandrides. He succeeded his half brother, Cleomenes I, about 490 .b.c. When, in 480 B.C., the Persian monarch Xerxes approached Greece with an immense army, Leonidas was sent with 300 Spartans and a small auxiliary force to occupy the narrow pass of Thermopylę, which lay between the sea and Mount Callidromus, a spur of the range of ta. For two days the Greeks successfully resisted the overwhelming force of the Persians and frustrated every attempt to force the pass. At the end of the second day's conflict a Malian named Ephialtes went to the Persian camp and gave information of a secret path across the mountains which the Greeks had neglected to occupy, and at daybreak on the next day Leonidas learned that the Persians were pouring across the mountains to attack him in the rear. Then Leonidas sent away his auxiliaries, gathered his 300 Spartans, together with their attendants, about him, and prepared to defend his post. In the fight that ensued Leonidas himself soon fell, but the remaining Greeks retreated to a hillock near the road and made their last stand. They fell, fighting, to a man. Consult: Herodotus, v, 39-41; vii, 202-225, with the Commentaries by R. W. Macan (London, 1892) The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 784.
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