"Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World"

[Jona Lendering]

I think Jona is being a bit harsh in suggesting incompetence

That is indeed just a suggestion, but not mine; it's Beloch's. Because we can not know what happened, we must take it into account. Just like other suggestions, like devotio and the hypothesis put forward by Herodotus, intentional sacrifice ("kamikaze", as Paul Cartledge said).

As far as I am concerned, I think the incompetence-hypothesis is more plausible than the other two, because war is a clumsy business.

I find it surprising however that today Thermopylae is still treated as an isolated battle rather than as the adjunct holding operation to the much more critical naval battle at Artemesium.

I think this is correct for the popular imagination, in works of art like Frank Miller's 300 and Cold War propaganda like The Three Hundred Spartans. But authors like Charles Hignett and Peter Green have correctly interpreted Thermopylae as a side show, a point made, originally, by Julius Beloch.

And let's face it: why should a person read Hignett or Green, if he can read Herodotus? Only Beloch approaches Herodotus' literary quality, but he wrote in a language that, since Germany lost WW1, is no longer the language of scholarship. Therefore, Herodotus' misrepresentation that Artemisium and Thermopylae were independent battles, is taken far too serious. If only Herodotus had presented the two battles day-by-day (like Green does), he would have prevented this misunderstanding. But Herodotus thinks that they took place on the same days 'by coincidence'; he simply misunderstood how close they were connected.