"'Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie'. Thus did the poet Simonides remember the three hundred elite Spartan warriors who, led by their king, Leonidas, faced the vast, inrushing Persian army at the 'hot gates' of Thermopylae and fought to the death for an ideal dearer to them than life itself - the ideal of freedom. The Spartans' courage and sacrifice-sacrafice inspired their fellow Greeks and the following year, after further heroic struggles by both land and sea, the mighty Persian Empire was defeated and the Greeks were finally free." "Paul Cartledge re-examines this crucial moment in history: the invasion of Europe from the 'east' by the Great King Xerxes, one hundred and fifty years before Alexander the Great famously invaded the Asiatic Persian empire from the European 'west'. The battle of Thermopylae was at its broadest a clash of civilizations; one that momentously helped shape the identity of classical Greece and hence the nature of our own cultural heritage."--BOOK JACKET.