Imagine your force of 7,000 warriors, decimated and holding on by a hair’s-breadth on a narrow pass flanked by the walls of a steep mountain and the sea down below. What did Leonidas say to his men on that last day, when treacherous Thebans defected to the Persian enemy? What did he say when confronted, finally, by the spectre of a thousand thousand men arrayed against his own?
What must he have thought when he saw the screaming hordes advancing against his 600 Thespians and the remnants of his own 300?
Maybe nothing. Maybe all necessary words were spoken before his force of 300 set out for Thermopylae. Maybe creeds pledged in private came to mind as the Persians charged, flogged and driven forward by their officers. Maybe Leonidas remembered the words of the Oracle before the tide washed inevitably over him.
Beloch remarked that Leonidas’ sacrifice had no purpose, served no miliary objective beyond the death of Spartans who had fathered sons ready to take over their own households, beyond the loss of a hapless leader with no miliary acumen.
And yet such a brutal, bloody honour was displayed and recorded for future generations, passed from Greek historians of antiquity into legend. A final stand of 300 against an army numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
So feared were the Spartans that when they retreated with the body of Leonidas of Sparta, the Persians slayed them with a storm of arrows.
It must be a strange thing for men to give up the soft, frail flesh for a cause beyond their own lives. That kind of granite will, determination, cannot be bought for any price but the highest.
Do terrorists feel that way?
Do they romanticise their own struggles against an amorphous West whose culture and civilization, they are taught, is anathema to their own beliefs? The Spartans were professional soldiers, bred for war and conflict with the knowledge that their deaths might come inevitably at the point of an enemy sword while defending the Peloponessus, or at the behest of their Council of Elders.
But what turns ordinary muslim men and women into fearless jihadists?
