Osprey (2024) 304pp h/b £25.00 (ISBN 9781472858665)
Named from its bubbling sulphur springs, for more than two and a half millennia (and possibly longer) Thermopylae, the Hot Gates, has been a ‘cauldron for war’. The reason is its location. Geography and geology mean that the square of land ‘ten miles on a side’, which includes Thermopylae itself but also the adjacent mountains of the Oiti-Kallidromo barrier, forms a natural choke point guarding the entry into mainland Greece from Thessaly. From the late 6th BC, when local Phocians built a wall to help defend what was then a narrow pass between cliffs and sea, to the Second World War, when German machinegun stations studded the hills, human intervention has enhanced these natural defences, sometimes deterring attack, sometimes defeating it, but not infrequently proving to be of little use, as invaders approaching over mountain tracks outflanked their enemy. Meanwhile, the topography kept changing, as silt turned sea to dry land and enlarged the coastal strip. Warfare, too, evolved. Javelins gave way to sarissas and eventually to stuka bombers, but still Thermopylae remained of key strategic importance, and the story of successive armies’ increasingly ingenious attempts to breach or circumvent it runs through much of this book.
Useful discussion is given to the area around Thermopylae itself. C&L have clearly spent time on the ground; C.’s military background shines through; and readers can feel confident in their calculations regarding such issues as how many Immortals Xerxes is likely to have sent with Ephialtes along Anopaia Path, the course of which the authors try to identify. Their analysis of Leonidas’ intentions is perhaps less convincing (they suggest that, rather than engaging face-to-face, the king meant to attack the Persians from the rear as they crossed the mountains south into Boeotia, where—overinterpreting a line in Herodotus and despite the Peloponnesians’ avowed policy of not advancing further north than the Isthmus of Corinth—they suppose that the rest of the Greek allies planned to confront them). Nonetheless, their discussion of the most famous battle at Thermopylae is a useful one. It is also the longest chapter, accounting for a fifth of the book.
As a result, discussion of many of the other encounters can seem cursory, as C&L appear to be aware. ‘Across all those centuries’, they write, ‘scraping the barrel for any action for which we had the slightest evidence—and some of that evidence is very slight indeed—we identified 27 military actions (broadly defined) at or near Thermopylae.’ The problem is that each of these actions is given its own chapter, and, while some of those chapters are short, all are perforce crammed with historical background, an abundance of dates and names occasionally leading to such anticlimactic conclusions as ‘Therefore, we’re unable to call this a battle of Thermopylae’ or ‘Again, we have no details whatsoever. Nothing on the armies, nothing of the fighting, nothing on the location within the region. Did Sgouros try to hold at … Thermopylae?’ This makes for a somewhat disconnected narrative, and C&L might have been better advised to focus on a few key encounters—their account of Operation Washing, a British sabotage mission in 1943, for example, is both thrilling and indicative of how even on a battlefield as enduring as Thermopylae developments in munitions dictate new tactics.
There are the odd errors. Eretria, for example, is not Eritrea. The Athenians did not defeat the Persians in 479 BC. The allied Greeks did. But these are minor points, and easily overlooked. Some readers may find it less easy to overlook the oddly chatty writing style, however. The text is peppered with abbreviations such as ‘should’ve’ and ‘could’ve’; a hoplite is defined as ‘literally “the guy with the war gear’’’; we are reminded that Leonidas fought ‘before the age of cell phones and ruggedized laptops and radios’; a striking observation on page 133, ‘And where there is war in Greece, there is Thermopylae’, is diminished by being repeated in much the same words on page 143 (‘And, whenever war visits Greece, there we will find Thermopylae’); and in a discussion of Philip II of Macedon we are told:
‘He was a smart man. He knew damn well that anyone hoping to master Greece below Thessaly needed to control one critical location.
“Thermopylae.”’
The Killing Ground is, then, something of a curate’s egg, instructive in parts, gripping in others, but perhaps better to be dipped into than regarded as a true biography with a convincing narrative arc. There are 27 colour illustrations, 4 maps, notes, and an index.
David Stuttard