Leonidas

Leonidas had gained the kingship at Sparta unexpectedly.

He now came to Thermopylae with the appointed three hundred he had selected, all of whom had sons.

Leonidas took pains to bring only the Thebans among the Hellenes, because they were accused of medizing;

Among the Greeks this is a modest matter:

And Leonidas, king of the Lacedaemonians, set himself and those three hundred whom he had led out from Sparta against the enemy at Thermopylae, when there was offered him either base flight or glorious death.

And after this, Xerxes, having campaigned against Greece, conquered the Lacedaemonians at Thermopylae and killed their king Leonidas, and taking the city of the Athenians razed it, and enslaved as many as did not escape.

For it would be ridiculous if one of your citizens, that Dorieus, or Leonidas, whom they say so often won at Olympia, should train looking to some other man, and that too one never crowned.

" What does that leader Leonidas say?

But glorious deaths met for one's country are wont to seem to the rhetoricians not only glorious but even blessed.

And again, when Xerxes came against Greece and the Thebans went over to the side of the Medes, the Plataeans refused to withdraw from their alliance with us, but, unsupported by any others of the Boeotians, half of them arrayed themselves in Thermopylae against the advancing barbarian together with the Lacedaemonians and Leonidas, and perished with them;

"So," he said, "breakfast, comrades, as men about to dine in the underworld.