by Sari Krosinsky
Daily Lobo Columnist
Picture this: A narrow pass through the mountains. Inside, four to five thousand Hellenes, armed with heavy, unwieldy bronze shields and eight foot spears. Outside, tens upon tens of thousands of soldiers from all corners of the Persian empire, with a wide assortment of light-weight armaments and enough arrows to cause a solar eclipse. By the second day of battle, the pass is littered with bodies. The Hellenes hold the pass seven days, and only give it up when the last has died.
That, or something like it, was the battle at Thermopylae. It was the beginning of the Pelyponnesian war, in which the Persian empire tried and ultimately failed to conquer Greece.
I'm not exactly war's biggest fan, but you have to respect people who can push past fear and self-preservation, knowing they were going to die, to give their loved ones a chance to survive. And what really sucks is that I'll never get to meet them.
I have long had this intense loathing for tourism. Maybe it has something to do with being from New York.
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When I was working as a student organizer, I frequently had to travel to various parts of the country to help students organize or to go to a conference. In the larger cities, people always wanted to run around looking at monuments and other tourist traps, a diversion I generally tried to opt out of.
Personally, I preferred the smaller towns. There, I could rest assured that the only touring I'd have to do would be of people's apartments and favorite hangouts. Under those circumstances, I've learned a great deal more about the life of a place than any monument could teach.
Maybe it's just because I'm a writer, but I find famous people - as well as the markers left behind for them - terribly dull. The Hellene foot soldier pushing his weight into the army before him, holding onto one more breath to give his family and people one more moment to prepare to fight and survive - in short, the ordinary person whose name will never be remembered no matter how extraordinary his acts - he is the man worth knowing. The Persian emperor gazing safely and gaudily from his high perch is hardly worth mentioning.
Of course, if I'm right, the most interesting part of history is the hardest part to find.
Take my present example. Very little is known about what precisely happened at Thermopylae. Since all the Hellenes that were there died, there's no way to really get their side of the story.
We do know that they were well out-numbered by the Persians and that they held the pass for the extraordinary interval of seven days, of which the last three were spent in almost constant battle. We know that this interval enabled the divided poleis to come together and organize a defense that ultimately defeated the Persians, though with losses as heavy as the destruction of Athens.
But we don't know the most compelling part. We don't how the Hellenes lived through those days, what thoughts and emotions kept them going past all imaginable endurance. My depictions above are based on a historical novel, "Gates of Fire," and conversations with a Sparta-avid friend. What the Hellenes really experienced we can't know; they left behind no books, only a few words engraved in stone.
I could go to Greece and gawk at some ruins, but I can never go to the Sparta or Thermopylae I want to know.
The history books will never tell my story, and maybe they'll never tell yours either. I guess we'll have to tell it ourselves.
Got a good story? E-mail Sari Krosinsky at michal_kro@hotmail.com.
