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When Aristodemos returned later, all honor was denied to him, no one shared the fire or talked to him anymore and because of his failure he was thanked henceforth with Aristodemos the coward.

The time the Spartans had gained at Thermopylae was well used. When the Persians hit Salamis again through the Greeks, they were beaten to death in a great naval battle. Xerxes dream of conquering Greece perished with his ships.

Aristodemos was a broken man. One year later, in the battle of Plataiai, he jumped on the enemy lines and ended his miserable.

For the next 100 years Sparta was the most powerful state in Greece. In the year 400 before Christ it defeated its proud rival Athens, but for the inflexible Spartans the new land proved easier to conquer than it was to administer. The state, an armed camp, was a concept that worked well in the homeland, but failed in the foreign one.

In the second century before Christ Sparta was broken. The discipline that kept his soldiers from fleeing in panic, however, prevented retreats where they would wisely have been appropriate. The militant Sparta had made too many enemies and lost too many men in the process. Sparta, the great state education system, became more and more a pure spectacle.

The young of Sparta are beaten all day long with whips at the altar of Artemis of Orthia, often almost to death, they bravely bear this full of cheerfulness and pride. They are eager to see who holds out the longest and who tolerates the most lashes. The victorious stands in high regard.

That was the legacy of the once so proud Spartans.

Part 4