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Can We Trust the Ancient Account of the 300 Spartans? - Evidence and Uncertainty in Ancient Military History | Sleepy Facts About History
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We think we know what happened at Thermopylae: three hundred Spartans holding a narrow mountain pass against a massive Persian army, fighting to the last man. But how do we actually know any of it? This episode explores the methods historians and archaeologists use to reconstruct ancient battles, using the famous last stand of the Spartans as a central test case.
The episode examines the surviving textual records, primarily the account written by Herodotus decades after the event. It looks…
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