Aristodemus (1)

The Spartan coward and hero.

Aristodemus was denounced as a coward when he survived the battle at Thermopylae and honored as the bravest man on the battlefield at Plataea.

Aristodemus was a Spartan soldier and accompanied the king, Leonidas, to the narrow pass at Thermopylae to await the invading Persian army where the four thousand Spartans faced perhaps as many as five hundred thousand Persians.

Aristodemus and another man named Eurytus where afflicted by an ailment of the eye and were not fit to fight; Leonidas released both men from their duty but when the Persians finally broke through the Spartan lines, Eurytus had his helot take him into the thick of the fighting where he was killed; Aristodemus did not die and returned to Sparta as the only survivor of the battle.

Aristodemus was labeled as a coward and no Spartan would give him a spark for his fire or speak to him; some said that he had not been ill at Thermopylae but instead had been a messenger and had lingered on the road so he would not have to fight and die in the battle; regardless of the reasons, he survived and all the others perished.

When the Persians burned the city of Athens and forced the allied Greeks back to the Peloponnesian Peninsula, the Persians seemed destined to enslave all of Greece; the Persian defeat in the naval battle near the island of Salamis gave the Greeks new hope and, after the majority of the Persian forces had retreated, the two armies faced one another near the town of Plataea in Boeotia.

During the battle of Plataea, Aristodemus attacked the Persians like a madman and was credited as the bravest of the Spartans who fought that day; some said that he fought with such zeal because he wanted to die in battle to prove his manhood.

• Histories, book 7, chapters 229-232; book 9, chapter 71