A visit to Thermopylae today at first must disappoint anyone who has read of the heroic stand a few thousand Greeks made against an invading Persian army of more than a quarter million men. History may write, but nature quite obviously erases.

The pass at Thermopylae, once scarcely broad enough for a wagon, is now several miles wide, and the sea which should be lapping at the base of the monument commemorating the battle fought there in 480 B.C. has retreated to a blue line miles away. Today a highway traces the ancient coastline. But a statue of Leonidas, the Greek Commander, does mark the carefully chosen battle site.

Bewildering at first, Thermopylae can tell its story, and perhaps the best way is to travel there along a circuitous route.

The most direct approach is up Route 1 out of Athens. In a few hours you're there. The problem, however, is that this easy access to the pass makes it diffcult to understand the decision to deploy a handful of men against hundreds of thousands. The wide openness speaks more to suicide than hope.

Better to take Routes 3, then 48, through Thebes and Delphi to Amfissa, and Route 27 north from there to the Pournaraki Pass. This is the alternative to Thermopylae that an aarmy would have to endure; a constant struggle against hairpin turns, over powerful thrusts of mountains above valleys that drop to little puddles of land. No general would willingly choose it.

At the end of the Pournaraki Pass the mountains stop, and below stretches a plain threaded with a road aimed straight for the city of Lamia which climbs the hill on the far side. To the right, the Malian Gulf pokes into view - ships strangely out of proportion to the land from this altitude. There, near the water, the Persians gathered for their assault on the narrow passage at Thermopylae, a few miles to the south.

The important elements of the battle site can be taken in at a glance. The statue of Leonidas, one of Sparta's kings, thrusting a spear stands atop the stone monument marking the main defensive position of the Greeks. Across the highway rises the hillock where they made their final stand, and beyond that tower green clifs, the eastern edge of the Oeta Mountain chain. The sea once there is gone.

With the narrow pass visualized, even an armchair general can see it's a good place to fight, providing your the defending army. Here, the superior Persian force couldn't act as a juggernaut. The Greek Flanks were quarded by the cliffs and sea, while the defile effectively funneled any large force until only a minute portion of it could fight at any one time. In essence, the Greeks never had to fight a force larger than themselves.

Perhaps the Greeks thought the enemy could be stopped, but more realistically they probably hoped additional time could be bought for the Greek city-states to ready themselves against this second Persian invasion in ten years.

Into this less-than-enviable position were sent nearly 7,000 troops, including 300 spartans and their subjects. The Spartans were the backbone of the operation. Without their support, meager though it was, ostensibly because a religious fesitval kept the main force at home, resistance would have been severly undermined. They were the most skilled warriors in Greece - their city-state had forged an iron core of military prowess unsurpassed anywhere, even if it were created largely out of fear of slave revolts.

Standing in the gravel enclosure surrounded by low trees nd shrubs, the most striking sight is the statue of Leonidas. The battle was his, both in terms of strategy and a destiny he probably felt couldn't avoid. He most likely felt prospects of success were marginal since he decided not to take Spartans who were only sons.

Against Leonidas came the Persian King Xerxes, determined to avenged is father's earlier defeat at Marathon. Xerxes, however, didn't understand the Greeks and found repugnant the idea of resitance against his overwhelming numbers. Herodotus, the Greek historian, relates that when he asked Demaratus, a Greek loyal to him, about the defenders, Demaratus answered their numbers were no indication of their quality - no matter how many were left, the rest would fight. Xerxes laughed and said, "It makes a good story, a thousand men fighting an army the size of mine."

After arriving at Thermopylae, the Greeks first gathered food in the plain below Lamia, then pusued a scorched-earth policy to deprive the Persians of what was left. Next, they restored an old Phocian wall at the most defensible position in the pass, called the "middle gate" where the cliffs squeezed the land to less than 20 yards. The wall was almost on line with the monument and hillock as seen today.

Unfortunately, the wall told a story that itself proved to be the Achille's heel of Leonidas' defense. the Phocians built it in a war with the Thessalians, but the allies of Thessaly outflanked the wall by using a path through the mountains taking them to the Phocian rear. Aware of history, Leoonidas has to assume Xerxes would learn of the path and sent a thousand Phocians to a point near the top of Mount Kallidromos to protect it. He sent no Spartan commanders, a costly mistake.

When the Persians finally arrived, the non-spartans grew restless, having expected a much longer wait and counting on more troops joining them. Leonidas managed to calm them down, and they anxiously waited. Xerxes, for his part, disregarded reports from his scouts that the Greeks, few in number, were calmly exercising an combing their hair. He waited four days for them to retreat.

The Greeks didn't and, on August 18, Xerxes sent in his Medes and Cissians to bring back alive those recalcitrant men in his way.

The slaughter was tremendous. The Medes were cut down by the hundreds as they ran into a wall of locked shields behind which the Greeks solidly stood piling up the dead with lethal spear thrusts. Next Xerxes sent in his crack troops the Immortals but they, too, were cut down horribly. It's said the Persians finally had to be whipped to drive them to the front. The next day went no better for the Persians.

As Xerxes desperately cast about for an answer to the dilemma, a traitorous Greek came forward and reminded him of the path thorugh the mountains. He offered to guide the Persians troops.

On the night of the 19th Persian troops under Hydarnes set off across the Asopos river to outflank the Greeks. By dawn they were heading across the high valley and quickly came upon the Phocian outpost. Without disciplined Spartans, the Phocians retreated back to their home city-state, expecting the force before them to be heading that way.

As soon as the Greeks heard of the Phocian rout, their ranks immediately split. Half returned to their city-states, possibly under Leonidas' orders. In the end, all that were left were the 300 Spartans and a 1,000 Thespians and Thebans.

That the Spartans would stay was a fore-gone conclusion. "Come back with your shield or on it," Spartan wives admonished departing husbands. Victorious or dead. One story has it that when Leonidas asked a Spartan to carry a last message home, the man replied, "I came here to fight, not act as a messenger." Another soldier when asked, answered, "I shall do my duty better staying here, and in that way the news will be better."

The small contigent could only await the end. They readied their armor and checked weapons while the Spartans, true to tradition, prepared for death by combing their hair. Perhaps, deep down, all of them envied the men now marching home. Life, it would seem, can't possibly be let go so easily.

Leonidas didn't mince words. Speaking each man's thoughts as they ate breakfast, according to Herodotus, he told them, "Eat well, men, for tonight we dine in Hades."

The final Persian attack appears to have started about the time the market-place is full, accoding to herodotus, meaning that time when the produce has been brought in and people begin shopping and conversing before the sun gets too hot. The time would have been about nine or ten o'clock in the morning.

At first the slaughter of oncoming Persians continued, but now the greeks were fewer, each with less chance to step back and rest. The constant surge of the enemy began to take its toll. With spears splintered, the Greeks unsheathed their swords and fought the Persians hand to hand.

At this time Leonidas received a fatal wound and, instantly, furious fighting took place over his body. Suddenly a cry went up form the Persian ranks and the Greeks knew the tiniest hope was lost. Hydarnes had arrived in the rear. Amidst savage fighting, the Greeks moved behind the wall and onto the hillock while dragging the body of Leonidas.

From their small piece of high ground, the remaining Greeks fought with weapons, then with hands and teeth, or simply rocks. One by one they fell on or around the body of Leonidas, killed by volleys of arrows.

By midday it was all over. Xerxes gained little comfort from the victory going so far as to try and bury his dead so the rest of the army wouldn't see what a handful of Greeks had accomplished. When Xerxes was shown the body of Leonidas, his unabated rage led him - uncharacteristically - to have the Spartan's head cut off and placed on a pole.

Humiliating a corpse, however, couldn't change a thing, nor could it lessen the coming Greek resistance. The Greek Demaratus' words had taken life at Thermopylae and, in the months ahead, Xerxes was to watch his navy destroyed by the Athenians at Salamis and his army battered at Plataea by the then-full Spartan army.

On the hillock todays sits a bronze plaque speaking poignantly of that Leonidas and his men did. It speaks of Spartans, but applies to the others as well. The inscription tells little of grand schemes or profound and empty gestures of the future, but simply of men clinging to their own ideals. Written in words as laconic as the Spartan ideal is the memorial, "Go, stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here in obedience to their commands."

A good novel on the topic is "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressfield.

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