Bret Devereaux

"No such thing as the rights of man" Natural Law has antecedents in Greek philosophy (though it only appears in full in Roman writing), but that philosophy was stoicism - one of the 'philosophies of comfort' that emerges as a response to the loss of Greek liberty to Alexander.

Unlike the Romans, the Greeks didn't have a strongly developed idea of a 'ius gentium' ('Law of Peoples'), that is, a law that held and bound all peoples regardless of citizenship of ethnicity. So, no, 'human rights' weren't saved at Thermopylae.

He comes back to the idea that the Spartans knew they were going to die (they didn't) and it is his central point about this battle. So...the whole argument collapses because he didn't read Herodotus very closely.

'The Spartans fought in a very dense compact mass' Two issues. First, if I don't note real uncertainty about how battle worked in 480, @Roelkonijn is going to bop me on the head. I think it is plausible that something like a phalanx was in use by this point, but we don't know.

The bigger issue is that this style of fighting when it did emerge was not unique to the Spartans. It was not some unique Spartan warrior formation. It was how every Greek fought, including the potters and bakers the Spartans *despised* with all of their being.

'Now the Spartan shield' GREEK shield. Spartan aspides were not special. Oak as the material for Spartan shields. No. Shield woods were generally light and that went double for the already heavy aspis. Pliny says poplar, we have an example from Sicily with willow.

He goes on for a bit on the qualities of oak, which is rather pointless given the previous point. Also, he declares that 'nothing is going to penetrate this' which flies in the face of both some combat narratives in the sources and modern tests. Shields are good, not perfect.

Making declarative statements about the grips (overhand/underhand) of hoplite weapons. This is something that drives me absolutely nuts about pop-history like this: confident statements about points of real uncertainty. *Probably* overhand was more common, as in art.