Manity

Έλα ριπόρτ όλοι να κλείσουμε το βλαχο χρυσαύγουλο. Να ξεβρωμίσουμε το τλ σιγά σιγά

What happened to the body of Leonidas? During the final hours of the battle, when Leonidas fell, a fierce struggle erupted over his body. The Spartans (and remaining Greeks) drove back the Persians four times to recover and protect it, refusing to let the enemy take the king’s corpse as a trophy. Eventually, the Persians overran the position. Xerxes, furious at the heavy losses (including two of his brothers), ordered Leonidas’s head to be cut off and impaled on a stake. His body was then crucified (or impaled/displayed) as a deliberate humiliation. This was unusually barbaric even for barbarians. After the persians were kicked of Greece (following their defeats at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale), the surviving Greeks returned to Thermopylae and buried their dead — including the Spartans — in a collective tomb (tumulus) on the hill called Kolonos. Leonidas’s mutilated body was presumably among them or buried nearby. Roughly 40 years after the battle (around 440 BC), the Spartans decided to bring Leonidas’s bones back home. The task is specifically attributed to Pausanias (not the famous regent/general who won at Plataea, but a later Spartan figure, sometimes identified in sources as involved in this mission). He located and exhumed the king’s remains from the battlefield area at Thermopylae. The bones were transported to Sparta and reburied with full honors in a prominent tomb in the city (located west of the agora, opposite the theater). This became a hero shrine (heroön). Annual funeral games called the Leonideia were instituted in his honor, featuring speeches and athletic contests restricted to Spartans only. These continued for centuries. The retrieval turned Leonidas into a lasting symbol: his tomb in Sparta became a site of veneration, and the story reinforced the Spartan ideal of duty and glory.