The Spartans at Thermopylae were outnumbered by their own allies
The most famous last stand in Western history isn't the one you think you remember.
Three hundred. That's the number everyone knows, the one on the movie poster and the gym-motivation poster. It is also wrong, or at least badly incomplete.
When Leonidas marched to hold the pass at Thermopylae in 480 BC, he brought 300 Spartans, yes. But roughly 4,000 Greeks stood with them on the first two days, from Thespiae, Thebes, Corinth, Arcadia. When the Persians found the goat path that let them flank the position, Leonidas dismissed most of that army to fight another day. The men who stayed for the final slaughter numbered close to 1,500: the 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians who refused to leave, several hundred Thebans, and helots serving alongside their masters. Tom Holland's Persian Fire rebuilds this campaign from Herodotus outward, and what emerges is less a myth of solitary heroism than a story about coalition, and about who chooses to stay when leaving is still an option.
The Thespians get almost no statues. They just didn't have a screenwriter five centuries later with a grudge against the Persians and a taste for abs.