Scholars report various figures ranging between about 100,000 and 150,000 soldiers. Today, it is considered to have been much smaller. Simonides went as far as to put the Persian number at three million. Herodotus, a contemporary writer, put the Persian army strength as one million and went to great pains to describe how they were counted in groups of ten thousand at a review of the troops. The Persian army was rumoured to have numbered over one million soldiers. The Athenian politician and general Themistocles had proposed that the allied Greeks block the advance of the Persian army at the pass of Thermopylae, while simultaneously blocking the Persian navy at the Straits of Artemisium.Ī Greek force of approximately 7,000 men marched north to block the pass in the middle of 480 BC. By 480 BC, Xerxes had amassed a massive army and navy and set out to conquer all of Greece. The Persian invasion was a delayed response to the defeat of the first Persian invasion of Greece, which had been ended by the Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. It was held at the narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae ('The Hot Gates') in August or September 480 BC. The battle took place simultaneously with the naval battle at Artemisium. It was fought in 480 BC over the course of three days, during the second Persian invasion of Greece. The Battle of Thermopylae ( / θ ər ˈ m ɒ p ɪ l iː/ thər- MOP-i-lee Greek: Μάχη τῶν Θερμοπυλῶν, Máchē tōn Thermopylōn) was fought between an alliance of Ancient Greek city-states, led by King Leonidas I of Sparta, and the Achaemenid Empire of Xerxes I.

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