Come and Take Them

The story

In 480 BCE a Persian army came down through Greece. Leonidas, one of the two kings of Sparta, held the narrow pass at Thermopylae with a small force. Herodotus, writing in the same century, tells the battle. He does not tell the story of a letter demanding the Spartan arms.

That story is in Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartans, a collection put together centuries later. In the 1874 Goodwin revision, Xerxes writes again, “Send me thy arms,” and Leonidas returns, “Come and take them.” The same chapter has him tell the men to dine as if they were to sup in another world. Treat both as sayings preserved under his name, not as a transcript of a dispatch.

The line people pair with him about fighting in the shade is a different problem. Plutarch’s collection gives it to Leonidas: someone says the Persian arrows will darken the sun, and he answers that it will be pleasant to fight in the shade. Herodotus 7.226 gives that speech to another Spartan, Dieneces. Godley’s 1920 translation has Dieneces call it good news. If the Medes hid the sun, they could fight in the shade instead of in the sun. Herodotus is the earlier witness, and he does not give the shade line to the king.

David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814) paints the men in the pass, which is the battle Herodotus describes. The sentence on this page is the later reported answer to a demand for the weapons. The curiosity is the shade line sitting on the wrong man in the later collection, while the near-contemporary history pins it on Dieneces.