It is not unnatural that the story of Thermopylæ should have found in the imagination of men a place more secure than have even the victories at Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa. The very tragedy of defeat stands out more conspicuously against the background of the moral victory. The physical surroundings, too, are more picturesque. At the narrow entrance between cliffs and sea individual daring emerges, as in the defence of a mediæval portcullis, and in the memory remain the details of the by-path over Mount Kallidromos; the leaves under foot rustling in the darkness and betraying the ascent of the Persians to the Phocian rear-guard; the dawn breaking over the blue sea at the foot of the cliffs; and the Persian Immortals descending swiftly upon the rear of the few resolute men below. Then the long struggle in the narrow pass comes to an end and Leonidas and his men move out into the wider part before the pass. The “strength of the hills” was rendered futile by the traitor guide; the water, faithful ally during the preceding days, would now vainly strive to engulf the invaders. The Sun, god of both armies, beat down indiscriminately upon the Oriental worshippers of his heavenly fire and on the heaps of dead Greeks. Somewhere amongst them lay the unaffrighted soldier Dieneces, who had welcomed with Laconic humour the sun-obscuring Persian arrows as a grateful shade in the heat of battle. It is disappointing, indeed, that now on the spot the actual scene requires certain stage directions. The modern coast line has been pushed far out into the bay by earthquakes and the detritus of the streams. The Spercheius now flows through a plain some two miles wide between the precipices and the sea. But the configuration of the land was still essentially unchanged when, under Brennus and his Gauls, in the third century B. C., there was another invasion hardly less formidable than that of the Persians. Before the Gauls reached Delphi there was here at Thermopylæ a repetition of the more famous struggle. The coast line still lay close to the cliffs. The Athenian fleet stood in near enough, despite the rapidly shoaling water, to harass the flank of the enemy, while the other Greeks in the narrow pass repeated the stubborn resistance of the Spartans and their allies just two hundred years before. Other details, too, were duplicated. The Gauls, unable to force the pass, resorted, as had the Persians, to the mountain path. Again it was the Phocians who strove to stop them, but the invaders, pushing by, descended on the rear of the Greeks, who were saved from the fate of Leonidas only by the presence of the Athenian fleet.