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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shilsen" data-source="post: 3393630" data-attributes="member: 198">If you're not using modern values, then it's not difficult to see the Spartans as defending freedom. They, and the historians writing at or shortly after the time, as Eric Anondson has pointed out, certainly saw themselves as doing so. They were defending the freedom of Sparta, and that of the Greek city-states in general, against an invader who wanted to conquer and subjugate them. Which, in all honesty, is pretty much what most defenses of freedom, in the ancient or modern world, has been about. It's about freedom for the guy defending it, and sometimes, by extension, some other people. But there's no great defense of some Platonic, universal freedom, because there's no great, universal freedom shared by everyone. The Spartans defended what they saw as freedom. It's like the fact that the Athenians had what they saw as democracy, and what many people afterwards saw as such. Sure, it wasn't complete democracy, since women, madmen, slaves and a few others didn't get to vote, but then no nation in the history of the world has had complete democracy, if we define that as equal franchise and rights for everyone in the nation. Within certain boundaries, we have democracies. Within certain boundaries, we have battles for freedom from subjugation. And Thermopylae was one such battle.</blockquote>