TRUE Heroes Have A Death Wish ☠️

[upbeat music] All right, guys, so the three spots that I visited, the first one was the sacred battlefield of Thermopylae.

That's the Hot Gates.

If you've seen the movie 300, I walked on that little piece of land.

Now the landscape is, is changed dramatically, so it's very hard to picture.

One of my sons was just crestfallen when we got on that, you know, sacred ground because they expected the water running up, but instead the water has receded dramatically as erosion from the mountain has run down.

And so now it's not like this thin Hot Gates which the Persian army was funneling through.

Now it's like this l- large, I don't know, it's like a parking lot.

It's a bus stop.

But then you can kind of get up into the trees, then you can really see the monuments.

There's a Leonidas statue there, and there's a monument to the fallen 300 Spartan warriors that died there.

If you're not familiar with this event, it was in the 5th century BC.

There was Xerxes, which was King of Persia.

In the Bible this is Esther's husband, and he is coming through wreaking havoc all throughout Greece, and really the known world.

He was kind of king of the known world at that time.

300 Spartan warriors marched north throughout Greece to what's called the Hot Gates and stopped the Persian advance there, uh, long enough to be able to mobilize, uh, Sparta and much of Greece to be able to mount resistance against the invading Persian army.

But it was really 300 warriors that had something of a death wish.

It was a death errand.

There was no way they were gonna go and beat this Persian horde.

All of them knew they were marching to their death.

Now they died epically, and they stacked bodies just like half a mile high.

Not literally, but it sounds cool.

Hyperbole's fun.

Uh, they killed a whole bunch of Persians in this pursuit and so we remember them to this day.

It's like an incredible feat.

But any one of those Spartans could have, you know, "I'm calling in sick today, guys." [laughs] It would've been so easy to avoid that fate.