Stripped of its helmet, Leonidas' head is framed by his long hair. The lean skin of the warrior's face, its color gone, stands out all the more against a short and pointed beard. The dirt of battle is probably still upon Leonidas, and there is a dark purple bruise on his chin from the pooling of what little blood is left. Ragged bits of tissue and bone hang from his severed neck, and flies and beetles have landed on his skin. If the dead Spartan king's eyes could see, they might look 140 miles to the south -- all the way to Athens, the road to which now lies open for Persia.

The time is August 480 b.c.; the place, Thermopylae, Greece; the occasion, the aftermath of a great battle. A vast army of Persians was on the march to conquer Greece. A small force of Greeks had been all that stood in their way. And yet, in a pass that narrows to a space smaller than a baseball diamond, the impossible almost happened. For three days, just over seventy-one hundred Greeks, spearheaded by an elite unit of three hundred Spartans, gave a savage beating to a Persian army that outnumbered them by perhaps 20-to-1. About 150,000 men willing to die for the glory of Xerxes, the Persian Great King.