…Actual Sparta wasn’t really destroyed by a slave uprising either, although they did have them on occasion, and one contributed to the falling out with Athens.
But there is a strange thing where people think Thermopylae was something other than simply a case of the Greeks – Spartans only being a small portion of the force – getting outmaneuvered and defeated. I can remember wikipedia for a while had people trying to list it as a Pyrrhic victory for the Persians, as if having to fight a couple days before taking over all of central Greece was some kind of loss for them.
From all I can tell, they probably never actually said molon labe either, which doesn’t show up in accounts until much later.
