position in the rear of the Greek army. The Persians surrounded the Greek forces and massacred them. The way was clear for Persia to march uncontested to Athens, which it did and burned the evacuated Acropolis to the ground. Xerxes had nearly subjugated Greece. The last remaining step was to destroy Athens’s formidable naval fleet. The Greeks did not give up, however. While Thermopylae was a battlefield defeat, it was something of a moral victory as they learned that they could hold off a much larger Persian force with superior technology and strategy.
