Moving words, and true—and yet it is sobering to reflect that Golding’s encomium might well have served to enthuse Adolf Hitler. To the Nazis, as it had been to Montaigne, Thermopylae was easily the most glorious episode in Greek history. The three hundred who defended the pass were regarded by Hitler as representatives of a true master race, one bred and raised for war, and so authentically Nordic that even the Spartans’ broth, according to one of the Führer’s more speculative pronouncements, derived from Schleswig-Holstein.
