Did Leonidas Really Say “Molon Labe”?

Ancient Greek is not like Latin. There are dozens of Latin phrases—such as et cetera, ad hoc, alias, alter ego, de facto, de jure, and so on—that are commonly used in everyday conversation. By contrast, there are very few phrases from the ancient Greek language that ordinary people can even recognize in the original language. μολὼν λαβέ (molṑn labé) is one of those phrases. Literally, it means: “Having come, take.” More idiomatically, it can be translated as: “Come and take them.”

Most people have heard a story about this phrase. The story normally goes a bit like this: in 480 BCE, the armies of the Achaemenid Empire were attempting to conquer mainland Greece, so King Leonidas I of Sparta brought an army of three hundred brave Spartan warriors to stop the invading armies at the pass of Thermopylai in central Greece. Then, when King Xerxes I of the Achaemenid Empire ordered Leonidas and his soldiers to hand over their weapons, Leonidas supposedly replied with two words: “μολὼν λαβέ”—”Come and take them.”

This makes for a rather fine story. Historically speaking, however, this incident almost certainly never really happened. In fact, the earliest version of the story is not attested until over four hundred years after Leonidas’s death and that version of the story is very different from the version that most people know today—for one thing, it doesn’t even include the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ.”

Some general misconceptions about the Battle of Thermopylai

The legend that Leonidas said “μολὼν λαβέ” is just one of many legends and misconceptions that have arisen about the Battle of Thermopylai. I address many of the other popular misconceptions about the battle in this article I wrote in October 2019 debunking historical inaccuracies in the movie 300, but I will briefly debunk some of the more significant ones here.

First of all, there were a lot more than just three hundred Greeks who stayed behind to fight and die in the final stand at Thermopylai. The earliest surviving historical account of the Battle of Thermopylai comes from the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE), who was probably a young child when the battle took place. Herodotos interviewed people who knew information about the battle and wrote a detailed account of what happened in The Histories 7.201–239.

Herodotos tells us that the total number of Spartiates (i.e., full Spartan citizens) who went to Thermopylai in 480 BCE was 301 (i.e., King Leonidas plus the three hundred Spartiates he brought with him). According to Herodotos, Leonidas sent one of the Spartiates named Pantites as a messenger to Thessalia, causing him to miss the final stand. Leonidas sent two of the other Spartiates back home because they had eye infections and couldn’t fight. One of these men reportedly turned back when he heard the Greek forces were being flanked and was killed. The other man, a Spartan named Aristodemos, survived and went on to die in the later Battle of Plataia.

In addition to the 299 Spartiates, however, Herodotos tells us that there were also around seven hundred Thespians and around four hundred Thebans who stayed behind for the final stand. The Thespians reportedly all died alongside the Spartans and so did many of the Thebans. Herodotos claims that the Thebans fought for a while, but, in the end, those who were still alive eventually surrendered to the Persians. Modern historians have disputed this claim.

In addition to the Spartiates, the Thespians, and the Thebans, modern historians also believe that there were probably at least several hundred helots and possibly other Peloponnesians who stayed behind to fight in the final stand. Herodotos, however, does not mention them, probably because he wanted to portray the Spartiates and Thespians as more heroic.

ABOVE: Illustration from 1881 showing how the artist imagined it might have looked when the Spartans and their allies decided to stay behind for the final stand, in which they knew they would all be killed

Also, although portrayals of the Battle of Thermopylai in modern popular culture tend to emphasize the supposed supernatural fighting prowess of the Spartiates, the battle was actually an unambiguous, unmitigated victory for the Achaemenid Persians and an absolutely devastating defeat for the allied Greek city-states who fought against them.

Nearly all the Greeks who stayed behind for the final stand at Thermopylai were slaughtered, including all the Spartiates, all the Thespians, and probably most of the others. The Persian victory was so complete that, according to Herodotos, the Persians retrieved Leonidas’s body, chopped off his head, mounted his head on a pike, and crucified his mutilated corpse.

As a result of this momentous victory, the Persians were able to advance south into mainland Greece, conquering all of Phokis, Boiotia, and Attike. The Athenians were forced to evacuate their city to escape the advancing Persian army. The Persians marched into Athens itself, occupied the city, and razed the Athenian Akropolis, destroying all the temples that had been built there.

The only reason why anyone thinks of the Battle of Thermopylai as anything other than a decisive victory for the Persians is because the allied Greek city-states eventually managed to turn the war in their favor through their subsequent victories in the Battle of Salamis, the Battle of Plataia, and the Battle of Mykale. Thus, ancient Greek historians (like Herodotos) chose to put as much of a positive spin on the tragic early defeat at Thermopylai as they could, claiming that, even though the armies who fought with Leonidas were utterly annihilated, they fought bravely.

ABOVE: Imaginative illustration from 1900 showing how the author imagined it might have looked when the Achaemenid Persians razed the Akropolis

Herodotos’s account of the Battle of Thermopylai

Now that I’ve debunked some basic misconceptions, let’s talk about the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ” specifically in a bit greater depth. Remember how I said that the earliest account of the Battle of Thermopylai comes from Herodotos? Well, he never mentions anything at all about the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ.”

In fact, in Herodotos’s account, Xerxes and Leonidas never engage in any form of communication with each other whatsoever. The two men never meet, they never talk, they never exchange envoys, and they never exchange letters. They never have any opportunity to hear each other’s thoughts.

Historically speaking, this is probably how it really happened. It’s unlikely that Xerxes would have been interested in personally reaching out to Leonidas and it’s unlikely that Leonidas would have been interested in personally reaching out the Xerxes, so there was really no reason for the two men to communicate with each other.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek historian Herodotos, based on an earlier Greek original

Diodoros Sikeliotes’s account

Nearly four hundred years after Herodotos, though, another Greek writer named Diodoros Sikeliotes (lived c. 90 – c. 30 BCE) wrote his own account of the Battle of Thermopylai, relying on various written sources that he had available to him, many of which no longer exist.

In his Library of History 11.4–5, Diodoros tells a story about a communication between Xerxes and Leonidas that is similar to the one that most people today have heard. In his version of the story, though, Xerxes and Leonidas communicate exclusively via envoys and they never actually meet in person. Also, in his story, Leonidas never uses the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ,” but he does says something to similar effect. Here is Diodoros’s account, as translated by C. H. Oldfather:

“After the Persians had encamped on the Spercheios River, Xerxes dispatched envoys to Thermopylai to discover, among other things, how the Greeks felt about the war with him; and he commanded them to make this proclamation: ‘King Xerxes orders all to give up their arms, to depart unharmed to their native lands, and to be allies of the Persians; and to all Greeks who do this he will give more and better lands than they now possess.’”

“But when Leonidas heard the commands of the envoys, he replied to them: ‘If we should be allies of the king we should be more useful if we kept our arms, and if we should have to wage war against him, we should fight the better for our freedom if we kept them; and as for the lands which he promises to give, the Greeks have learned from their fathers to gain lands, not by cowardice, but by valour.’”

It is highly unlikely that anything like this conversation ever really took place. Diodoros’s account is almost certainly a literary fiction meant to illustrate Leonidas’s reputation for courage and intelligence in a vivid way that readers would be able to easily digest and understand.

Ancient Greek and Roman historians generally tended to be somewhat less scrupulous about avoiding literary embellishment than modern historians are. Although they generally tried to make sure that their overall narratives were essentially correct according to the evidence, they often felt free to invent dialogue and entertaining anecdotes to illustrate what the historical figures they were writing about were like as people. Diodoros’s conversation between Leonidas and Xerxes seems to be an example of this.

ABOVE: Nineteenth-century fresco depicting how the artist imagined Diodoros Sikeliotes might have looked

Ploutarchos’s version of the story

The Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) was born over five hundred years after Leonidas’s death. In his time, Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire, Sparta was nothing but a small village, and the old Spartan way of life was little more than a memory.

Perhaps partly as a result of this, Ploutarchos had an abiding sense of admiration for the ancient Spartans and he wrote about them with great enthusiasm, often idealizing them. He even wrote a collection of Spartan sayings and aphorisms, compiled from various written and oral sources, titled Sayings of the Spartans. It is here, in section fifty-one of Ploutarchos’s collection that we find the earliest known attribution of the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ” to Leonidas.

The story Ploutarchos gives us, however, is not exactly the same one that most modern storytellers are familiar with. Ploutarchos doesn’t describe the conversation between Xerxes and Leonidas as taking place in-person; instead, he describes it as taking place through a series of letters. He tells us that Xerxes wrote a letter to Leonidas saying “πέμψον τὰ ὅπλα,” which means “Put down your equipment.” Then he says Leonidas wrote back saying “μολὼν λαβέ.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust from Delphoi that has been questionably identified as possibly a representation of the biographer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia

Why Ploutarchos’s account is totally implausible

Ploutarchos’s story is clearly a later, more romanticized version of the story told by Diodoros Sikeliotes in his Library of History. Diodoros portrays Xerxes and Leonidas as making more verbose declarations to each other via envoys; whereas, by Ploutarchos’s time well over a century later, these statements had evidently been whittled down into the much pithier, more memorable aphorisms that he records.

There are also several huge historical problems with Ploutarchos’s account itself. The first problem is that the whole premise of Xerxes and Leonidas writing letters doesn’t fit well with the historical context. We have no record of military leaders in the early fifth century BCE communicating before battles via written messages. Nearly all communication between military leaders in the fifth century BCE seems to have been done verbally. It’s only in later periods that we start to get reliable accounts of military leaders communicating before battle via written messages.

That’s not the end of it, though; even if we completely ignore the historical implausibility of Xerxes and Leonidas writing letters in the first place, the exchange itself as described by Ploutarchos raises a lot of red flags. Quite simply, it would make no sense for Xerxes to send Leonidas a letter composed of a single three-word command. If Xerxes only wanted to say those three words, why would he even bother to write a letter? If he really only wanted to say those three words, he could just send someone to say them. Surely an envoy would be able to remember three words.

Now, one could argue that maybe Xerxes’s letter was more than three words long and Ploutarchos just omits most of the letter from his account. If Xerxes’s letter was longer than three words, though, then Leonidas’s two-word reply of “μολὼν λαβέ” doesn’t make sense, because it would be unclear which part of Xerxes’s letter he is replying to.

Ploutarchos’s story works well as an entertaining anecdote, but it doesn’t work at all when you try to think about it as any kind of historical account.

Modern uses of the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ”

Despite having almost certainly never actually been spoken by Leonidas, the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ” has taken on a whole legacy of its own. During the Texas Revolution, it became a rallying cry of the rebellion as a result of the Battle of Gonzales on 2 October 1835, in which rebellious settlers successfully prevented a group of Mexican soldiers from seizing a cannon.

The Texas revolutionaries created a flag known as the “Gonzales flag,” which consists of a white banner bearing a star with a cannon and the caption “COME AND TAKE IT”—a direct translation of the Greek phrase “μολὼν λαβέ.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a replica of the original Gonzales flag in the Texas State Capitol

More recently, the phrase “Molon labe” or “Come and take it” has become widely used by gun activists, white supremacists, and other members of the far right. Versions of the Gonzales flag bearing the image of a rifle instead of a cannon can be seen in photographs of gun activist and white supremacist rallies (including Trump rallies), alongside other flags associated with white supremacy, such as the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (i.e., the “Confederate” flag), the flag of Nazi Germany, the Trump flag, the Gadsden flag, and Thin Blue Line flag.

Also occasionally visible at white supremacist rallies are black flags bearing the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ” itself in white Greek letters, with the image of a white plumed Corinthian helmet above it. If you search for the words “Molon labe flag” in Google Images, you’ll even find versions of this flag with the Confederate saltire imposed over the helmet, making it explicitly clear that the phrase is being used in a white supremacist context.

ABOVE: Screenshot of some of the image results for the search “Molon labe flag”

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has pretty much adopted “Come and take it” as one of their unofficial mottos. They have used the slogan on multiple occasions. For instance, on 5 November 2020, the NRA’s official Twitter account issued a tweet with the words “COME AND TAKE IT” written in all caps. As of the time I am writing this, this single tweet has received 36,500 likes and 8,800 retweets.

ABOVE: Screenshot of a tweet by the NRA’s official Twitter account on 5 November 2020 with the phrase “COME AND TAKE IT” in all capital letters

Members of the right wing have even used the phrase “Come and take it” in some extremely weird contexts. For instance, in November 2020, health organizations were issuing warnings telling people not to gather in large groups for Thanksgiving dinner because doing so would almost certainly result in much more rapid spread of COVID-19, which would almost certainly result in even more people dying.

Ted Cruz, a United States senator from the state of Texas, apparently decided that this was some kind of attack on American values, so he came out in full force in support of celebrating Thanksgiving as one would in any other year. In support of this message, he posted an image on Twitter showing a version of the Gonzales flag edited to have a roasted Thanksgiving turkey above the motto “Come and take it” in the place of the usual cannon.

I think that, if Ploutarchos could see all the ways in which the phrase “Come and take it” is being used today, he would be very confused indeed.

ABOVE: Screenshot of a tweet issued by Senator Ted Cruz with an image of the Gonzales flag edited to have a roasted Thanksgiving turkey in the place of a cannon