Thermopylae The Battle that Changed the World by Paul Cartledge Overlook, 376 pp., $30 One of the key moments in Herodotus' chronicle of the Persian wars comes at the narrow mountain passage of ...

The mortal sacrifice made by Spartan king Leonidas and his 300 elite troops at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. was described in vivid and dramatic detail in the Histories of Herodotus.

IT'S HARD to say what's more troubling. Is it the assumption -- made in "Spartan," a quintessentially Mametian thriller from writer-director David Mamet -- that Middle Eastern white slavers have ...