Awesome / The Histories

• 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians holding the pass in Thermopylæ against hundreds of thousands^note In real life, the Persian army likely had only a few tens of thousands of soldiers, but this Awesome Moment is about The Histories which reports upwards of a hundred thousand. of soldiers in the Persian army for far longer than expected, inflicting major casualties before being outflanked and overwhelmed.
  • Crosses over with tearjerker, but a few years later, a Greek traveler, Simonedes of Ceos, wrote down a centopath (a sort of plaque) on the battlefield. The inscription on it undoubtedly assures yet again, how badass the Spartans were:
  "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie."
• The naval Battle of Artemisio in Euboea, in which an Athenian-led navy forms a hedgehog and survives against a vastly-larger Persian fleet that had encircled them.
• The Battle of Salamis, in which disciplined and well-trained Hellene sailors throw a much larger Persian fleet into chaos and even open up the possibility of cutting off the Persian land army's retreat route.
• The Battle of Plataea, a great land battle in which the numerically-superior Persians are slaughtered en masse due to their lack of training or armor, even though they are of equal bravery to the Spartans.