Ephialtes - the name of an Athenian politician
After the tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons,
which ended c.510 BCE (source: OCD3), Isagoras took
the side of the rich, and Cleisthenes took the side of the
People, then Miltiades and Xanthippus, then Aristides and
Themistocles, and then Cimon led the rich, while Ephialtes
took the side of the People
a subscriber writes "i was watching the history channel's docupictuary on the spartans last week, and could swear i heard them say the guy who showed the persians the mountain path to get behind the spartans at thermopylae was Ephialtes and that his name became the synonym/eponym for nightmare.
found this on a site about mein kampf"
Herodotus (Book VII, 213-218) tells the story of how a Greek traitor, Ephialtes, helped the Persian invaders at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.) When the Persian King, Xerxes, had begun to despair of being able to break through the Greek defence, Ephialtes came to him and, on being promised a definite payment, told the King of a pathway over the shoulder of the mountain to the Greek end of the Pass. The bargain being clinched, Ephialtes led a detachment of the Persian troops under General Hydarnes over the mountain pathway. Thus taken in the rear, the Greek defenders, under Leonidas, King of Sparta, had to fight in two opposite directions within the narrow pass. Terrible slaughter ensued and Leonidas fell in the thick of the fighting.
The bravery of Leonidas and the treason of Ephialtes impressed Hitler, as it does almost every schoolboy. The incident is referred to again in Mein Kampf (Chap. VIII, Vol. I), where Hitler compares the German troops that fell in France and Flanders to the Greeks at Thermopylae, the treachery of Ephialtes being suggested as the prototype of the defeatist policy of the German politicians towards the end of the Great War."http://www.ety.com/HRP/booksonline/mk/mkfootnotes.htm
There was an Athenian politician named Ephialtes, no apparent conection to the Ephialtes
who told Xerxes about the trail that enabled the Persians to attact the Spartans from the rear.
There are days that I stomp on my rugs hard just for the revenge. I might get over this in a couple more thousand years.