The history of "come and take it"
For those who are curious.
Many things happened in 480 BC. For instance, Confucius died. By other traditions, Lao Tzu also died that same year. Gautama ("Buddha"
also seems to have shuffled off this mortal coil around the same time. It was roughly the time of the book of Esther; a lot of the later Jewish Prophets were alive then. Yue had just captured the capital of Wu. Thales had just measured the size of the earth.
In that same year, Xerxes led an army of unprecedented strength into Europe. A vanguard of that army was met in a very strategic corner of Greece by a detachment of 300 Spartans commanded by King Leonidas.
I won't bore you with the details, and most of you have seen the movie. It is attested by multiple sources that the Spartans were told to lay down their weapons because their position was hopeless; Leonidas replied "???ὼ? ???έ" This is often rendered "come and take them" but a better translation would be, "having come, then take them".
Think about the difference between those for a seond; I'll be back.
I bring these facts up mostly because they are interesting, at least to me.
