“They Died the Spartan’s Death”: Thermopylae, the Alamo, and the Mirrors of Classical Analogy

ABSTRACT In moments of crisis, people often make sense of the present by activating memories of the past through particular tropes of public memory. Classical analogies are one such trope, suggesting a sense of continuity between a (seemingly) stable ancient world and a chaotic present. Despite their prominence in American rhetoric, classical analogies have received too little attention from scholars of rhetoric. In the following, I interrogate the use of classical analogies in nineteenth-century American rhetoric— a period in which the classics were a vibrant aspect of public culture—by analyzing analogies between the fall of the Alamo and the fifth-century BC battle of Thermopylae. Thermopylae analogies were activated as tropes of public memory to warrant the formation of a defiant political identity for a Texian community reeling from defeat. Through an analysis of key texts that utilized Thermopylae analogies, I show that classical analogies sometimes go beyond comparisons between the past and the present to act as “mirrors” that inspire identification with, and imitation of, the ancients.