La VEILLE DES THERMOPYLES. Profitant des ombres de la nuit, Léonidas s'avança pour reconnaître les avant-postes de Xercès. Quatre bouillans guerriers l'accompagnaient dans cette héroïque expédition. (Plutarque illustré).

Trustman, Benjamin A., Trustman, Julia M. · 1842

The print is referring to the battle at the Thermopylae (480 B.C.), a strategically important pass between Northern and Southern Greece. Leonidas, King of Sparta led 6000 Greeks into battle against the Persian King Xerxes. They were all killed to the last man. Here we see the Greek king shamelessly shown as an overweight middle aged man commanding a group of bourgeois veterans.... a far cry from an ideal model of Greek beauty. The men's figures are more similar to a Falstaff than to a Mars or Apollo. Daumier certainly must have known the rather similar painting by J.L.David from 1814, which now can be seen at the Louvre in Paris. During the 1840's, a quarrel between painters of the classic and romantic schools had fully flared up. Delacroix asked the "loaded" question: "Who is going to liberate us from the old Greeks?" Daumier succeeded to answer it his own way by showing historic personalities such as Hercules, Pygmalion or Agamemnon in absurd situations.