Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 124, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 May 1920 — Rann-dom Reels [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Rann-dom Reels

LEONIDAS LEONIDAS was a Spartan hero who earned a large bronze monument by holding the pass of Thermopylae with 300 men and a shoestring. - ■— Sparta was a small, irritable country about the size of a Florida town site, but it was never stepped on .with any. success. The Inhabitants lived on cayenne pepper and red beefsteak

and practiced shooting at a mark eight hours a day. One time Xerxes, king of Persia, decided to annex Sparta, and after, rounding up a neat little army of 2,000,000 men he headed for the Grecian archipelago, which was about in the same place It is now. Xerxes did not get far before he ran into the pass of Thermopylae, which was a short cut between the mountains wide eough to allow two thin men to pass without being tele-

By HOWARD L. RANN

scoped. Here Xerxes found Leonidas drawn np in battle array, defying the whole Persian army in some of the rudest Greek adjectives ever used. Xerxes took the affair as a joke until Leonidas had spitted a. few thousand Persian husbands on his trusty sword, when he deeded to surround Leonidas. When the Spartan hero discovered this, be delivered an eloquent address to his men and charged the entire Persian army, which filled bUu so full of arrows that he had to be pin-feathered before being removed to the family residence. Leonidas’ name at onee became a household word, and autographs and kodak pictures of the deceased were eagerly sought after. His death aroused so much indignation that the Spartans rose up and threw Xerxes across the Hellespont with chagrin written all over his profile. Leonidas did not die in vain, as he had furnished the Impassioned high school graduate with some of the most livid eloquence and weird , rhetoric ever uncorked from an opera house stage. (Copyright.)

Defying the Persian Army in Some of the Rudest Greek Adjectives Ever Used.