Badass

by Ben Thompson

  Ramses’s raging egomania also manifested itself in the form of some totally sweet government-sponsored vandalism. In addition to building more structures than any other Egyptian pharaoh, this guy would go around to temples that had been built by previous pharaohs, cross out their names, and write his own on top. At the time of his death, nearly every monument in the New Kingdom bore Ramses’s name, and you couldn’t throw a discus without hitting a towering depiction of his scowling visage—the capital city alone had more than fifty different statues of the pharaoh, and every one was life-sized or larger (usually larger). What’s more, since Ramses was a god-king, all of his citizens were required to worship him by prostrating themselves before the feet of these towering, angry monoliths.

  The rule of Ramses the Great was a golden age in Egyptian history, and his name was passed on for generations, much like that of Julius Caesar in Rome, except there’s no such thing as a Ramses salad (but there really should be—it would be romaine lettuce, dates, and goat cheese, and when you order it the cashier punches you in the face). After Ramses II, ten other rulers took his name, each one unsuccessfully trying to capitalize on his success and fame. He was such a baller that after his death the Egyptian priests actually went back and rewrote their entire mythology to incorporate Ramses as one of their foremost gods. Despite all of this awesome crap, perhaps the greatest testament to his sweeping badassitude is this: before the Europeans were able to decipher hieroglyphics, the only pharaoh’s name known to Egyptologists was that of Ramses.

  Everything I attempted I succeeded…. I found the enemy chariots scattering before my horses. Not one of them could fight me. Their hearts quaked with fear when they saw me and their arms went limp so that they could not shoot. They did not have the heart to hold their spears. They fell on their faces, one on top of the other…. I slaughtered them at my will.

  —RELIEF CARVING DESCRIBING RAMSES SINGLE-HANDEDLY WINNING THE BATTLE OF KADESH. ARCHAEOLOGICAL E VIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT THIS BATTLE WAS ACTUALLY A CRUSHING DEFEAT FOR THE EGYPTIAN ARMY, OR AT BEST A DRAW.

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  Ramses’s capital city was named Pi-Ramses Aa-nakhtu, meaning “The Domain of Ramses, Great of Victories.”

  During his reign, Ramses commissioned restoration work on the Great Pyramid of Giza. The pyramid now holds the honor of being the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing. The other, pussier wonders all got their asses kicked by stupid garbage like catapults, fires, earthquakes, conquerors, and giant carnivorous sea monsters.

  To make mummies, Egyptian royal undertakers would cut open the dead pharaoh with a piece of sharpened glass and take out his stomach, lungs, intestines, and liver. These organs were then dried, placed into individual jars, and neatly arranged in the tomb by an interior designer. What was left of the body was dusted with salt, embalmed, wrapped up in cloth, accessorized with gold, and then entombed.

  The name Ozymandias is actually just the Greek bastardization of Ramses’s throne name, User-maat-ra-setep-en-ra. How the Greeks got Ozymandias out of that is beyond me.

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  HATSHEPSUT

  * * *

  Another kick-ass Egyptian ruler was the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, who reigned from 1508 to 1458 BCE. This grim woman seized control of the throne in the name of her infant son and exerted her dominance over Egypt for more than twenty years. Her greatest exploit was a campaign into the land of Punt, where she drop-kicked her cowering enemies into the ocean and returned up the Nile with everything from perfume bottles filled with myrrh to an entire grove of frankincense trees she simply pulled out of the ground with her bare hands and transplanted to her palace.

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  2

  LEONIDAS

  (540–480 BCE)

  They made it evident to every man, and to the king himself not least of all, that human beings are many but men are few.

  —HERODOTUS, HISTORIES

  ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS THIS PLACE CALLED SPARTA, AND EVERYONE WHO LIVED THERE WAS A TOTAL BADASS. They were so hardcore that whenever one of their citizens said some stupid nonsense like, “Hey, man, democracy kicks ass…I like reading books, petting small puppies, and not violently killing people with pointy sticks that are also on fire,” they shipped his ass off to Athens to pick daisies and philosophize about a bunch of asinine drivel that nobody really cares about. Spartan men were all trained from birth to be highly disciplined, explosive killing machines, and the women were taught to raise strong children and encourage their husbands to die honorably in battle with another warrior’s spear through their heart. Anybody who wasn’t down with that way of life was sent into exile, where they were eaten by wolves.

  Well, one day some jackass named Emperor Xerxes I of Persia got all pissed at Greece for some reason and sent his two-hundred-thousand-man army over there with explicit orders to incinerate everything they could find. Obviously this didn’t sit well with the Spartans. They hate it when jerks burn down their cities.

  Xerxes’s army created an impractically large pontoon bridge across the Hellespont and arrived in Greece in 480 BCE with the intention of kicking everyone’s ass and possibly even taking names while doing so. However, in order to get through the countryside and sack Athens and Sparta, they needed to march through a narrow mountain pass known as Thermopylae. The Spartans knew this, and they had every intention of using this unforgiving terrain to their advantage.

  The Spartan king Leonidas hand-selected a force of three hundred of the most subatomically kick-ass warriors in Sparta to defend the pass at Thermopylae. Knowing that it was pretty much a suicide mission, all the men he chose to accompany him had sons who were old enough to take over as the heads of their families. When Leonidas’s wife was like, “What shall I do while you’re gone?” Leonidas just tipped his helmet and said, “Marry a good man and have good children,” before draining his wine bowl and riding off into the sunset like the Clint Eastwood-style badass that he was.

  The Spartans arrived at the pass, which was already being held by a force of about four thousand other Greek troops. The Spartans were like, “Go home, hippies,” and sent them back to organize the defense of Athens. Everybody took off out of there, except for a contingent of about seven hundred Thespian citizen-soldiers, most of whom weren’t very experienced in the ways of war but were still pretty stoked about the prospect of stabbing Persian people in the throat with their javelins.

  Eventually Xerxes showed up and was like, “What the hell is this crap?” He opened a parlay with the Spartan king.

  Xerxes: What the hell is this crap?

  Leonidas: Eat me.

  Xerxes: There are two hundred thousand dudes here and you’ve only got a couple of hundred pussies guarding this pass. You’re so boned. Just lay down your weapons.

  Leonidas: Why don’t you come and get them, bitch? We’ll see who’s a pussy when I shove all two hundred thousand of those knuckleheads up your ass.

  Xerxes: Screw you.

  Leonidas: Good one, loser. I’ve heard better insults from sock puppets.

  Xerxes: That’s it.

  Xerxes flipped out and assaulted the Greek defenses, but the Persian light infantry was ill-equipped and way too lame to dislodge the battle-hardened, heavily armored Spartan warriors. They were torn to shreds by the huge spears of the Greek phalanx and then put into a giant three-man water balloon launcher and catapulted into the Aegean Sea. Xerxes ordered the light infantry to pull back and moved his archers to the front to fire a couple of volleys at the Greeks. According to the account of the battle provided by the Greek historian Herodotus, one Spartan remarked that this was all good because there were so many arrows it was almost like they got to fight in the shade for a while. The Spartans were just hard like that. Seeing that his nice, relaxing arrow shower was unsuccessful, Xerxes brought in his elite bodyguard contingent of ten thousand Immortals, a unit world-renowned for its incomparable beatdown skills. The Spartans and Immortals clashed in fierce combat, and Xerxes pretty muc
h crapped a brick when he saw his most disciplined and experienced troops getting seriously worked over by Leonidas and his men.

  At the end of the second day of battle, the Greeks still held the pass and the Persians had lost a buttload of their toughest soldiers. Unfortunately for King Leonidas, a Greek traitor named Epialtes defected to the Persians and told Emperor Xerxes about a secret path around the mountain. During the night, Xerxes sent what remained of his Immortals to the other side of the pass, and when the Spartans got ready to resume the fight in the morning they noticed that there were now Persians on both sides of them.

  Xerxes: All right, bro. Nice try, but now you’re toast.

  Leonidas: Come on down here, then. I’ve got a present for you.

  Xerxes: Dude, you have no chance to survive. Just give up.

  Leonidas: I’ve got a better idea. How about you shut up and bite my dick? Does that sound like a good plan?

  Surrounded on both sides, Leonidas then did the last thing the Persian king expected—he lined up his men and launched a balls-out charge right into the face of the overwhelming enemy forces. The Spartans fought bravely against ridiculous odds and held out for far longer than they should have, hurling themselves into the fray and battling with whatever they had—spears, swords, fists, teeth, sticks, knees to the crotch…you name it. Eventually, the last of the Greeks fell while defending the body of his fallen king. The Persians found the corpse of Leonidas, beheaded it, and crucified him outside the pass.

  It takes a special kind of person to volunteer for a suicide mission and battle to the end against impossible odds. Leonidas found three hundred men willing to do just that. They did not fail the honor of their city or their people, willingly and unflinchingly facing an entire army to defend their homeland. The three hundred Spartans held the mountain pass for three days, being slain to the man but inflicting a tremendously high number of casualties on the Persian army’s most capable units. They dealt a serious blow to Xerxes’s forces and managed to hold back the Persian advance long enough for the Greeks in Athens to prepare for a major military engagement at Salamis, where they would crush the Persians and effectively end the invasion of Greece.

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  The Immortals were the elite heavy infantry of the Persian army and one of the most terrifying military organizations of the classical era. Formed under Cyrus the Great, this unit always consisted of ten thousand men, and for every warrior who died another was immediately promoted to his place. Since the regiment never appeared to suffer any lasting casualties, many of Persia’s enemies believed these royal bodyguards were literally invincible.

  Epialtes—the spineless ass-helmet who led the Persians around the mountain pass—fled to the land of Thessaly, where he was killed a few years later in a drunken bar fight by a dude named Athenades. Even though the reasons behind the killing were completely unrelated to the betrayal at Thermopylae, the Spartan government bestowed a massive reward on Athenades anyway.

  Xerxes’s first attempt to cross the Hellespont was unsuccessful due to inordinately choppy waters. When the emperor of Persia heard about this, he ordered the ocean whipped for daring to defy him. So some dude went out on the beach and smacked the water with a cat-o’-nine-tails a couple of times, and everybody called it a day. I’m pretty certain that this idea sounded a lot better in Xerxes’s head.

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  FAMOUS LAST STANDS

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  MAGELLAN’S DOUCHERY (1521)

  The Portuguese conquistador Ferdinand Magellan landed a force of fifty men on the Philippine island of Visayas with the intention of teaching the natives a lesson in Catholicism and whup-ass, with an emphasis on the latter. His syllabus included things like randomly firing crossbow bolts at the natives and burning their villages to the ground, so fifteen hundred pissed-off Filipino stick fighters, led by their chieftain Lapu-Lapu, responded by charging into the surf and bludgeoning Magellan into a thin red paste. His body was never recovered.

  THE SACK OF ROME (1527)

  The jerkwad soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire proved themselves to be neither holy nor Roman when they plundered the Eternal City in 1527, torching it to the ground and using its citizens for crossbow target practice. During the destruction of the city, 189 members of the Swiss Guards fought a desperate last stand outside the gates of the Vatican in a valiant effort to buy the Pope time to escape through his secret Pope passage. His Holiness evaded the rampaging army, but only forty-two guardsmen survived the melee.

  MIRACLE AT MYEONGNYANG (1597)

  Legendary Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin and his battle group of just thirteen warships went up against an armada of three hundred Japanese cruisers, all bearing down on him and filled to the brim with angry, screaming, katana-wielding samurai warriors. Yi positioned his tiny force in a narrow strait with cliffs on either side; the Japanese poured into the gap at top speed, and ran head-on into a powerful current that slowed them down considerably and left them exposed to withering cannon fire from the Korean battleships. During the course of the battle, Yi’s tiny fleet relentlessly bombarded the enemy, and when the smoke cleared, he had sunk 123 Japanese ships and killed more than twelve thousand enemy sailors, including the admiral in command of the entire Japanese navy. Yi’s losses totaled three wounded and two killed.

  THE LEGION DIES BUT DOES NOT SURRENDER (1863)

  Captain Jean Danjou of the French Foreign Legion, a lights-out ass-kicker with a wooden hand and a badass Rollie Fingers–style handlebar moustache, led a detachment of sixty-five Legionnaires in the desperate defense of a small hacienda at Cameron against two thousand Mexican troops. The Legion tenaciously fought to the end—the final five survivors, completely out of bullets, mounted a balls-out bayonet charge against an entire battalion of enemy riflemen.

  RORKE’S DRIFT (1879)

  The 139 men of 2nd Battalion, 24th Regiment of the British Army found their small makeshift fort completely surrounded by an almost endless throng of spear-toting, face-stabbing Zulu warriors. The natives charged and broke through the outer defenses, and fierce hand-to-hand fighting ensued. Remarkably, the British somehow repelled the tribesmen, killing more than four hundred of the enemy during the bloody carnage. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded for actions during the battle, the most ever issued to one regiment in a single battle.

  THE BATTLE OF THE SARAGARHI (1897)

  A small garrison of just twenty-one Sikh warriors was sneak-attacked by a throng of more than ten thousand well-armed Orakzai tribesmen in the mountains of India. Unable to receive reinforcements in time and unwilling to surrender their strategically critical mountain fortress, these valiant men vowed to fight to the death. They withstood several determined assaults by the fierce Orakzai (not to be confused with Uruk-Hai) warriors, even fending off the invaders in hand-to-hand combat on a couple of occasions. The entire garrison was eventually killed to the man, but these ass-wrecking Sikhs managed to take six hundred enemy troops with them and checked the enemy advance long enough for the main body of the British Army to arrive and smash the tribal forces.

  THE STALINGRAD OF THE EAST (1944)

  At the Battle of Kohima a small, undersupplied garrison of fifteen hundred British and Indian soldiers fought in desperate defense of a tiny country club situated high in the forested mountains of Burma, holding out for thirteen days against a massive, continuous onslaught of more than twenty thousand Japanese troops. At one point during the battle, the two armies were dug in on opposite sides of a tennis court, taking potshots at each other from thirty feet away and making Federer and Nadal look like total pussies. When the garrison was finally relieved by Allied reinforcements, its defensive perimeter occupied a mere 350 square yards.

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  3

  XENOPHON

  (431–355 BCE)

  Whoever among you desires to return to his family, let him remember to fight bravely, for that is the only means to affect it. Whoever has a mind to live, let him endeavor to conquer; for the part of the conqu
eror is to inflict death, that of the conquered to receive it. If any of you covet riches, let him endeavor to overcome; for the victorious not only preserve their own possessions, but acquire those of the enemy.

  I’M GOING TO GO OUT ON A LIMB HERE AND SAY THAT XENOPHON IS PROBABLY THE MOST BADASS GREEK HERO YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF. This stalwart Athenian military commander fearlessly led a tough-as-hell group of ten thousand mercenaries on an odyssey so monumentally epic that it would make Homer crap his pants, traveling the entire length of the known world in pursuit of adventure, wealth, and jerkwads who needed to get their faces smashed, and then fighting his way home when all the odds were stacked up against him.

  The saga begins with young Xenophon serving in a battle-hardened mercenary outfit of ten thousand Greek heavy infantrymen led by the noble Prince Cyrus of Persia. Cyrus’s brother Artaxerxes was the king, and Prince Cyrus was pretty convinced that his bro was a giant raging moron unfit to run a PTA meeting, let alone govern the most powerful empire in the entire known world, so the fratricidal prince put together a ginormous army and set out to drown his brother in a sea of blood. For six months a mixed Greek and Persian army marched from the Mediterranean Sea into the heart of Persia, covering nearly a thousand miles before arriving outside the gates of Babylon itself—the farthest any Greek military force had ever ventured. To put the trip into perspective, this is roughly the equivalent of traveling from New York City to Des Moines, Iowa. On foot. Through the desert. With heavy armor, a shield, a full backpack, a sword, a canteen, and a six-foot-long spear strapped to your body. Basically, this mission wasn’t for whiny schoolgirls who complained about blisters, deadlines, or bad hair days.