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2. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje

Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje is another gentlemen who betrayed the right side and deserves to be deemed as a hero. He was a Dutch scholar of oriental languages and religion of Islam.

PHOTO: Wikipedia

Hurgronje went to Mecca in 1884 after being in consultancy with the Ottoman governor in Jeddah. He quickly embraced the Arabian culture and many believed him to be a Muslim. In his letter to a friend back home he confessed that “he was only pretending to be a Muslim”.

Hurgronje took active part in the Aceh War. Using his fluent Arabic and deep understanding of Arabian ways, he helped the Dutch crush the Aceh revolution – a conflict that had claimed lives of 50,000 people.

PHOTO: Wikipedia

1. Ephialtes of Trachis

Ephialtes of Trachis betrayed his own people. His motive was simple: greed. In exchange for gold, he sold out the Greeks to the Persians. He gave Persians detailed route and formations of the Greek army positioned at Thermopylae. The Persians won that battle quite easily in 480 BC.

PHOTO: Wikipedia

Ephialtes betrayal is recorded in the accounts of Greek historian Herodotus:

Xerxes was pleased by what Ephialtes promised to accomplish. He immediately became overjoyed and sent out Hydarnes and the men under Hydarnes’ command, who set out from the camp at about lamp-lighting time. This path had been discovered by the native Malians, who used it to guide the Thessalians into Phocis when the Phocians had fenced off the pass with a wall and were sheltered from the war. So long ago the Malians had discovered that the pass was in no way a good thing.

The course of the path is as follows: it begins at the river Asopus as it flows through the ravine, and this mountain and the path have the same name, Anopaea. This Anopaea stretches along the ridge of the mountain and ends at Alpenus, the Locrian city nearest to Malis, near the rock called Blackbuttock and the seats of the Cercopes, where it is narrowest.

This, then, was the nature of the pass. The Persians crossed the Asopus and travelled all night along this path, with the Oetaean mountains on their right and the Trachinian on their left. At dawn they came to the summit of the pass.

There is a comical end to the story; Epilates didn’t receive any reward from the Persians as they were defeated in the Battle of Salamis shortly afterwards.