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Episode Six: “Come And Take Them”

2500 years ago, the Persian king Xerxes, while invading Greece with an army of two million men (according to Herodotus), confronted the defending Greeks, led by 300 Spartan warriors, at a narrow pass called Thermopylae.

Xerxes demanded that the Spartans lay down their arms.

If you travel to Thermopylae today, you’ll see a great statue of the Spartan king Leonidas, who commanded the defenders on that day.

On the statue are only two words:

Molon Labe—”Come and take them”—Leonidas’ answer to the Persian invader’s demand.

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“Get to true identity” is not always happy

Last week we explored the story concept of

Get to true identity.

The examples we cited-Huck Finn, Bogey in Casablanca, Thelma and Louise-all got to be who they really were by the climax of their stories. And their endings (and I count Thelma and Louise’s in this category) were happy.

But true identity doesn’t always equate to riding off into the sunset. Ask Oedipus. Ask Shane. Ask Jake Gittes.

Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes in “Chinatown”

These latter tales are tragedies. To me, that makes them a loftier form of fiction, even a transcendent one. But they are definitely not fun finishes.

When Oedipus, king of Thebes, gets to his true identity, i.e. the fate-doomed stranger who has killed his father and married his mother (and thus is the source of the god-spawned pestilence that is destroying his beloved city), his world collapses. In agony, he plunges stakes into his eyes.

When Shane gets to his true identity-a gunfighter who can never turn the page to become a normal person and live a regular life-he is forced by his own sense of honor to “ride on,” leaving behind not just the people he has come to love but his last chance at happiness.

And our private detective J.J. Gittes? The best anyone can tell him at the tragic end of his tale is, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” 

The Greeks had a word for it.

Anagnorisis.

The moment when a character in a drama realizes their true identity. In Greek tragedy, this moment coincided with the peripeteia, the “reversal of fortune.”

At this moment in the drama, we in the audience realize that the true engine of the story is not Oedipus or Shane or Jake.

The real hero is the gods.

Fate.

Destiny. 

The unseen, unknowable forces at work in all aspects of human endeavor. 

This, however, does not negate the principle of 

Get to true identity.

It simply adds another, deeper dimension to it.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,

nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches

to the intelligent, nor yet favor to men of knowledge;

but time and chance happeneth to them all.

“Get to true identity” is not always happy.

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Episode Five: A Society of Virtue

Lycurgus was the founder of Sparta. The first thing he did was outlaw money. He wanted his people to pursue virtue instead.

The equivalent of a Spartan dime was a two-pound lump of iron, dipped in vinegar so it would be useless for any other purpose.

In today’s video, we’ll examine the warrior virtues that the ancients aspired to … and begin to ask how these ideals can be applied today (and should be applied) to other kinder, gentler pursuits.

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Episode 5: A Society of Virtue

Lycurgus was the founder of Sparta. The first thing he did was outlaw money. He wanted his people to pursue virtue instead.

The equivalent of a Spartan dime was a two-pound lump of iron, dipped in vinegar so it would be useless for any other purpose.

In today’s video, we’ll examine the warrior virtues that the ancients aspired to … and begin to ask how these ideals can be applied today (and should be applied) to other kinder, gentler pursuits.

The post Episode 5: A Society of Virtue first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

Episode Four: “Add a Step to It”

Spartan quips and Spartan swords were notoriously short.

The story goes that a young warrior remarked on this stubbiness the first time his mother handed him this weapon.

Her reply?

“Add a step to it.”

Meaning, Get that much closer to the enemy.

In today’s video, we explore the clipped, laconic speech of the ancient Spartans and tell the tale of their famous one-word response to a king who threatened to invade their country.

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Get to True Identity

We’ve talked in recent weeks about the story-defining concept of

Get to “I love you.”

For me, as I’m working on a new story, this way of thinking is tremendously helpful. It doesn’t work for every book or screenplay but it sure works for a lot of ‘em.

Start with two characters who are as far apart emotionally, materially, politically, and spiritually as possible. They don’t have to be actual lovers, nor does “I love you” have to imply anything physical or romantic. The pair can be an adult and a child (Paper Moon and True Grit), a human and a non-human, a mouse and a mutant. “I love you” can happen within a single character (Far from Heaven), who at story’s end comes to accept and embrace not a separate character but her own self.

Here’s another paradigm I find extremely helpful:

Get to true identity.

In the climax of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck tears up the letter he had forced himself to write turning in his friend Jim, he has reached his true identity.

When Bogey puts Ingrid on the plane to Lisbon, he has reached his true identity.

When Thelma and Louise go soaring into thin air in their ’66 T-bird, they have reached their true identity.

Walter White (Bryan Cranston) gets to his true identity as “Heisenberg” in Vince Gilligan’s BREAKING BAD

Pick any one of a thousand books or movies (dramas, tragedies, comedies … the principle applies across the board) and you’ll see more often than not this paradigmatic  progression:

Act One: Hero starts with a warped and deformed self-conception (Huck, Thelma, Bogey).

Act Two: Hero is compelled by events and her own decisions to embrace a new and initially terrifying (to her) view of herself.

Act Three: In climax, hero embraces this new identity-what we as viewers and readers can see clearly as her true identity-whole-heartedly and in a manner that permits of no going back.

Even mild-mannered Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in Breaking Bad, by the end of series when he has become the arch-villain “Heisenberg,” is true to this principle. That’s why for me the whole burn-down-the-world ending worked. Even within his unrepentant villainy, Walter/Heisenberg manages to sacrifice himself to save his friend Jesse (Aaron Paul).

P.S. On another subject, if you missed the announcement last week of our new video series, The Warrior Archetype, you can sign up (below) to subscribe.

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Episode Three: Spartan Women, Part Two

Why did king Leonidas pick the specific 300 warriors that he did to fight the Persians (and to face certain death) at Thermopylae?

To this day, no one knows.

In Gates of Fire, I imagined an answer. Leonidas chose his Three Hundred—including himself, for he knew he too would die in the coming battle—not for their own courage but for the courage of their women.

In today’s video, we’ll investigate further the mindset of these wives and mothers, sisters and daughters of the ancient world’s premier warrior culture.

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Episode Two: “With This Or On It”

It’s only fitting to begin our exploration of the Warrior Archetype with ancient Sparta. But let’s not start with the men. Let’s start with the women. Spartan women were famous as the most beautiful and the free-est in the ancient world. But they were also the toughest-minded and the fiercest enforcers of the warrior ethos to which their husbands, sons, and fathers aspired. Let’s begin this series with them.

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A COVID-spawned enterprise

When the coronavirus first hit, I thought to myself, “How can I help? People are facing tremendous new psychological and emotional challenges. What can I share? How can I contribute?”

I started doing a no-frills video series on Instagram … just two-minute pieces with me on-camera … in which I’d recommend books that I thought might fortify all of us in this new upside-down world. Inevitably a bunch of these titles came from the ancient world—Xenophon, Herodotus, Arrian, Thucydides, etc.

Short version:

I’ve decided to expand this series.

This intro video describes what I’m trying to do.

I’m calling the series The Warrior Archetype. The episodes will be five or six minutes instead of two. I’m planning on fifty episodes or more. Two a week. Monday and Thursday. All videos with transcripts. 

I’m going to start with the ancient Spartans and Athenians and follow the thread up through the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, the Romans … and on into the Bhagavad-Gita and the inner war that you and I fight every day, not just against the forces of self-sabotage inside our own heads but against the individual and collective dark energy that seems to be inundating the nation and the planet more and more every day.

There’s a SUBSCRIBE box at the bottom of the page. Sign up and you’ll get the (free) episodes in your inbox, just like “Writing Wednesdays.” I would not presume to automatically switch any current “WW” subscriber over. If you don’t opt-in, you won’t get the new series.

P.S. Don’t worry, “Writing Wednesdays” is not going anywhere. “WW” will continue to be delivered every Wednesday. It ain’t going away!

Episode One: Introducing The Warrior Archetype

Today begins a new video series. I’ll be spending the next several months talking about what I call The Warrior Archetype. This series will look at the idea of what a warrior is in ancient times and modern times; the internal battle and the external battle; the warrior in each of us. Hope you’ll join me. Looking forward to comments and new conversations.