Gates Of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

Three hundred Spartans and their allies held off the invaders for seven days, until, their weapons smashed and broken from the slaughter, they fought ‘with bare hands and teeth’ (as recorded by Herodotus) before being at last overwhelmed.

Upon the modern one, called the Leonidas monument in honour of the Spartan king who fell there, is engraved his response to Xerxes’ demand that the Spartans lay down their arms. Leonidas’ reply was two words, Molon labe. ‘Come and get them.’

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

Although extraordinary valour was displayed by the entire corps of Spartans and Thespians, yet bravest of all was declared the Spartan Dienekes. It is said that on the eve of battle, he was told by a native of Trachis that the Persian archers were so numerous that, when they fired their volleys, the mass of arrows blocked out the sun. Dienekes, however, quite undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh, ‘Good. Then we’ll have our battle in the shade.’ HERODOTUS, THE HISTORIES

I will append the observation only, from the horror-benumbed apprehension of a boy shorn at one blow of mother and father, family, clan, tribe and city, that this was the first time my eyes had beheld those sights which experience teaches are common to all battles and all slaughters. This I learned then: there is always fire.

All is the obverse of what it had been. Things are fallen which had stood upright. Things are free which should be bound, and bound which should be free.

this flesh, this body, does not belong to us. Thank God it doesn’t. If I thought this stuff was mine, I could not advance a pace into the face of the enemy. But it is not ours, my friend. It belongs to the gods and to our children, our fathers and mothers and those of Lakedaemon a hundred, a thousand years yet unborn. It belongs to the city which gives us all we have and demands no less in requital.’

‘Because a warrior carries helmet and breastplate for his own protection, but his shield for the safety of the whole line.’

Only gods and heroes can be brave in isolation. A man may call upon courage only one way, in the ranks with his brothers-in-arms, the line of his tribe and his city.

Each man of Greece knew what defeat in war meant and knew that sooner or later that bitter broth would complete its circuit of the table and settle at last before his own place. Suddenly,

The Egyptian enquired of the Spartans why they wore their hair so long. Olympieus replied, quoting the lawmaker Lykurgus, ‘Because no other adornment makes a handsome man more comely or an ugly one more terrifying. And it’s free.’

In the East we have learned that which you Greeks have not. The wheel turns, and man must turn with it. To resist is not mere folly, but madness.’

‘You have never tasted freedom, friend,’ Dienekes spoke, ‘or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.’

in-arms. As the priest with his graphis and tablet of wax, the infantryman, too, has his scription. His history is carved upon his person with the stylus of steel, his alpha-bet engraved with spear and sword indelibly upon the flesh.

The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has its legs under it; the real test comes when all strength is fled and the men must produce victory on will alone.

‘This is my shield. I bear it before me into battle, but it is not mine alone. It protects my brother on my left. It protects my city. I will never let my brother out of its shadow nor my city out of its shelter. I will die with my shield before me facing the enemy.’

The Spartans have a discipline they call phobologia, the science of fear.

The Spartans are schooled to regard the foe, any foe, as nameless and faceless. In their minds it is the mark of an ill-prepared and amateur army to rely in the moments before battle on what they call pseudoandreia, false courage, meaning the artificially inflated martial frenzy produced by a general’s eleventh-hour harangue or some peak of bronze-banging bravado built to by shouting, shield-pounding and the like.

His was not, I could see now, the heroism of an Achilles. He was not a superman who waded invulnerably into the slaughter, single-handedly slaying the foe by myriads. He was just a man doing a job. A job whose primary attribute was self-restraint and self-composure, not for his own sake, but for those whom he led by his example. A job whose objective could be boiled down to the single understatement, as he did at the Hot Gates on the morning he died, of ‘performing the commonplace under uncommonplace conditions’.

‘War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, calls forth all that is noble and honourable in a man. It unites him with his brothers and binds them in selfless love, eradicating in the crucible of necessity all which is base and ignoble. There in the holy mill of murder the meanest of men may seek and find that part of himself, concealed beneath the corrupt, which shines forth brilliant and virtuous, worthy of honour before the gods. Do not despise war, my young friend, nor delude yourself that mercy and compassion are virtues superior to andreia, to manly valour.’

We spend tears now that we may conserve blood

‘Habit will be your champion. When you train the mind to think one way and one way only, when you refuse to allow it to think in another, that will produce great strength in battle.’

that other cities produce monuments and poetry, Sparta produces men.

An ‘all-sire’ unit was comprised only of men who were fathers of living sons.

nothing good in life comes but at a price. Sweetest of all is liberty. This we have chosen and this we pay for.

We have embraced the laws of Lykurgus, and they are stern laws. They have schooled us to scorn the life of leisure, which this rich land of ours would bestow upon us if we wished, and instead to enrol ourselves in the academy of discipline and sacrifice. Guided by these laws, our fathers for twenty generations have breathed the blessed air of freedom and have paid the bill in full when it was presented. We, their sons, can do no less.’

‘In years six hundred, so the poets say, no Spartan woman has beheld the smoke of the enemy’s fires.’

Greeks conscripted by Xerxes: If under compulsion you must fight us your brothers, fight badly.

‘For a wall of stone will not preserve Hellas, but a wall of men.’

Keep your men busy. If there is no work, make it up, for when soldiers have time to talk, their talk turns to fear. Action, on the other hand, produces the appetite for more action.

let them not yield pre-eminence in valour to the Spartans, rather strive to outdo them.

Remember, in warfare practice of arms counts for little. Courage tells all, and we Spartans have no monopoly on that.

What is the opposite of fear?’

‘Dogs in a pack find courage to take on a lion. Each hound knows his place. He fears the dog ranked above and feeds off the fear of the dog below. Fear conquers fear. This is how we Spartans do it, counterpoising to fear of death a greater fear: that of dishonour. Of exclusion from the pack.’

“Less philosophy, Dienekes, and more virtue.”’

There is a secret all warriors share, so private that none dare give it voice, save only to those mates drawn dearer than brothers by the shared ordeal of arms. This is the knowledge of the hundred acts of his own cowardice.

‘The opposite of fear,’ Dienekes said, ‘is love.’

‘But by our deaths here with honour, in the face of these insuperable odds, we transform vanquishment into victory. With our lives we sow courage in the hearts of our allies and the brothers of our armies left behind. They are the ones who will ultimately produce victory, not us.

‘In one way only have the gods permitted mortals to surpass them. Man may give that which the gods cannot, all he possesses, his life. My own I set down with joy, for you, friends, who have become the brother I no longer possess.’

A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.

Those events of the actual battle I count as nothing, for the fight was over in its profoundest sense before it began.

The Spartans, however, spurned Aristodemos for their prize of valour, awarding this to three other warriors, Posidonius, Philokyon and Amompharetus. The commanders adjudged Aristodemos’ heroics reckless and unsound, striving in blood madness alone in front of the line, clearly seeking death before his comrades’ eyes to expiate the infamy of his survival at Thermopylae. The valour of Posidonius, Philokyon and Amompharetus they reckoned superior, being that of men who wish to live yet still fight magnificently.