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response to Xerxes’ demand that the Spartans lay down their arms. Leonidas’ reply was two words, Molon labe. “Come and get them.”
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.
“War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, call forth all that is noble and honorable 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.
“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.”
His Majesty indicated His campaign throne, which stood in the lamplight beneath the pinnacle of the tent. “Do you see that chair, my friends? No mortal can be lonelier or more isolated than He who sits upon it.
Whom can a king trust who comes into His hearing? What man enters before Him but with some secret desire, passion, grievance or claim, which he employs all his artifice and guile to conceal? Who speaks the truth before a king? A man addresses Him either in fear for that which He may seize or in avarice for that which He may bestow. None comes before Him but as a suppliant. His heart’s business the flatterer speaks not aloud, but all he obscures beneath the cloak of dissemblance and dissimulation.
Fear conquers fear. This is how we Spartans do it, counterpoising to fear of death a greater fear: that of dishonor. Of exclusion from the pack.”
“We are where we must be, and we will do what we must.”
“When a warrior fights not for himself, but for his brothers, when his most passionately sought goal is neither glory nor his own life’s preservation, but to spend his substance for them, his comrades, not to abandon them, not to prove unworthy of them, then his heart truly has achieved contempt for death, and with that he transcends himself and his actions touch the sublime. This is why the true warrior cannot speak of battle save to his brothers who have been there with him. This truth is too holy, too sacred, for words. I myself would not presume to give it speech, save here now, with you.”
“The opposite of fear,” Dienekes said, “is love.”
“Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we’ll all be sharing dinner in hell.”
I will tell His Majesty what a king is. 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.
