Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

No main-force army would be dispatched to Thermopylae; that tale was for public consumption only, to shore up the allies’ confidence and put iron in their backbones. Only the Three Hundred would be sent, with orders to stand and die. Dienekes would not be among them. He had no male issue.

“It contains the Spartans,” the lady Artemisia spoke. “Whom we have crushed,” Mardonius replied, “and whose king His Majesty’s forces have slain.” “We slew three hundred of them,” replied Artemisia, “and it took two million of us to do it.”

“Now, inspired by blind impulse,” she spoke toward me, “I have saved the life of this boy, my brother’s bastard’s son, and lost my husband’s in the process.”

My own wife, Thereia, held me hard, grinding against me beneath her Messenian white robe, while she held our infants crooked in one arm. She would not be husbandless for long. “Wait at least until I’m out of sight,” I joked, and held my children, whom I hardly knew. Their mother was a good woman. I wish I could have loved her as she deserved.

“Men’s pain is lightly borne and swiftly over. Our wounds are of the flesh, which is nothing; women’s is of the heart—sorrow unending, far more bitter to bear.”

He observed that often those who seek to overcome fear of death preach that the soul does not expire with the body. “To my mind this is fatuousness. Wishful thinking. Others, barbarians primarily, say that when we die we pass on to paradise. I ask them all: if you really believe this, why not make away with yourself at once and speed the trip?

“Do you know who owns it, this pure form of courage, more than any other I have known?” None around the fire answered. “My wife,” Dienekes said. He turned to Alexandros. “And your mother, the lady Paraleia.” He smiled again. “There is a clue here. The seat of this higher valor, I suspect, lies in that which is female. The words themselves for courage, andreia and aphobia, are female, whereas phobos and tromos, terror, are masculine. Perhaps the god we seek is not a god at all, but a goddess. I don’t know.”

“Let neither of us pity the other,” my cousin spoke in parting. “We are where we must be, and we will do what we must.”

With an expulsion of breath that was not a sigh but something deeper, like the whistle of death the daimon makes escaping within the avenue of the throat, he released Alexandros’ life-fled form and settled it gently upon the scarlet cloak spread beneath it on the earth. With his right hand he clasped that of the youth who had been his charge and protege since the morn of his birth. “You forgot about our hunt, Alexandros.”

A thousand years from now, Leonidas declared, two thousand, three thousand years hence, men a hundred generations yet unborn may for their private purposes make journey to our country. “They will come, scholars perhaps, or travelers from beyond the sea, prompted by curiosity regarding the past or appetite for knowledge of the ancients. They will peer out across our plain and probe among the stone and rubble of our nation. What will they learn of us? Their shovels will unearth neither brilliant palaces nor temples; their picks will prise forth no everlasting architecture or art. What will remain of the Spartans? Not monuments of marble or bronze, but this, what we do here today.”

“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.

I will never tell the city why I appointed these three hundred. I will never tell the Three Hundred themselves. But I now tell you. “‘I chose them not for their own valor, lady, but for that of their women.’

A dynamism of optimism and enterprise fired each man with belief in himself and his gods. Each citizen-warrior who had endured trial of arms in the phalanx or pulled an oar under fire on the sea now deemed himself deserving of full inclusion in all affairs and discourse of the city. That peculiar Hellenic form of government called democratia, rule of the people, had plunged its roots deep, nurtured by the blood of war;