Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

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.”

Upon the modern one, called the Leonidas monument in honor 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.”

Yet did His Majesty in His God-inspired wisdom instruct His servant so to translate the man’s speech as to render it in whatever tongue and idiom necessary to duplicate the precise effect in Greek. This have I attempted to do. I pray that His Majesty recall the charge He imparted and hold His servant blameless for those portions of the following transcription which will and must offend any civilized hearer.

POV from a captive Greek.

Thermopylae is a spa. The word in Greek means “hot gates,” from the thermal springs and, as His Majesty knows, the narrow and precipitous defiles which form the only passages by which the site may be approached—in Greek, pylae or pylai, the East and West Gates.

When I say Spartiates, I mean the formal term in Greek, Spartiatai, which refers to Lakedaemonians of the superior class, full Spartans—the homoioi—Peers or Equals. None of the class called Gentleman-Rankers or of the perioikoi, the secondary Spartans of less than full citizenship, or those enlisted from the surrounding Lakedaemonian towns, fought at the Hot Gates, though toward the end when the surviving Spartiates became so few that they could no longer form a fighting front, a certain “leavening element,” as Dienekes expressed it, of freed slaves, armor bearers and battle squires, was permitted to fill the vacated spaces.

“They won’t step so smartly when heaven starts to rain arrows and javelins. Each man will be edging to the right to get into his rankmate’s shadow.” Meaning the shelter of the shield of the man on his right.

Things are fallen which had stood upright. Things are free which should be bound, and bound which should be free. Things which had been hoarded in secret now blow and tumble in the open, and those who had hoarded them watch with dull eyes and let them go. Boys have become men and men boys. Slaves now stand free and freemen slaves. Childhood has fled.

The argives sack a city and there are no Spartans to help.

Piety demanded that we bury our fallen countrymen, but fear of enemy cavalry pushed us on. Sometimes bodies would be dragged into a ditch and a few pitiful handfuls of dirt cast over them, accompanied by a miserable prayer. The crows got so fat they could barely fly a foot off the ground.

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.

Sure enough, as soon as the belly of the coastline had swallowed the lights of Rhion behind us, a Spartan cutter emerged out of the black and made way to intercept us. Doric voices hailed the smack and ordered her to heave-to. Suddenly our skipper demanded his money. When we land, Alexandros insisted, as agreed. The beards clamped oars in their fists like weapons. Cutter’s getting closer, boys. How will it go with you if you’re caught?

“Dienekes says the mind is like a house with many rooms,” he said. “There are rooms one must not go into. To anticipate one’s death is one of those rooms. We must not allow ourselves even to think it.”

He was, as I said, not a Spartan but a Potidaean, an officer in his own country, taken captive long years past and never permitted to see his home again.

The Spartans have a term for that state of mind which must at all costs be shunned in battle. They call it katalepsis, possession, meaning that derangement of the senses that comes when terror or anger usurps dominion of the mind.

Many wept, others shuddered violently. This was not regarded as effeminate, but termed in the Doric idiom hesma phobou, purging or “fear-shedding.”

“When a man seats before his eyes the bronze face of his helmet and steps off from the line of departure, he divides himself, as he divides his ‘ticket,’ in two parts. One part he leaves behind. That part which takes delight in his children, which lifts his voice in the chorus, which clasps his wife to him in the sweet darkness of their bed. “That half of him, the best part, a man sets aside and leaves behind. He banishes from his heart all feelings of tenderness and mercy, all compassion and kindness, all thought or concept of the enemy as a man, a human being like himself. He marches into battle bearing only the second portion of himself, the baser measure, that half which knows slaughter and butchery and turns the blind eye to quarter. He could not fight at all if he did not do this.”

“Let those we spared this day stand beside us in line of battle on that day when we teach the Persian once and for all what valor free men can bring to bear against slaves, no matter how vast their numbers or how fiercely they are driven on by their child-king’s whip.”

knew it. I myself had been in Lakedaemon half a year then, a wild boy just down from the hills and consigned, since it was safer than risking ritual pollution by killing me, to the meanest of farm labor.

He glared at me with contempt. “What are they to you, moron? Your city was sacked, they say. You hate the Argives and think these sons of Herakles”—he indicated the drilling Peers, spitting the final phrase with sarcastic loathing—“are their enemies. Wake up! What do you think they would have done had they sacked your city? The same and worse! As they did to my country, to Messenia and to me. Look at my face. Look at your own. You’ve fled slavery only to become lower than a slave yourself.”

Polynikes ordered Alexandros to recite the pleasures of war, to which the boy responded by rote, citing the satisfactions of shared hardship, of triumph over adversity, of camaraderie and philadelphia, love of one’s comrades-in-arms.

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. He could not be selected.

“The lady knows full well that if a man, like this youth called Rooster, is found guilty of treason and executed, his male issue may not be allowed to live, for these, if they possess any honor whatever, will seek vengeance when they reach manhood. This is the law not merely of Lykurgus but of every city in Hellas and holds true without exception even among the barbarians.”

A woman tries to save the life of a helot slave.

“You have a son now, Dienekes,” he said. “Now you may be chosen.” My master regarded the elder quizzically, uncertain of his meaning. “For the Three Hundred,” Medon said. “For Thermopylae.”

The Hellenes defending the pass had another day, no more. His Majesty even now was offering the wealth of a province to any guide who could inform him of a track through the mountains by which the Hot Gates could be encircled. “God made no rock so steep that men couldn’t climb it, particularly driven by gold and glory. The Persians will find a way around to your rear, and even if they don’t, their fleet will break the Athenian sea line within another day. No reinforcements are coming from Sparta; the ephors know they’d only be enveloped too.