Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

Polynikes turned again to Alexandros. When he resumed now, his voice was gentle and without malice; if anything it seemed informed with something not unlike kindness and even, odd as it sounds, sorrow. “Mankind as it is constituted,” Polynikes said, “is a boil and a canker. Observe the specimens in any nation other than Lakedaemon. Man is weak, greedy, craven, lustful, prey to every species of vice and depravity. He will lie, steal, cheat, murder, melt down the very statues of the gods and coin their gold as money for whores. This is man. This is his nature, as all the poets attest. “Fortunately God in his mercy has provided a counterpoise to our species’ innate depravity. That gift, my young friend, is war. “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. 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 honor before the gods. Do not despise war, my young friend, nor delude yourself that mercy and compassion are virtues superior to andreia, to manly valor.”

“And why,” the lady asked, “does a boy of no city display so much loyalty to this alien country of Lakedaemon, of which he is not, and can never be, a part?” I knew the answer but could not judge how much I dared entrust to her. I responded obliquely, speaking briefly of Bruxieus. “My tutor instructed me that a boy must have a city or he cannot grow to be fully a man. Since I no longer possessed a city of my own, I felt free to choose any I liked.” This was a novel point of view, but I could see the lady approved of it. “Why not, then, a polis of riches or opportunity? Thebes or Corinth or Athens? All that can come to you here is coarse bread and a striped back.” I replied with a proverb that Bruxieus had once quoted to Diomache and me: that other cities produce monuments and poetry, Sparta produces men.