Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

There is a force beyond fear. More powerful than self-preservation.

“Listen to me, boy. 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. Most piteous of all states under heaven is that of a man alone, bereft of the gods of his home and his polis. A man without a city is not a man. He is a shadow, a shell, a joke and a mockery. That is what you have become now, my poor Xeo. No one may expect valor from one cast out alone, cut off from the gods of his home.”

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.

phobologic

The gods endow each man with a gift by which he may conquer fear;

pursuit of esoterike harmonia, that state of self-composure which the exercises of the phobologia are designed to produce.

the kithera vibrates purely, emitting only that note of the musical scale which is its alone, so must the individual warrior shed all which is superfluous in his spirit, until he himself vibrates at that sole pitch which his individual daimon dictates.

The achievement of this ideal, in Lakedaemon, carries beyond courage on the battlefield; it is considered the supreme embodiment of vi...

“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.”

virtue

Now even in the hot blood aftermath their discipline maintained them chaste and noble, above all vaunting and boasting.

This, I realized now watching Dienekes rally and tend to his men, was the role of the officer: to prevent those under his command, at all stages of battle—before, during and after—from becoming “possessed.”

To fire their valor when it flagged and rein in their fury when it threatened to take them out of hand. That

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.”

hesma phobou, purging or “fear-shedding.”

it is not that they were not afraid but that did the job despite being afraid

valor

This night, however, was not one for ease or conviviality. The souls of the twenty-eight perished hung heavily over the city. The secret shame of the warrior, the knowledge within his own heart that he could have done better, done more, done it more swiftly or with less self-preserving hesitation; this censure, always most pitiless when directed against oneself, gnawed unspoken and unrelieved at the men’s guts. No decoration or prize of valor, not victory itself, could quell it entire.

to harden the will against responding with rage and fear, the twin unmanning evils of which that state called katalepsis, possession,

everything they did tonight and every other night was not to break his spirit or crush him like a slave, but to make him stronger, to temper his will and render him more worthy of being called warrior, as they were, of taking his place as a Spartiate and a Peer.

“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.”

“Habit is a mighty ally, my young friend. The habit of fear and anger, or the habit of self-composure and courage.”

krypteia

Bear witness to that lesson they teach: 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 enroll 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.”

The king confined his instructions to the practical, prescribing actions which could be taken physically, rather than seeking to produce a state of mind, which he knew would evaporate as soon as the commanders dispersed beyond the fortifying light of the king’s fire.

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

“All my life,” Dienekes began, “one question has haunted me. What is the opposite of fear?”

“To call it aphobia, fearlessness, is without meaning. This is just a name, thesis expressed as antithesis. To call the opposite of fear fearlessness is to say nothing. I want to know its true obverse, as day of night and heaven of earth.” “Expressed as a positive,” Ariston ventured.

“How does one conquer fear of death, that most primordial of terrors, which resides in our very blood, as in all life, beasts as well as men?” He indicated the hounds flanking Suicide. “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 dishonor. Of exclusion from the pack.”

The closest I’ve come is to act despite terror.

But that’s not it either. Not the kind of courage I’m talking about. Nor is beastlike fury or panic-spawned self-preservation. These are katalepsis, possession. A rat owns as much of them as a man.”

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

Is it not this element—the nobility of setting the whole above the part—that moves us about women’s sacrifice?”

Dienekes prowled before the men. “All eyes on me! Here, brothers!” His voice penetrated, hard and throaty, carrying with the hoarse bark all combatants know when their tongue turns to leather. “Look at me, don’t look at the fighting!”

fueled only by courage, which, glorious though it was, could not prevail against the disciplined and cohesive assault which now pressed upon them.

His gallantry had elevated him second only to Leonidas in prestige among the men.

But valor must be tempered with wisdom or it is merely recklessness.

“The opposite of fear,” Dienekes said, “is love.”

Alpheus spoke quickly, unblessed by the orator’s gift but graced simply with the sincerity of his heart. “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.”

So I say to you now only what I would say to my own men, knowing the fear that stands unspoken in each heart—not of death, but worse, of faltering or failing, of somehow proving unworthy in this, the ultimate hour.”

“Here is what you do, friends. Forget country. Forget king. Forget wife and children and freedom. Forget every concept, however noble, that you imagine you fight for here today. Act for this alone: for the man who stands at your shoulder. He is everything, and everything is contained within him. That’s all I know. That’s all I can tell you.”

A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.

That is a king, Your Majesty. A king does not expend his substance to enslave men, but by his conduct and example makes them free.