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of parastates pais, a sort of sparring partner for the youths enrolled in the agoge, the notorious and pitiless thirteen-year training regimen which turned boys into Spartan warriors.
copse of the double-boled myrtle they called Dioscuri, the Twins,
Karneia, the festival of Apollo which prohibited taking up arms,
An “all-sire” unit was comprised only of men who were fathers of living sons. This was so that, should the warriors perish, their family lines would not be extinguished.
It was the month, as I said, of Karneius, the new year having begun at midsummer as it does in the Greek calendar,
There is a secret all warriors share, so private that none dare give it voice, save only to those mates drawn dearer than brothers by the shared ordeal of arms. This is the knowledge of the hundred acts of his own cowardice. The little things that no one sees. The comrade who fell and cried for aid. Did I pass him by? Choose my skin over his? That was my crime, of which I accuse myself in the tribunal of my heart and there condemn myself as guilty.
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.
To the Greeks, victory was proof of the might and majesty of their gods. These deities, which to our more civilized understanding appear vain and passion-possessed, riddled with folly and so prey to humanlike faults and foibles as to be unworthy of being called divine, to the Greeks embodied and personified their belief in that which was, if grander than human in scale, yet human in spirit and essence.
