Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

  The army was at the Oaks, in the Otona valley, a blistering late summer afternoon, on an eightnighter, what they call in Lakedaemon, the only city which practices it, an oktonyktia. These are regimental exercises normally, though in this case it involved a division. An entire mom, more than twelve hundred men with full armor and battle train including an equal number of squires and helots, had marched out into the high valleys and drilled in darkness for four nights, sleeping in the day in open bivouac, by watches, at full readiness with no cover, then drilling day and night for the following three days. Conditions were deliberately contrived to make the exercise as close as possible to the rigor of actual campaign, simulating everything except casualties. There were mock night assaults up twenty-degree slopes, each man bearing full kit and panoplia, sixtyfive to eighty pounds of shield and armor. Then assaults down the hill. Then more across. The terrain was chosen for its boulder-strewn aspect and the numerous gnarled and low-branched oaks which dotted the slopes. The skill was to flow around everything, like water over rocks, without breaking the line.

  No amenities whatever were brought. Wine was at half-rations the first four days, none the second two, then no liquid at all, including water, for the final two. Rations were hard linseed loaves, which Dienekes declared fit only for barn insulation, and figs alone, nothing hot. This type of exercise is only partially in anticipation of night action; its primary purpose is training for surefootedness, for orientation by feel within the phalanx and for action without sight, particularly over uneven ground. It is axiomatic among the Lakedaemonians that an army must be able to dress and maneuver the line as skillfully blind as sighted, for, as His Majesty knows, in the dust and terror of the othismos, the initial battlefield collision and the horrific scrum that ensues, no man can see more than five feet in any direction, nor hear even his own cries above the din.

  It is a common misconception among the other Hellenes, and one deliberately cultivated by the Spartans, that the character of Lakedaemonian military training is brutal and humorless in the extreme. Nothing could be further from the fact. I have never experienced under other circumstances anything like the relentless hilarity that proceeds during these otherwise grueling field exercises. The men bitch and crack jokes from the moment the salpinx' blare sounds reveille till the final bone-fatigued hour when the warriors curl up in their cloaks for sleep, and even then you can hear cracks being muttered and punchy laughter breaking out in odd corners of the field for minutes until sleep, which comes on like a hammerblow, overtakes them.

  It is that peculiar soldiers' humor which springs from the experience of shared misery and often translates poorly to those not on the spot and enduring the same hardship. What's the difference between a Spartan king and a mid-ranker? One man will lob this query to his mate as they prepare to bed down in the open in a cold driving ram. His friend considers mock-theatrically for a moment. The king sleeps in that shithole over there, he replies. We sleep m this shithole over here.

  The more miserable the conditions, the more convulsing the jokes become, or at least that's how it seems. I have witnessed venerable Peers of fifty years and more, with thick gray in their beards and countenances as distinguished as Zeus', dropping helpless with mirth onto hands and knees, toppling onto their backs and practically pissing down their legs they were laughing so hard.

  Once on an errand I saw Leonidas himself, unable to get to his feet for a minute or more, so doubled over was he from some otherwise untranslatable wisecrack. Each time he tried to rise, one of his tent companions, grizzled captains in their late fifties but to him just boyhood chums he still addressed by their agoge nicknames, would torment him with another variation on the joke, which would reconvulse him and drop him back upon his knees.

  This, and other like incidents, endeared Leonidas univer-sally to the men, not just the Spartiate Peers but the Gentleman-Rankers and perioikoi as well. They could see their king, at nearly sixty, enduring every bit of misery they did. And they knew that when battle came, he would take his place not safely in the rear, but in the front rank, at the hottest and most perilous spot on the field.

  The purpose of an eight-nighter is to drive the individuals of the division, and the unit itself, beyond the point of humor. It is when the jokes stop, they say, that the real lessons are learned and each man, and the mora as a whole, make those incremental advances which pay off in the ultimate crucible. The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. 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.

  The seventh day had come and gone now, and the army had reached that stage of exhaustion and short-temperedness that the eight-nighter was contrived to produce. It was late afternoon; the men were just rousing themselves from some pitifully inadequate catnap, parched and filthy and stink-begrimed, in anticipation of the final night's drill. Everyone was hungry and tired and drained utterly of fluid. A hundred variations were spun out on the same joke, each man's wish for a real war so he could finally get more than a half hour's snooze and a bellyful of hot chow.

  The men were dressing their long sweat-matted hair, griping and bitching, while their squires and helots, as miserable and dehydrated as they, handed them the last dry fig cake, without wine or water, and readied them for the sunset sacrifice, while their stacked arms and panoplia waited in perfect order for the night's work to begin.

  Alexandras' training platoon was already awake and in formation, with eight others of the fourth age-class, boys thirteen and fourteen under their twenty-year-old drill instructors, on the lower slopes below the army's camp. These agoge platoons were regularly exposed to the sight of their elders and the rigors they endured, as a means of rousing their emulative instincts to even greater levels of exertion. I had been dispatched to the upper camp with a message stick when the commotion came from back down across the plain.

  I turned and saw Alexandros singled out at the edge of his platoon, with Polynikes, the Knight and Olympic champion, standing before him, raging. Alexandros was fourteen, Polynikes twenty-three; even at a range of a hundred yards you could see the boy was terrified.

  This warrior Polynikes was no man to be trifled with. He was a nephew of Leonidas, with a prize of valor already to his name, and utterly pitiless. Apparently he had come down from the upper camp on some errand, had passed the boys of the agoge in their lineup and spotted some breach of discipline.

  Now the Peers on the slope above could see what it was, Alexandros had neglected his shield, or to use the Doric term, etimasen, defamed it. Somehow he had allowed it to lie outside his grasp, facedown, untended on the ground with its big concave bowl pointing at the sky.

  Polynikes stood in front of him. What is this I see in the dirt before me? he roared. The Spartiates uphill could hear every syllable.

  It must be a chamber pot, with its bowl peeking up so daintily.

  Is it a chamber pot? he demanded of Alexandros. The boy answered no.

  Then what is it?

  It is a shield, lord.

  Polynikes declared this impossible.

  It can't be a shield, I'm certain of that. His voice carried powerfully up the amphitheater of the valley. Because not even the dumbest bum-fucked shitworm of a paidarion would leave a shield lying facedown where he couldn't snatch it up in an instant when the enemy came upon him. He towered above the mortified boy.

  It is a chamber pot, Polynikes declared. Fill it.

  The torture began.

  Alexandras was ordered to piss into his shield. It was a training shield, yes. But Dienekes knew as he looked down with the other Peers from the slope above that this particular aspis, patched and repatched over decades, had belonged to Alexandras' father and grandfather before him.

  Alexandras was so scared and so dehydrated, he couldn't raise a drop.

  Now a second factor entered the equation. This was the tendency among t
he youths in training, those who were not for the moment the object of their superiors' rage, to convulse with perverse glee at the misery of whatever luckless mate now found himself spitted above the coals. Up and down the line of boys, teeth sank into tongues seeking to suppress this fear-inspired hilarity. One lad named Ariston, who was extremely handsome and the fastest sprinter of the fourth class, something of a younger version of Polynikes himself, could not contain himself. A snort escaped his clamped jaws.

  Polynikes turned upon him in fury. Ariston had three sisters, all what the Lakedaemonians call two-lookers, meaning they were so pretty that one look was not enough, you had to look twice to appreciate them.

  Polynikes asked Ariston if he thought this was funny.

  No, lord, the boy replied.

  If you think this is funny, wait till you get into combat. You'll think that's hysterical.

  No, lord.

  Oh yes you will. You'll be giggling like your goddam sisters. He advanced a pace nearer. Is that what you think war is, you fucking come-spot?

  No, lord.

  Polynikes pressed his face inches from the boy's, glowering into his eyes with a look of blistering malice. Tell me. Which do you think will be the bigger laugh: when you take an enemy spear eighteen inches up the dogblossom, or when your psalm-singing mate Alexandras takes one?

  Neither, lord. Ariston's face was stone.

  You're afraid of me, aren't you? That's the real reason you're laughing. You're so fucking happy it wasn't you I singled out.

  No, lord.

  What? You're not afraid of me?

  Polynikes demanded to know which it was. Because if Ariston was afraid of him, then he was a coward. And if he wasn't, he was reckless and ignorant, which was even worse.

  Which is it, you miserable mound of shit? 'Cause you'd better fucking well be afraid of me. I'll put my dick in your right ear, pull it out your left and fill that chamber pot myself.

  Polynikes ordered the other boys to take up Alexandras' slack. While their pathetic dribbles of urine splotched onto the wood and leather-padded frame, over the good-luck talismans that Alexandras' mother and sisters had made and that hung from the inner frame, Polynikes returned his attention to Alexandras, querying him on the protocol of the shield, which the boy knew and had known since he was three.

  The shield must stand upright at all times, Alexandras declaimed at the top of his voice, with its forearm sleeve and handgrip at the ready. If a warrior stand at the rest, his shield must lean against his knees. If he sit or lie, it must be supported upright by the tripous basis, a light threelegged stand which all bore inside the bowl of the concave hoplon, in a carrying nest made for that purpose.

  The other youths under Polynikes' orders had now finished urinating as best they could into the hollow of Alexandras' shield. I glanced at Dienekes. His features betrayed no emotion, though I knew he loved Alexandras and wished for nothing more than to dash down the slope and murder Polynikes.

  But Polynikes was right. Alexandros was wrong. The boy must be taught a lesson.

  Polynikes now had Alexandros' tripous basis in his hand. The little tripod was comprised of three dowels joined at one end by a leather thong. The dowels were the thickness of a man's finger and about eighteen inches long. Line of battle! Polynikes bellowed. The platoon of boys formed up.

  He had them all lay their shields, defamed, facedown in the dirt, exactly as Alexandros had done.

  By now twelve hundred Spartiates up the hill were observing the spectacle, along with an equal number of squires and helot attendants.

  Shields, port!

  The boys lunged for their heavy, grounded hopla. As they did, Polynikes lashed at Alexandras' face with the tripod. Blood sprung. He swatted the next boy and the next until the fifth at last wrestled his twenty-pound, unwieldy shield off the ground and up into place to defend himself.

  He made them do it again and again and again.

  Starting at one end of the line, then the other, then the middle. Polynikes, as I have said, was an Agiad, one of the Three Hundred Knights and an Olympic victor besides. He could do anything he liked. The drill instructor, who was just an eirene, had been brushed aside, and could do nothing but look on in mortification.

  This is hilarious, isn't it? Polynikes demanded of the boys. I'm beside myself, aren't you? I can hardly wait to see combat, which will be even more fun.

  The youths knew what was coming next.

  Tree fucking.

  When Polynikes tired of torturing them here, he would have their drill instructor march them over to the edge of the plain, to some particularly stout oak, and order them, in formation, to push the tree down with their shields, just the way they would assault an enemy in battle.

  The boys would take station in ranks, eight deep, the shield of each pressed into the hollow of the boy's back before him, with the leading boy's shield mashed by their combined weight and pressure against the oak. Then they would do othismos drill.

  They would push.

  They would strain.

  They would fuck that tree for all they were worth., The soles of their bare feet would churn the dirt, heaving and straining until a rut had been excavated ankle-deep, while they crushed each other's guts humping and hurling, grinding into that unmoveable trunk. When the front-rank boy could stand no more, he would assume the position of the rearmost and the second boy would move up.

  Two hours later Polynikes would casually return, perhaps with several other young warriors, who had themselves been through this hell more than once during their own agoge years. These would observe with shock and disbelief that the tree was still standing. By God, these dog-strokers have been at it half the watch and that pitiful little sapling is still right where it was! Now effeminacy would be added to the list of the lads' crimes. It was unthinkable that they be allowed to return to the city while this tree yet defied them; such failure would disgrace their fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins, all the gods and heroes of their line, not to mention their hounds, cats, sheep and goats and even the rats in their helots' barns, who would hang their heads and have to slink off to Athens or some other rump-split polis where men were men and knew how to put out a respectable fucking.

  That tree is the enemy!

  Fuck the enemy!

  On it would go, into all-night shield drill which by mid second watch would have reduced the boys to involuntary regurgitation and defecation; they would be puking and shitting themselves, their bodies shattered utterly from exhaustion, and then, when the dawn sacrifices at last brought clemency and reprieve, the boys would fall in for another full day of training without a minute's sleep.

  This torment, the boys knew now as they stood under Polynikes' face-lashing, was yet to come.

  This was what they had to look forward to.

  By this point every nose in the formation had been broken. Each boy's face was a sheet of blood.

  Polynikes was just taking a breath (he had tired his arm with all that swatting) when Alexandras thoughtlessly reached with a hand to the side of his blood-begrimed face.

  What do you think you're doing, buttfuck? Polynikes turned instantly upon him.

  Wiping the blood, lord.

  What are you doing that for?

  So I can see, lord.

  Who the fuck told you you had a right to see?

  Polynikes continued his blistering mockery. Why did Alexandras think the division was out here, training at night? Was it not to learn to fight when they couldn't see? Did Alexandras think that in combat he would be allowed to pause to wipe his face? That must be it. Alexandras would call out to the enemy and they would halt politely for a moment, so the boy could pluck a nosenugget from his nostril or wipe a turdberry from his crease. I ask you again, is this a chamber pot?

  No, lord. It is my shield.

  Again Polynikes' dowels blasted the boy across the face. 'My'? he demanded furiously.

  'My'?

  Dienekes looked on, mortifi
ed, from where he stood at the edge of the upper camp. Alexandras was excruciatingly aware that his mentor was watching; he seemed to summon his composure, rally all his senses. The boy stepped forward, shield at high port. He straightened to attention before Polynikes and enunciated in his loudest, clearest voice:

  This is my shield. I bear it before me into battle, but it is not mine alone. It protects my brother on my left. It protects my city. I will never let my brother out of its shadow nor my city out of its shelter. I will die with my shield before me facing the enemy.

  The boy finished. The last of his words, shouted at the top of his voice, echoed for a long moment around the valley walls.