Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

  The Spartans had neither moved nor made a sound.

  They waited patiently in their scarlet-cloaked ranks, neither grim nor rigid, but speaking quietly to each other words of encouragement and cheer, securing the final preparation for actions they had rehearsed hundreds of times in training and performed dozens and scores more in battle.

  Here came the foe, picking up the pace of his advance. A fast walk. A swinging stride. The line was extending and fanning open to the right, winging out as men in fear edged into the shadow of the shield of the comrade on their right; already one could see the enemy ranks stagger and fall from alignment as the bravest surged forward and the hesitant shrank back. Leonidas and the priests still stood exposed out front.

  The shallow stream yet waited before the enemy. The foe's generals, expecting the Spartans to advance first, had formed their lines so that this watercourse stood midway between the armies.

  In the enemy's plan, no doubt, the sinuous defile of the river would disorder the Lakedaemonian ranks and render them vulnerable at the moment of attack. The Spartans, however, had outwaited them. As soon as the bronze-banging began, the enemy commanders knew they could not restrain their ranks longer; they must advance while their men's blood was up, or all fervor would dissipate and terror flood inevitably into the vacuum.

  Now the river worked against the enemy. His foreranks descended into the defile, yet a quarter mile from the Spartans. Up they came, their already disordered dress and interval disintegrating further. They were again on the flat now, but with the river to their rear, the most perilous place it could be in the event of a rout.

  Leonidas stood patiently watching, flanked by the battle priests and Dekton with his goats. The enemy was now a fifth of a mile off and accelerating the pace of his advance. The Spartans still hadn't moved. Dekton handed over the first she-goat's leash. We could see him glancing apprehensively as the plain began to thunder from the pounding of the enemy's feet and the air commenced to ring with their fear- and rage-inspired cries.

  Leonidas performed the sphagia, crying aloud to Artemis Huntress and the Muses, then piercing with his own sword the throat of the sacrificial goat whose haunches he pinned from behind with his knees, his left hand hauling the beast's jaw exposed as the blade thrust through its throat. No eye in the formation failed to see the blood gush and spill into Gaia, maternal earth, splattering as it fell Leonidas' bronze greaves and painting crimson his feet in their oxhide battle soles.

  The king turned, with the life-fled victim yet clamped between his knees, to face the Skiritai, Spartiates, perioikoi and Tegeates, who still held, patient and silent, in their massed ranks. He extended his sword, dark and dripping the blood of holy sacrifice, first heavenward toward the gods whose aid he now summoned, then around, toward the fast-advancing enemy.

  Zeus Savior and Eros! his voice thundered, eclipsed but not unheard in that cacophonous din.

  Lakedaemon!

  The salpinx sounded Advance! trumpeters sustaining the eardrum-numbing note ten paces after the men had stepped off, and now the pipers' wail cut through, shrill notes of their auloi piercing the melee like the cry of a thousand Furies. Dekton heaved the butchered goat and the live one over his shoulders and scampered like hell for the safety of the ranks.

  To the beat the Spartans and their allies advanced, eight-footers at the upright, their honed and polished spearpoints flashing in the sun. Now the foe broke into an all-out charge. Leonidas, displaying neither haste nor urgency, fell into step in his place in the front rank as it advanced to envelop him, with the Knights flowing impeccably into position upon his right and left.

  Now from the Lakedaemonian ranks rose the paean, the hymn to Castor ascending from four thousand throats. On the climactic beat of the second stanza, Heaven-shining brother Skiborne hero the spears of the first three ranks snapped from the vertical into the attack.

  Words cannot convey the impact of awe and terror produced upon the foe, any foe, by this seemingly uncomplex maneuver, called in Lakedaemon spiking it or palming the pine, so simple to perform on the parade ground and so formidable under conditions of life and death. To behold it executed with such precision and fearlessness, no man surging forward out of control nor hanging back in dread, none edging right into the shadow of his rankmate's shield, but all holding solid and unbreakable, tight as the scales on a serpent's flank, the heart stopped in awe, the hair stood straight up upon the neck and shivers coursed powerfully the length of the spine.

  As when some colossal beast, brought to bay by the hounds, wheels in his fury, bristling with rage and baring his fangs, and plants himself in the power and fearlessness of his strength, so did the bronze and crimson phalanx of the Lakedaemonians now snap as one into its mode of murder.

  The left wing of the enemy, eighty across, collapsed even before the shields of their promachoi, the front-rankers, had come within thirty paces of the Spartans. A cry of dread rose from the throats of the foe, so primal it froze the blood, and then was swallowed in the tumult.

  The enemy left broke from within.

  This wing, whose advancing breadth had stood an instant earlier at forty-eight shields, abruptly became thirty, then twenty, then ten as panic flared like a gale-driven fire from terror-stricken pockets within the massed formation. Those in the first three ranks who turned in flight now collided with their comrades advancing from the rear. Shield rim caught upon shield rim, spear shaft upon spear shaft; a massive tangle of flesh and bronze ensued as men bearing seventy pounds of shield and armor stumbled and fell, becoming obstacles and impediments to their own advancing comrades. You could see the brave men stride on in the advance, crying out in rage to their countrymen as these abandoned them. Those who still clung to courage pushed past those who had forsaken it, calling out in outrage and fury, trampling the forerankers, or else, as valor deserted them too, jerked free and fled to save their own skins.

  At the height of the foe's confusion the Spartan right fell upon them. Now even the bravest of the enemy broke. Why should a man, however valorous, stand and die while right and left, fore and rear, his fellows deserted him? Shields were flung, spears cast wildly to the turf. Half a thousand men wheeled on their heels and stampeded in terror. At that instant the center and right of the enemy's line crashed shields-on into the central corps of the Spartans.

  That sound which all warriors know but which to Alexandras' and my youthful ears had been heretofore unknown and unheard now ascended from the clash and collision of the othismos.

  Once, at home when I was a child, Bruxieus and! had helped our neighbor Pierion relocate three of his stacked wooden beehives. As we jockeyed the stack into place upon its new stand, someone's foot slipped. The stacked hives dropped. From within those stoppered confines yet clutched in our hands arose such an alarum, neither shriek nor cry, growl nor roar, but a thrum from the netherworld, a vibration of rage and murder that ascended not from brain or heart, but from the cells, the atoms of the massed poleis within the hives.

  This selfsame sound, multiplied a hundred-thousandfold, now rose from the massed compacted crush of men and armor roiling beneath us on the plain. Now I understood the poet's phrase the mill of Ares and apprehended in my flesh why the Spartans speak of war as work. I felt Alexandras' fingernails dig into the flesh of my arm.

  Can you see my father? Do you see Dienekes?

  Dienekes waded into the rout below us; we could see his cross-crested curry brush at the right of the Herakles, in the fore of the third platoon. As disordered as were the ranks of the enemy, so held the Spartans' intact and cohesive. Their forerank did not charge wildly upon the foe, flailing like savages, nor did they advance with the stolid precision of the parade ground. Rather they surged, in unison, like a line of warships on the ram. I had never appreciated how far beyond the interleaved bronze of the promachoi's shields the murderous iron of their eight-footers could extend. These punched and struck, overhand, driven by the full force of the right arm and shoulder, across the upper
rim of the shield; not just the spears of the front-rankers but those of the second and even the third, extending over their mates' shoulders to form a thrashing engine that advanced like a wall of murder. As wolves in a pack take down the fleeing deer, so did the Spartan right fall upon the defenders of Antirhion, not in frenzied shrieking rage, lip-curled and fang-bared, but predator-like, cold-blooded, applying the steel with the wordless cohesion of the killing pack and the homicidal efficiency of the hunt.

  Dienekes was turning them. Wheeling his platoon to take the enemy in flank. They were in the smoke now. It became impossible to see. Dust rose in such quantities beneath the churning feet of the men, commingling with the screen of smoke from the tindered hulks, that the entire plain seemed afire, and from the choking cloud arose that sound, that terrible indescribable sound. We could sense rather than see the Herakles lochos, directly beneath us where the dust and smoke were thinner. They had routed the enemy left; their front ranks now surged into the business of cutting down those luckless bastards who had fallen or been trampled or whose panic-unstrung knees could not find strength to bear them swiftly enough from their own slaughter. On the center and right, along the whole line the Spartans and Syrakusans clashed now shield-to-shield, helmet-to-helmet. Amid the maelstrom we could catch only glimpses, and those primarily of the rear-rankers, eight deep on the Lakedaemonian side, twelve and sixteen deep on the Syrakusan, as they thrust the three-foot-wide bowls of their hoplon shields flush against the backs of the men in file before them and heaved and ground and shoved with all their strength, the soles of their footgear churning up trenches in the plain and slinging yet more dust into the already choking air.

  No longer was it possible to distinguish individual men, or even units. We could see only the tidal surge and back-surge of the massed formations and hear without ceasing that terrible, bloodstill ing sound.

  As when a flood descends from the mountains and the wall of water crashes down the dry courses, smashing into the stone-founded stakes and woven brush of the husbandman's dam, so did the Spartan line surge against the massed weight of the Syrakusans. The dam's bulk, founded as firmly against the flood as fear and forethought may devise, seems itself to dig in and hold, to plant its force fiercely into the earth, and for long moments displays no sign of buckling. But then, as the anxious planter watches, before his eyes a surge begins to capsize one deep-sunken stake, another rush undermines a stacked stone revetment. Into each fraction of a breach, the force and weight of the downrushing wave thrusts itself irresistibly, hammering deeper, tearing and gouging, widening the gap and exploiting it with each successive ripping surge.

  Now the dam wall which had cracked only a hand-breadth splits to a foot and then a yard. The mass of the plunging flood builds upon itself, as ton upon ton plummets in from the courses above, adding its weight to the irresistible ever-mounting tide. Along the banked margins of the watercourse, sheets of earth calve into the churning, boiling torrent. So now did the Syrakusan center, pounded and hammered by the Tegeate heavy infantry, the king and the Knights and the massed battalions of the Wild Olive, begin to peel and founder.

  The Skiritai had routed the enemy right. From the left the battalions of the Herakles rolled up the enemy flank. Each Syrakusan wingman forced to wheel to defend his unshielded side meant another drawn off from the forward push against the frontally advancing Spartans. The sound of the keening struggle seemed to rise for a moment, then went dead silent as desperate men summoned every reserve of valor from their shrieking, exhausted limbs. An eternity passed in the time it takes to draw a dozen breaths, and then, with the same sickening sound made by the mountain dam as it gives way unable to withstand the onrushing torrent, the Syrakusan line cracked and broke.

  Now in the dust and fire of the plain the slaughter began.

  A shout, half of joy and half of awe, sprung from the throats of the crimson-tunicked Spartans.

  Back the Syrakusan line fell, not in rout and riot as their allies the An-tirhionians had done, but in still-disciplined squads and bunches, held yet by their officers, or whatever brave men had taken it upon themselves to act as officers, maintaining their shields to the fore and closing ranks as they retreated. It was no use. The Spartan front-rankers, men of the first five age-classes, were the cream of the city in foot speed and strength, none save the officers over twenty-five years old.

  Many, like Polynikes in the van among the Knights, were sprinters of Olympic and near-Olympic stature with garland after garland won in games before the gods.

  These now, loosed by Leonidas and driven on by their own lust for glory, pressed home the sentence of steel upon the fleeing Syrakusans.

  When the trumpeters had blown the salpinx and its mind-numbing wail sounded the call to still the slaughter, even the rawest untrained eye could read the field like a book.

  There, on the Spartan right where the Herakles regiment had routed the Antirhionians, one saw the turf unchurned and the field beyond littered with enemy shields and helmets, spears and even breastplates, flung aside by the stampeding foe in his flight.

  Bodies lay scattered at intervals, facedown, with the shameful gashes of death delivered upon their fleeing backs.

  On the right where the stronger troops of the enemy had held longer against the Skiritai, the carnage spread thicker and more dense, the turf chewed more fiercely; along the battle wall which the foe had erected to anchor its flank, clumps of corpses could be seen, slain as they, trapped by their own wall, had struggled in vain to scale it.

  Then the eye found the center, where the slaughter had achieved its most savage concentration.

  Here the earth was rent and torn as if a thousand span of oxen had assaulted it all day with the might of their hooves and the steel of their ploughs' deep-churning blades. The chewed-up dirt, dark with piss and blood, extended in a line three hundred meters across and a hundred deep where the feet of the contending formations had heaved and strained for purchase upon the earth.

  Bodies sprawled like a carpet upon the earth, mounded in places two and three deep. To the rear, across the plain where the Syrakusans had fled, and along the riven walls of the watercourse, more corpses could be seen in scattered perimeters manned by two and three, five and seven, where these in their flight had closed ranks and made their stand, doomed as castles of sand against the tide. They fell with wounds of honor, facing their Spartan foe, cut down from the front.

  A wail arose from the hillsides where the watching An-tirhionian skirmishers now looked down upon their comrades' vanquishment, while from the walls of the citadel itself wives and daughters keened in grief as must have Hekube and Andromache upon the battlements of Ilium.

  The Spartans were hauling bodies off the stacks of the dead, seeking friend or brother, wounded and clinging yet to life. As each groaning foeman was flung down, a xiphos blade held him captive at the throat. Hold! Leonidas cried, motioning urgently to the trumpeters to resound the call to break off. Attend them! Attend the enemy too! he shouted, and the officers relayed the order up and down the line.

  Alexandras and I, pounding pell-mell down the slope, had reached the plain now. We were on the field. I sprinted two strides behind as the boy ranged in mortal urgency among the blood- and gore-splattered warriors, whose flesh seemed yet to burn with the furnace heat of fury and whose breath appeared to our eyes to steam upon the air.

  Father! Alexandros cried in the exigency of dread, and then, ahead, he glimpsed the crosscrested officer's helmet and then Olympieus himself, upright and unwounded. The expression of shock upon the polemarch's face was almost comical when he beheld his son sprinting toward him out of the carnage. Man and boy embraced with wide-flung arms. Alexandras' fingers searched his father's corselet and breastplate, probing to confirm that all four limbs stood intact and no unseen punctures yet leaked dark blood.

  Dienekes emerged from the still-seething throng; Alexandros flew into his arms. Are you all right? Did they wound you? I raced up. Suicide stood there beside Die
nekes, dam-ing needle javelins in hand, his own face sprayed with the sling of enemy blood. A knot of staring men had clustered; I saw at their feet the torn and motionless form of Meriones, Olympieus' squire.

  What are you doing here? Olympieus demanded of his son, his tone turning to anger as he realized the peril the boy had put himself in. How did you get here?

  Around us other faces reacted with equal wrath. Olympieus swatted his son, hard, across the skull. Then the boy saw Meriones. With a cry of anguish he dropped to his knees in the dirt beside the fallen squire.

  We swam, I announced. A heavy fist cuffed me, then another and another.

  What is this to you, a lark? You come to sightsee?

  The men were furious, as well they should have been. Alexandros, unhearing in his concern for Meriones, knelt over the man, who lay upon his back with a warrior crouched at each side, his helmetless head pillowed upon a hoplon shield and his bushy white beard clotted with blood, snot and sputum. Meriones, as a squire, had no cuirass to shield his breast; he had taken a Syrakusan eight-footer right through the bone of the chest. A seeping wound pooled blood into the bowl of his sternum; his tunic bunched up sodden with the dark, already clotting fluid; we could hear the hissing of air as his sucking lungs fought for breath and inhaled blood instead.