Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

  Barbarous and unholy, is it? responded Polynikes, darkening with anger.

  The Peers in their messes are encouraged, when they deem it useful for the instruction of youth, to single out one lad, or even another Peer, and abuse him verbally in the most stem and pitiless fashion. This is called arosis, harrowing. Its purpose, much like the physical beatings, is to inure the senses to insult, to harden the will against responding with rage and fear, the twin unmanning evils of which that state called katalepsis, possession, is comprised. The prized response, the one the Peers look for, is humor. Deflect defamation with a joke, the coarser the better. Laugh in its face. A mind which can maintain its lightness will not come undone in war.

  But Alexandras possessed no gift for the wisecrack. It wasn't in him. All he could do was answer in his clear pure voice with the most excruciating candor. I watched him from my service station at the left of the mess entrance, beneath the carven plaque- Exo tes thyras ouden, Out this door nothing-meaning no word spoken within these precincts may be repeated elsewhere.

  It was a form of high courage which Alexandras displayed, to stand up to the Peers' hammering without a joke or a lie. At any time during a harrowing, the object boy may signal and call a stop.

  This is his right under the laws of Lykurgus. Pride, however, prevented Alexandras from exercising this option, and everyone knew it.

  You wanted to see war, Polynikes began. What did you imagine it would be?

  Alexandras was required to answer in the Spartan style, at once, with extreme brevity.

  Your eyes were horror-stricken, your heart aggrieved at the sight of the manslaughter. Answer this:

  What did you think a spear was for?

  A shield?

  A xiphos sword?

  Questions of this kind would be put to the boy not in a harsh or abusive tone, which would have been easier to bear, but coldly, rationally, demanding a concisely expressed reasoned response.

  Alexandras was made to describe the wounds an eight-footer could produce and the types of deaths that would ensue. Should an overhand thrust be aimed at the throat or the chest? If the tendon of a foeman's calf be severed, should you pause-to finish him off or press forward with the advance? If you plunge a spear into the groin above a man's testicles, should it be pulled straight out or ripped upward, blade vertical, to eviscerate the man's bowels? Alexandras' face flushed, his voice quaked and broke. Would you like to stop, boy? Is this instruction too much for you?

  Answer concisely:

  Can you envision a world without war?

  Can you imagine clemency from an enemy?

  Describe the condition of Lakedaemon without her army, without her warriors, to defend her.

  Which is better, victory or defeat?

  To rule or be ruled?

  To make a widow of the enemy's wife or to have one's own wife widowed?

  What is the supreme virtue of a man? Why? Whom of all in the city do you admire most? Why?

  Define the word mercy. Define compassion. Are these the virtues of war or of peace? Of men or of women? Are they virtues at all?

  Of the Peers who harrowed Alexandras this evening, Polynikes did not on the surface seem the most relentless or display the harshest severity. He did not lead the arosis, nor was his interrogation overtly cruel or malicious. He just wouldn't let it stop. In the tone of the other men's voices, no matter how ruthlessly they grilled Alexandros, resided at bottom the unspoken fundament of inclusion. Alexandros was of their blood, he was one of them; 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.

  Polynikes' harrowing was different. There was something personal about it. He hated the boy, though it was impossible to guess why. What made it even more painful, to watch as it must have been to endure, was Polynikes' supreme physical beauty. In every aspect of his person, face as well as physique, the Knight was formed as flawlessly as a god. Naked in the Gymnasion, even alongside scores of youths and warriors blessed in comeliness and elevated by their training to the peak of condition, Polynikes stood out, without equal, surpassing all others in symmetry of form and faultlessness of physical structure. Clothed in white robes for the Assembly, he shone like Adonis. And armed for war, with the bronze of his shield burnished, his scarlet cloak across his shoulders and the horsehair-crested helmet of a Knight pushed back upon his brow, he shone forth, peerless as Achilles. To watch Polynikes train on the Big Ring, in preparation for the Games at Olympia or Delphi or Nemea, to behold him in the pastel light of day's end when he and the other sprinters had finished their distance work and now, under the eyes of their trainers, donned their racing armor for the final dressed sprints, even the most hardened Peers, training in the boxing oval or the wrestling pits, would pull up from their regimens and watch.

  Four runners regularly trained with Polynikes: two brothers, Malineus and Gorgone, both victors at Nemea in the diaulos sprint; Doreion the Knight, who could outrun a racehorse over sixty meters; and Telamonias the boxer and enomotarch of the Wild Olive regiment.

  The five would take their marks and a trainer would clap the start. For thirty meters, sometimes as long as fifty, the elite field remained a pack of straining bronze and flesh, laboring beneath the weight of their harness, and for a span of heartbeats the watching Peers would think, maybe this once, maybe this singular time, one will best him. Then from the fore, as the runners' accelerating power began to break the bonds of their burdens, Polynikes' churning shield would emerge, twenty pounds of oak and bronze sustained upon the pumping flesh and sinew of his left forearm; you saw his helmet flash; his polished greaves extended next, flying like the winged sandals of Hermes himself, and then, with a force and power so magnificent they stopped the heart, Polynikes would catapult out of the pack, blazing with such impossible swiftness that he seemed to be naked, even winged, and not belabored by the poundage upon his arm and across his back.

  Around the turning pole he flew. Daylight burst between him and his pursuers. He vaulted forward to the finish, four hundred meters total, no longer in his mind competing with these lesser fellows, these pedestrian mortals, any one of whom in another city would have been the object of adoration, mobbed by throngs of admirers, but who here, against this invincible runner, were doomed to eat dust and like it. This was Polynikes, No one could touch him. He possessed in every pore those blessings of feature and physique which the gods allow to combine in a single mortal only once in a generation.

  Alexandros was beautiful too. Even with the broken nose Polynikes had gifted him with, his physical perfection approached that of the peerless runner. Perhaps this, in some way, lay at the root of the hatred the man felt for the boy. That he, Alexandros, whose joy lay in the chorus and not on the athletic field, was unworthy of this gift of beauty; that it, in him, failed to reflect the manly virtue, the andreia, which it in Polynikes so infallibly proclaimed.

  My own suspicion was that the runner's animus was inflamed further by the favor Alexandros had found in Dienekes' eyes. For of all the men in the city with whom Polynikes competed in virtue and excellence, he resented most my master. Not so much for the honors Dienekes had been granted by his peers in battle, for Polynikes, like my master, had been awarded the prize of valor twice, and he was ten or twelve years younger.

  It was something else, some less obvious aspect of character which Dienekes possessed and which the city honored him by recognizing, instinctively, without prompting or ceremony.

  Polynikes saw it in the way the young boys and girls joked with Dienekes when he passed their sphairopaedia, the ball-playing fields, during the noonday break. He caught it in the tilt of a smile from a matron and her maids at the springs or an old woman passing in the square. Even the helots granted my master a fondness and respect that were withheld from Polynikes, for all the heaps of honors that were his in
other quarters. It galled him. Mystified him. He, Polynikes, had even produced two sons, while Dienekes' issue were all female, four daughters who, unless Arete could produce a son, would extinguish his line altogether, while Polynikes' strapping swift lads would one day be warriors and men. That Dienekes wore the respect of the city so lightly and with such self-effacing wit was even more bitter to Polynikes.

  For the runner saw in Dienekes neither beauty of form nor fleetness of foot. Instead he perceived a quality of mind, a power of self-possession, which he himself, for all the gifts the gods had lavished upon him, could not call his own. Polynikes' courage was that of a lion or an eagle, something in the blood and the marrow, which summoned itself out of its own preeminence, without thought, and gloried in its instinctual supremacy.

  Dienekes' courage was different. His was the virtue of a man, a fallible mortal, who brought valor forth out of the understanding of his heart, by the force of some inner integrity which was unknown to Polynikes. Was this why he hated Alexandros? Was it why he had splintered the boy's nose that evening of the eight-nighter? Polynikes sought to break more than the youth's face now. Here in the mess he wanted to crack him, to see him come apart.

  You look unhappy, pais. As if the prospect of battle held for you no promise of joy.

  Polynikes ordered Alexandras to recite the pleasures of war, to which the boy responded by rote, citing the satisfactions of shared hardship, of triumph over adversity, of camaraderie and Philadelphia, love of one's comrades-in-arms.

  Polynikes frowned. Do you feel pleasure when you sing, boy?

  Yes, lord.

  And when you flirt around with that trollop Agathe?

  Yes, lord.

  Then imagine the pleasure that awaits you, when you clash in line of battle, shield-to-shield with an enemy burning to kill you, and you instead slay him. Can you imagine that ecstasy, you little shitworm?

  The pais is trying, lord.

  Let me assist you. Close your eyes and picture it. Obey me!

  Polynikes was keenly aware of the torment this was causing Dienekes, who held himself controlled and impassive upon his bare couch, just two places down.

  To plunge a spear, blade-deep, into a man's guts is like fucking, only better. You like to fuck, don't you?

  The boy doesn't know, lord.

  Don't toy with me, you twittering sparrow.

  Alexandras, on his feet for an hour by this time, had steeled himself utterly. He answered his tormentor's questions, frozen at attention, eyes riveted to the dirt, ready in his guts to endure anything.

  Killing a man is like fucking, boy, only instead of giving life you take it. You experience the ecstasy of penetration as your warhead enters the enemy's belly and the shaft follows. You see the whites of his eyes roll inside the sockets of his helmet. You feel his knees give way beneath him and the weight of his faltering flesh draw down the point of your spear. Are you picturing this?

  Yes, lord.

  Is your dick hard yet?

  No, lord.

  What? You've got your spear in a man's guts and your dog isn't stiff? What are you, a woman?

  At this point the Peers of the mess began rapping their knuckles upon the hardwood, an indication that Polynikes' instruction was going too far. The runner ignored this.

  Now picture with me, boy. You feel the foe's beating heart upon your iron and you rip it forth, twisting as you pull. A sensation of joy surges up the ash of your spear, through your hand and along your arm up into your heart. Are you enjoying this yet?

  No, lord.

  You feel like God at that moment, exercising the right only He and the warrior in combat may experience: that of dealing death, of loosing another man's soul and sending it down to hell. You want to savor it, to twist the blade deeper and pull the man's heart and guts out upon the iron point of your spear, but you can't. Tell me why.

  Because I must move on and slay the next man.

  Are you going to weep now?

  No, lord.

  What will you do when the Persians come?

  Slay them, lord.

  What if you stand on my right in line of battle? Will your shield protect me?

  Yes, lord.

  What if I advance, defended by the shadow of your shield? Will you hold it high at port before me?

  Yes, lord.

  Will you bring down your man?

  I will.

  And the next?

  Yes.

  I don't believe you.

  At this the Peers rapped more vigorously with their knuckles upon the tables. Dienekes spoke.

  This is no longer instruction, Polynikes. This is malice.

  Is it? the runner answered, not deigning to look in the direction of his rival. We'll inquire of its object. Have you had enough, you psalm-singing wad of shit?

  No, lord. The boy begs the Peer to continue.

  Dienekes stepped in. Gently, with compassion, he addressed the youth, his protege. Why do you tell the truth, Alexandras? You could lie, like every other boy, and swear you reveled in the witnessing of slaughter, you savored the sight of limbs cleaved and men maimed and murdered within the jaws of war.

  I thought of that, lord. But the company would see through me.

  You're fucking right we would, confirmed Polynikes. He heard the anger in his own voice and brought it swiftly under control. However, out of deference to my esteemed comrade-here he turned with a mock-courteous bow to Dienekes-I will address my next question not to this child, but to the mess as a whole. He paused, then indicated the boy at attention before them.

  Who will stand with this woman on his right in the line of battle?

  I will, Dienekes answered without hesitation.

  Polynikes snorted.

  Your mentor seeks to shield you, paidarion. In the pride of his own prowess he imagines he may fight for two. This is recklessness. The city cannot risk his loss, because he has eyes for the comeliness of your girlish face.

  Enough, my friend. This from Medon, senior of the mess. The Peers seconded with a chorus of knuckle raps.

  Polynikes smiled. I accede to your chastisement, gentlemen and elders. Please excuse my excess of zeal. I seek only to impart to our youthful comrade some insight into the nature of reality, the state of man as the gods have made him. May I conclude his instruction?

  With brevity, Medon admonished.

  Polynikes turned again to Alexandras. 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. He finished, turning to Medon and the elders. Forgive me for waxing long-winded.

  The harrowing ended; the Peers dispersed. Outside beneath the oaks, Dienekes sought out Polynikes, addressing him by his praise-name Kallistos, which may be defined as harmoniously beautiful or of perfect symmetry, though in the tone Dienekes employed, it expressed itself in the converse, as pretty boy or angel face.

  Why
do you hate this youth so much? Dienekes demanded.

  The runner replied without hesitation. Because he does not love glory.

  And is love of glory the supreme virtue of a man?

  Of a warrior.

  And of a racehorse and a hunting dog.

  It is the virtue of the gods, which they command us to emulate.

  The others of the mess could overhear this exchange, though they affected not to, since, under the laws of Lykurgus, no matter discussed behind those doors may be carried over to these more public precincts. Dienekes, realizing this as well, brought himself under control and faced the Olympian Polynikes with an expression of wry amusement.