Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

  Yet massive as was this economic recrudescence, it paled alongside the effects of victory upon the individuals, the commons of the populace themselves. A dynamism of optimism and enterprise fired each man with belief in himself and his gods. Each citizen-warrior who had endured trial of arms in the phalanx, or pulled an oar under fire on the sea now deemed himself deserving of full inclusion in all affairs and discourse of the city.

  That peculiar Hellenic form of government called democra-tia, rule of the people, hod plunged its roots deep, nurtured by the blood of war; now with victory the shoot burst forth into full flower. In the Assembly and the courts, the marketplace and the magistracies, the commons thrust themselves forward with vigor and confidence.

  To the Greeks, victory was proof of the might and majesty of their gods. These deities, which to our more civilised 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 tnan human in scale, yet human in spirit and essence. The Greeks' sculpture and athletics celebrated the human form, their literature and music human passion, their discourse and philosophy human reason.

  In the flush of triumph the arts exploded. No man's home, however humble, reascended from the ashes without some crowning mural, statue or memorial in thanksgiving to the gods and to the valor of their own arms. Theater and the chorus throve. The tragedies of Aeschylus and Phrynichus drew hordes to the precincts of the theatron, where noble and common, citizen and foreigner, took their stations, attending in rapt and often transported awe to works whose stature, the Greeks professed, would endure forever.

  In the fall of my second year of captivity I was repatriated upon receipt of His Majesty's ransom, along with a number of other officers of the Empire, and returned to Asia.

  Restored to His Majesty's service, I reassumed my responsibilities recording the affairs of the Empire. Chance, or perhaps the hand of God Ahura Mazda, found me toward the close of the following summer in the port city of Sidon, there assigned to assist in the interrogation of a ship's master of Aegina, a Greek whose galley had been driven by storm to Egypt and there been captured by Phoenician warships of His Majesty's fleet. Examining this officer's logs, I came upon an entry indicating a sea passage, the summer previous, from EpidaurusLimera, a port of Lakedaemon, to Thermopylae.

  At my urging, His Majesty's officers pressed their interrogation upon this point. The Aeginetan captain declared that his vessel had been among those employed to convey a parry of Spartan officers and envoys to the dedication of a monument to the memory of the Three Hundred.

  Also on board, the captain stated, was a party of Spartan women, the wives and relations of a number of the fallen.

  No commerce was permitted, the captain reported, between himself and his officers and these gentlewomen. I questioned the man strenuously, but could determine neither by evidence nor by surmise if among these were included the ladies Arete and Paraleia, or the wives of any of the warriors mentioned in the papers of the man Xeones.

  His vessel beached at the mouth of the Spercheios, the captain stated, at the eastern terminus of the very plain where His Majesty's army had encamped during the assault upon the Hot Gates.

  The memorial party there disembarked and proceeded the final distance on foot.

  Three corpses of Greek warriors, the ship's master reported, had been recovered by the natives months earlier at the upper margins of the Trachinian plain, the very pastureland upon which His Majesty's pavilion had been sited. These remains had been preserved piously by the citizens of Trachis and were restored now with honor to the Lakedaemonians.

  Though certainty remains ever elusive in such matters, the bodies, common sense testifies, can have been none other than those of the Spartan Knight Doreion, the Skirite Hound and the outlaw known as Ball Player, who participated in the night raid upon His Majesty's pavilion.

  The ashes of one other body, that of a warrior of Lakedaemon returned from Athens,.were borne by the Aeginetan vessel. The captain could provide no intelligence as to the identity of these remains. My heart, however, leapt at the possibility that they might be those of our narrator. I pressed the sea captain for further intelligence.

  At the Rot Gates themselves, this officer declared, these final bodies and the urn of ashes were interred in the burial mound of the Lakedaemonian precinct, sited upon a knoll directly above the sea. Scrupulous interrogation of the captain as to the topography of the site permits me to conclude with near certainty that this hillock is the same whereupon the final defenders perished.

  No athletic games were celebrated in memoriam, but only a simple solemn service sung in thanksgiving to Zeus Savior, Apollo, Eros and the Muses. It was ail over, the ship's master stated, in less than an hour.

  The captain's preoccupations upon the site were understandably more for the tide and the security of his vessel than with the memorial events transpiring. One instance, however, struck him, he said, as singular to the point of recollection. A woman among the Spartan party had held herself discrete from the others and chose to linger, solitary, upon the site after her sisters had reassembled in preparation to depart. In fact this lady tarried so late that the captain was compelled to dispatch one of his seamen to summon her away.

  I inquired earnestly after the name of this woman. The captain, not surprisingly, had neither inquired nor been informed. I pressed the question, seeking any peculiarities of dress or person which might assist in mounting a supposition as to her identity. The captain insisted that there was nothing.

  What about her face? I persisted. Was she young or old? Of what age or appearance?

  I cannot say, the man replied.

  Why not?

  Her face was hidden, the ship's master declared. AH but her eyes obscured by a veil.

  I inquired further as to the monuments themselves, the stones and their inscriptions. The captain reported what he recalled, which was little. The stone over the Spartans' grave, he recollected, bore verses composed by the poet Simonides, who himself stood present that day to assist in the dedication.

  Can you recall the epitaph upon the stone? I inquired. Or were the verses too lengthy for memory to retain?

  Not at all, the captain replied. The lines were composed Spartan-style. Short. Nothing wasted.

  So spare were they, he testified, that even one of as poor a memory as himself encountered no difficulty in their recollection, O xein angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti tede keimetha tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi These verses have I rendered thus, as best I can:

  Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.

  Acknowledgments

  It goes without saying that a work which attempts to imagine vanished worlds and cultures owes everything to the original literary sources, in this case Homer, Herodotus, Plutarch, Pausanias, Diodorus, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, and on and on. They're the real stuff, without which nothing.

  Almost as indispensable, however, have been the extraordinary scholars and historians of our own time, whose published wisdom I have looted shamelessly. I hope they will forgive the author of this work of far less rigorous scholarship than their own if he acknowledges with gratitude and by name a number of these distinguished classicists-Paul Cartledge, G. L. Cawkwell, Victor Davis Hansen, Donald Kagan, John Keegan, H.D.F. Kitto, J. F. Lazenby, Peter Green, W. K.

  Pritchett and, especially, Mary Renault. In addition, I would like to thank two colleagues whose personal counsel and direction have been indispensable:

  First, Hunter B. Armstrong, Director of the International Hoplology Society, for graciously sharing his expertise in hoplite weapons, tactics and practice and for his invaluable insights into, and imaginative reconstructions of, ancient battle. Himself an acclaimed weapons athlete, Mr.

  Armstrong's combatant's-eye-view assisted immeasurably in reimagining the experience of Greek heavy-infantry
warfare.

  Finally, my profound gratitude to Dr. Ippokratis Kantzios, Assistant Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, for his generous and encyclopedic assistance through all aspects of this undertaking, acting not only as guide and mentor for historical and linguistic authenticity and as translator (free as well as exact) of the epigraph and of passages and terms throughout this book, but for numerous other sage and inspired contributions. There's not a page in the book that doesn't owe something to you, Hip.

  Thanks for your innumerable creative contributions, your unfailing encouragement and your ever-Olympian counsel.

  About The Author

  STEVEN PRESSFIELD is also the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and Tides of War. He lives in Los Angeles.