Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

by Steven Pressfield

  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 the 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, mortified, 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.

  Twenty-five hundred men stood listening and watching.

  They could see Polynikes nod, satisfied. He barked an order. The boys resumed formation, each now with his shield in proper place, upright against its owner's knees.

  Shields, port!

  The boys lunged for their hopla.

  Polynikes swung the tripod.

  With a crack that could be heard across the valley, the slashing sticks struck the bronze of Alexandras' shield.

  Polynikes swung again, at the next boy and next. All shields were in place. The line protected.

  He did it again from the right and from the left. Now all shields leapt into the boys' grips, all swiftly into place before them.

  There.

  With a nod to the platoon's eirene, Polynikes stepped back. The boys held fast at attention, shields at high port, with the blood beginning to cake dry on their empurpled cheekbones and shattered noses.

  Polynikes repeated his order to the drill instructor, that these sheep-stroking sons of whores would do tree-fucking till the end of the second watch, then shield drill till dawn.

  He walked once down the line, meeting each boy's eye. Before Alexandras, he halted.

  Your nose was too pretty, son of Olympieus. It was a girl's nose. He tossed the boy's tripod into the dirt at his feet. I like it better now.

  Chapter Nine

  One of the boys died that night. His name was Hermion; they called him Mountain. At fourteen he was as strong as any in his age-class or the class above, but dehydration in combination with exhaustion overcame him. He collapsed near the end of the second watch and fell into that state of convulsive torpor the Spartans call nekrophaneia, the Little Death, from which a man may recover if left alone but will die if he tries to rise or exert himself. Mountain understood his extremity but refused to stay down while his mates kept their feet and continued their drill.

  I tried to make the platoon take water, I and my helot mate Dekton, whom they later called Rooster. We snuck a skin to them around the middle of the first watch, but the boys refused to accept it. At dawn they carried Mountain in on their shoulders, the way the fallen in battle are borne.

  Alexandras' nose never did heal properly. His father had it broken again, twice, and reset by the finest battle surgeons, but the seam where the cartilage meets the bone never mended quite right.

  The airway would constrict involuntarily, triggering those spasms of the lungs called by the Greeks asthma, which were excruciating simply to watch and must have been unbearable to endure. Alexandras blamed himself for the death of the boy called Mountain. These fits, he was certain, were the retribution of heaven for his lapse of concentration and unwarrior-like conduct.

  The spasms enfeebled Alexandras' endurance and made him less and less a match for his agemates within the agoge. Worse still was the unpredictability of the attacks. When they hit, he was good for nothing for minutes at a stretch. If he could not find a way to reverse this condition, he could not when he reached manhood be made a warrior; he would lose his citizenship and be left to choose between living on in some lesser state of disgrace or embracing honor and taking his own life.

  His father, gravely concerned, offered sacrifice again and again and even sent to Delphi for counsel from the Pythia. Nothing helped.

  Aggravating the situation further was the fact that, despite what Polynikes had said about the boy's broken nose, Alexandras remained pretty. Nor did his breathing difficulties, for some reason, affect his singing. It seemed somehow that fear, rather than physical incapacity, was the trigger for these attacks.

  The Spartans have a discipline they call phobologia, the science of fear. As his mentor, Dienekes worked with Alexandras privately on this, after evening mess and before dawn, while the units were forming up for sacrifice.

  Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck.

  A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans phobosynakteres, fear accumulators.

  Fear spawns in the body, phobologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself, mounting into a runaway of terror. Put the body into a state of aphobia, fearlessness, the Spartans believe, and the mind will follow.

  Under the oaks, in the still half-light before dawn, Dienekes practiced alone with Alexandras. He would tap the boy with an olive bough, very lightly, on the side of the face. Involuntarily the muscles of the trapezius would contract. Feel the fear? There. Feel it? The older man's voice crooned soothingly, like a trainer gentling a colt. Now. Drop your shoulder. He popped the boy's cheek again. Let the fear bleed out. Feel it?

  Man and boy worked for hours on the owl muscles, the ophthalmomyes surrounding the eyes.

  These, Dienekes instructed Alexandras, were in many ways the most powerful of all, for God in His wisdom made mortals' keenest defensive reflex that which protects the vision. Watch my face when the muscles constrict, Dienekes demonstrated. What expression is this? Phobos.

  Fear.

  Dienekes, schooled in the discipline, commanded his facial muscles to relent.

  Now. What does this expression indicate
? Aphobia. Fearlessness.

  It seemed effortless when Dienekes did it, and the other boys in their training were practicing and mastering this too. But for Alexandras, nothing of the discipline came easy. The only time his heart beat truly without fear was when he mounted the choral stand and stood, solitary, to sing at the Gymnopaedia and the other boys' festivals.

  Perhaps his true guardians were the Muses. Dienekes had Alexandras sacrifice to them and to Zeus and Mnemosyne. Agathe, one of the two-looker sisters of Ariston, made a charm of amber to Polyhymnia, and Alexandras carried it with him, pended from the Crosshatch within his shield.

  Dienekes encouraged Alexandros in his singing. The gods endow each man with a gift by which he may conquer fear; Alexandros', Dienekes felt certain, was his voice. Skill in singing in Sparta is counted second only to martial valor and in fact is closely related, through the heart and lungs, within the discipline of the phobologia. This is why the Lakedaemonians sing as they advance into battle. They are schooled to open the throat and gulp the air, work the lungs till the accumulators relent and break the constriction of fear.

  There are two running courses within the city: the Little Ring, which begins at the Gymnasion and follows the Ko-nooura road beneath Athena of the Brazen House, and the Big Ring, which laps all five villages, past Amyklai, along the Hyakinthian Way and across the slopes of Taygetos. Alexandros ran the big one, six miles barefoot, before sacrifice and after dinner mess.

  Extra rations were slipped him by the helot cooks. By unspoken compact the boys of his boua protected him in training. They covered for him when his lungs betrayed him, when it seemed he might be singled out for punishment. Alexandros responded with a secret shame which propelled him to even greater exertions.

  He began to train in the all-in, that type of no-holds-barred boys' brawling unique to Lakedaemon, in which the competitor may kick, bite, gouge the eyes, do anything but raise the hand for quarter. Alexandros hurled himself barefoot up the Therai watercourse and bare-handed against the pankratist's bag; he ran weighted sprints, he pounded his fists into the trainer's boxes of sand. His slender hands became scarred and knuckle-busted. His nose broke again and again.