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

by Steven Pressfield

  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.

  My wish for you, Kallistos, is that you survive as many battles in the flesh as you have already fought in your imagination. Perhaps then you will acquire the humility of a man and bear yourself no longer as the demigod you presume yourself to be.

  Spare your concern for me, Dienekes, and save it for your boy friend. He has greater need of it.

  That hour had arrived when the messes along the Amyklaian Way released their men, those over thirty to depart for their homes and wives, and the younger men, of the first five age-classes, to retire under arms to the porticoes of the public buildings, there to stand the night watches over the city or curl in their cloaks for sleep. Dienekes took these last moments to speak apart with Alexandros.

  The man placed an arm about the boy's shoulder; they moved slowly together beneath the unlit oaks. You know, Dienekes said, that Polynikes would give his life for you in battle. If you fell wounded, his shield would preserve you, his spear would bring you safely back. And if death's blow did find you, he would swim without hesitation into the manslaughter and spend his last breath to retrieve your body and keep the enemy from stripping your armor. His words may be cruel, Alexandros, but you have seen war now and you know it is a hundred times crueler.

  Tonight was a lark. It was practice. Prepare your mind to endure its like again and again, until it is nothing to you, until you can laugh in Polynikes' face and return his insults with a carefree heart.

  Remember that boys of Lakedaemon have endured these harrowings for hundreds of years. We spend tears now that we may conserve blood later. Polynikes was not seeking to harm you tonight. He was trying to teach that discipline of mind which will block out fear when the trumpets sound and the battle pipers mark the beat.

  Remember what I told you about the house with many rooms. There are rooms we must not enter. Anger. Fear. Any passion which leads the mind toward that 'possession' which undoes men in war. Habit will be your champion. When you train the mind to think one way and one way only, when you refuse to allow it to think in another, that will produce great strength in battle.

  They stopped beneath an oak and sat.

  Did I ever tell you about the goose we had on my father's kleros? This bird had formed a habit, God knows why, of pecking three times at a certain patch of turf before she waddled into the water with her brothers and sisters. When I was a boy, I used to marvel at this. The goose did it every time. It was compelled to.

  One day I got it into my head to prevent her. Just to see what she would do. I took up a station on that patch of superstitious turf-I was no more than four or five years old at the time-and refused to let that goose come near it. She became frantic. She rushed at me and beat me with her wings, pecking me bloody. I fled like a rat. At once the goose recovered composure. She pecked her little spot of turf three times and slid into the water, contented as could be.

  The older Peers were departing now for their homes, the younger men and boys returning to their stations.

  Habit is a mighty ally, my young friend. The habit of fear and anger, or the habit of selfcomposure and courage. He rapped the boy warmly upon the shoulder; they both stood.

  Go now. Get some sleep. I promise you, before you see battle again, we'll arm you with all the handiest habits.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When the youths began dispersing to their stations, Dienekes with his squire, Suicide, moved out to the road, joining a company of other officers assembling to proceed to the ekklesia, where they were to assist in the organization of the coming funeral games. A helot boy approached Dienekes there, before the mess, dashing up with a message. I was on the point of departing with Alexandros for the open porches around the Square of Freedom to take up my berth for the night when a sharp whistle summoned me.

  To my astonishment it was Dienekes.

  I crossed to him swiftly, presenting myself respectfully upon his left, his shield side. Are you acquainted with the location of my house? he asked. These were the first words he had ever addressed directly to me. I replied that I was. Go there now. This boy will lead you.

  Dienekes said nothing more but turned and departed at once with the body of officers toward the Assembly. I had no idea what was required of me. I asked the boy if perhaps there was some mistake, was he sure it was I who was required? It's you, all right, and we'd better make the pebbles fly.

  The town house of Dienekes' family, in contradistinction to the farmstead their helot families worked three miles south along the Eurotas, stood
two lanes off the Eventide Road, on the west end of the village of Pitana. It was not conjoined to other dwellings, as many in that quarter were, but isolated at the edge of a grove beneath ancient oaks and olives. It had itself been a farmhouse at some point in the past and possessed yet the unadorned utilitarian charm of a country kleros.

  The house itself was unassuming in the extreme, barely larger than a cottage, less prepossessing even than the house of my own father in Astakos, though its courtyard and grounds, nestled within a grove of myrtle and hyacinth, arose like a haven of refuge and charm. One arrived upon the site at the terminus of a series of flower-girt lanes, each seeming to draw one deeper into a space of serenity and seclusion, passing, as one went, the dappled clusters of other Peers' cottages, their hearths aglow in the evening chill, with the peal of children's laughter and the happy yapping of their hounds spilling over the founded walls. The site itself, and its bowered environs, could not have appeared farther removed from the precincts of training and of war, nor offered more contrast and comfort to those repairing from them.

  Dienekes' eldest daughter, Eleiria, who was eleven at the time, let me in the gate. I perceived low white walls surrounding an immaculately swept courtyard of plain tile brick, decorated with flowers in earthen pots upon the sill, jasmine bloomed along the unvarnished beams of an axehewn pergola; wisteria and oleander nestled trim upon the face; a stonework watercourse, no wider than a handbreadth, gurgled along the northern wall. A servant girl whom I did not recognize waited beside a plaited wicker garden seat in the shadows.

  I was directed to a stone bowl and told to rinse my hands and feet. Several clean linen cloths hung upon a bar; I dried myself and rehung them scrupulously. My heart was hammering, though for the life of me I could not have said why. The maiden Eleiria ushered me inside to the hearth hall, the solitary room, other than Dienekes' and his wife Arete's bedchamber, of which the house was comprised.

  All four of Dienekes' daughters were present, including a slumbering toddler and a newborn; the second-eldest, Alexa, now being joined by her sister, both of whom sat to the side and proceeded to card wool as if it were the normal activity for the middle of the night. These maidens were presided over by the lady Arete, who sat with the infant at her breast upon a low uncushioned stool adjacent the hearth.

  I discerned at once, however, that it was not Dienekes' lady upon whom I was to attend. Instead, at her side, and more toward the meridian of the room, sat the lady Paraleia, Alexandras' mother, the wife of the polemarch Olympieus.

  This mistress began without ceremony to interrogate me on the harrowing her son had received not half an hour earlier in the mess. That she knew of this event at all, and so immediately, was surprise enough. Something in her eyes warned me I must choose my words with care.

  The lady Paraleia declared that she was keenly cognizant of and held in profoundest respect the proscription against revealing any exchange spoken within the precincts of a Peers' mess.

  Nonetheless I might, without violating the sanctity of the law, yet vouchsafe to her, a mother understandably concerned about her son's welfare and future, some indication, if not of the precise words and actions of the aforesaid event, then perhaps some portion of its tone and flavor.

  She inquired by way of motivation, in the identical understated tone with which the Peers of the mess had interro-gated Alexandras, who it was who governed the city. The kings and the ephors, I replied at once, and of course the Laws. The lady smiled and glanced, just for a moment, toward the mistress Arete.

  Yes, she said. Surely this must be so.

  This was her way of letting me know that the women ran the show and that if I didn't want to find myself permanently back in the farmers' shitfields, I'd better start coughing up a satisfactory dose of information. Within ten minutes she had gotten everything there was to get. I sang like a bird.

  She wished, the lady Paraleia began, to know everything her son had done in the hours after he had defied her wishes in the grove of the Twins and set off to follow the army to Antirhion. She grilled me as if I were a spy. The lady Arete did not interrupt.

  Her eldest daughters never lifted their eyes toward me nor toward the lady Paraleia, yet they remained in their modest silence riveted to every word. This was how they learned. The lesson today was how to grill a boy in service. How a lady did it. What tone she took, what questions she asked, when her voice rose with a hint of threat and when it lowered to assume a more confidential, candor-evoking tone.

  What rations had Alexandras and I taken? What arms? When our food ran out, how had we acquired more? Did we encounter strangers along the way? How did her son comport himself?

  How did the strangers respond? Did they show him respect worthy of a Spartan? Did her son's demeanor command it?

  The lady assimilated my responses, revealing nothing herself, though it was plain at certain junctures that she disapproved of her son's conduct. Only once did she permit actual anger to invest her tone, that when I acknowledged under compulsion that Alexandras had not secured the name of the boat captain who had ferried and betrayed us. The lady's voice shook. What was wrong with the boy? What had he learned all these years at his father's table and in the common mess? Didn't he see that this reptile, this fisher cap-tain, must be punished, executed if necessary, to teach these scoundrels the price of playing perfidy with the son of a Peer of Lakedaemon? Or if prudence dictated, that he, this boatman, could be exploited to advantage? If war with the Persian came, this blackguard, turned informer, could prove an invaluable source of intelligence for the army. Even if he attempted through falsehood to play the traitor, this could be discerned and valuable knowledge acquired. Why didn't my son find out his name?

  Your servant does not know, lady. Perhaps your son did and his servant was unaware of it.

  Call yourself I Paraleia scolded me sharply, You're not a slave, don't talk like one.

  Yes, lady.

  The boy needs something to wet his throat, Mother. This from the maiden Eleiria, with a giggle. Look at him. If his face gets any redder, he'll burst like a pomegranate.

  The grilling went on for another hour. Adding to the discomfort I felt on this hot seat was the effect of the lady Paraleia's physical appearance, which bore an uncanny resemblance to that of her son. Like him, the lady was beauti-ful, and like him, her beauty took the unadorned, underplayed Spartan form.

  The wives and maidens of my native Astakos, and those of every other city in Hellas, routinely employ cosmetics and facial paint to enhance their comeliness. These ladies are keenly aware of the effect the artificial sheen of their curls or the pink of their lips produces upon any male within range of their charms.

  None of this entered into the scheme of the lady Paraleia, nor Arete either. Her peplos robe was split up the side in the Spartan style, revealing her bare leg to the thigh. This in any other city would have been lewd to the point of scandalous. Yet here in Lakedaemon it was unremarkable in the extreme. This is a leg. We women possess them just like you men. For Spartan males to leer at or ogle a lady in this dress would have been unthinkable. They had beheld their mothers and sisters and daughters naked since they were old enough to open their eyes, both in the girls' and women's athletic training and in the festivals and the other women's processions.

  Still these ladies, both of them, were not unaware of their personal magnetism and the effect it produced, even upon a boy in service drawn up before them. After all, wasn't Helen herself a Spartan? The wife of Menelaus, she whom Paris had carried off to Troy, the cause of endless suffering among Trojans and Greeks, and for whose peerless beauty's sake so many brave Achaeans lost their lives in Troy far from their native country.

  Spartan women surpass for beauty all others in Hellas, and not the least of their charms is that they make so little play upon it. Aphrodite is not their goddess, but Artemis Huntress. Look at the loveliness of our hair, their bearing seems to say, which reflects the lamplight not by the artifice of the cosmetician's art, but b
y the sheen of health and the luster of virtue. Look in our eyes which embrace a man's, neither lowering in contrived modesty nor fluttering behind dyed lashes like Corinthian whores. Our legs we groom not in the boudoir with wax and myrtle, but under the sun in the race and upon the Ring.

  They were dams, these ladies, wives and mothers whose primary calling was to produce boys who would grow to be warriors and heroes, defenders of the city. Spartan women were brood mares, the pampered damsels of other cities might scoff, but if they were mares, they were racers, Olympic champions. The athletic glow and vigor which the gynaikagoge, the women's training discipline, produced in them was powerful stuff and they knew it.

  Standing before these women now, my thoughts despite all efforts were wrung back into the past, to Diomache and to my mother. I saw in memory my cousin's bare legs flashing strong and well made when we raced after some hare or doe with our dogs sprinting ahead up some rock-strewn slope. I saw the smooth glowing flesh of her arm when she drew the bow, her eyes that shrank before nothing and the flush of youth and freedom that suffused the skin of her face when she smiled. I saw again my mother, who was only twenty-six at her death, and whose memory to my eyes was of surpassing gentleness and nobility.

  These thoughts were like a room in the house of the mind that Dienekes spoke of, a room I had sworn since the Three-Cornered Way never to permit myself to enter.

  But now, finding myself here in this real room of this real house, before these womanly rustles and scents, the feminine auroras of these wives and mothers and daughters and sisters, six of them, so much female presence concentrated in so close a space, I was driven back in mind against my will. It took all my self-composure to conceal the effect of these memories and to answer the lady's continuing questions in good order. At last it seemed the inquisition was approaching its conclusion.

  Answer now one final question. Speak with candor. If you lie, I will know. Does my son possess courage? Evaluate his andreia, his manly virtue, as a youth who must soon take his place as a warrior.