Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

  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.

  He fought boys from his own platoon and others, and he fought me.

  I was growing fast. My hands were getting stronger. Every athletic action Alexandros performed, I could do better. In the fighting square it was all I could do not to
break up his face even more.

  He should have hated me, but it was not in him. He shared his surplus rations and worried that I would be whipped for going easy on him.

  We talked for hours in secret on the pursuit of esoterike harmonia, that state of self-composure which the exercises of the phobologia are designed to produce- As a string of the kithera vibrates purely, emitting only that note of the musical scale which is its alone, so must the individual warrior shed all which is superfluous in his spirit, until he himself vibrates at that sole pitch which his individual daimon dictates. The achievement of this ideal, in Lakedaemon, carries beyond courage on the battlefield; it is considered the supreme embodiment of virtue, andreia, of a citizen and a man.

  Beyond esoterike harmonia lies exoterike harmonia, that state of union with one's fellows which parallels the musical harmony of the multistringed instrument or of the chorus of voices itself. In battle exoterike harmonia guides the phalanx to move and strike as one man, of a single mind and will. In passion it unites husband to wife, lover to lover, in wordless perfect union. In politics exoterike harmonia produces a city of concord and unity, in which each individual, securing his own noblest expression of character, donates this to each other, as obedient to the laws of the commonwealth as the strings of the kithera to the immutable mathematics of music. In piety exoterike harmonia produces that silent symphony which most delights the ears of the gods.

  At the height of that summer there was a war with the Antirhionians. Four of the army's twelve lochoi were mobilized (reinforced by elements of the Skiritai, the mountain rangers who comprised their own main-force regiment) to a call-up of the first ten age-classes, twenty-eight hundred in all. This was no force to be taken lightly, all-Lakedaemonian, commanded by the king himself; the battle train alone would be half a mile long. It would be the first full-scale campaign since the death of Kleomenes and the third in which Leoni-das would assume command as king, Polynikes would go as a Knight of the king's bodyguard, Olympieus with the Huntress battalion in the Wild Olive lochos and Dienekes as a platoon commander, an enomotarch, in the Herakles.

  Even Dekton, my half-breed friend, would be mobilized as herd boy for the sacrificial beasts.

  The entire Deukalion mess in which Alexandros stood-to, meaning acted as occasional cupbearer and server so he could observe his elders and learn, was called up except the five eldest men, between forty and sixty. For Alexandros, though he was six years too young to go, the mobilization seemed to plunge him even more deeply under his cloud. The uncalled-up Peers twitched about with their own brand of frustration. The air was touchy and ripe for explosiveness.

  Somehow an all-in match got started one evening between Alexandros and me, outdoors behind the mess. The Peers gathered eagerly; the action was just what they needed. I could hear Dienekes' voice, cheering the brawl on. Alexandros seemed full of fire; we were bare-handed and his smallish fists flew fast as darts. He kicked me hard, to the temple, and followed with a solid elbow to the gut; I dropped. It was a true fall, I was really hurt, but the Peers had seen Alexandras' friends cover for him so frequently that they now thought I was tanking it.

  Alexandros did too.

  Get up, you outlander piece of shit! He straddled me in the dirt and hit me again when I rose.

  For the first time I heard real killer instinct in his voice. The Peers heard it too and raised a shout of delight. Meanwhile the hounds, of whom there were never fewer than twenty after chow time, howled and bounded from every quarter in the turf-skimming fever that their masters' excited voices now drove them to.

  I got up and hit Alexandros. I knew I could beat him easily, despite his crowd-impelled fury; I tried to pull my punch, just slightly so that no one would notice. They did. A howl of outrage rose from the Peers of the mess and others from adjacent syssitia, who had now clustered, forming a ring from which neither Alexandros nor I could escape.

  Men's fists cuffed me hard about the ears. Fight him, you little fucker! The pack instinct had seized the hounds; they were at the verge of losing themselves to their animal nature. Suddenly two burst into the ring. One got in a nip at Alexandros before the men's sticks sent him scampering. That was it.

  A spasm of the lungs seized Alexandros; his throat constricted, he began to choke. My punch hesitated. A three-foot switch burned my back. Hit him! I obeyed; Alexandros dropped to one knee. His lungs had frozen, he was helpless. Pound him, you whore's son! a voice shouted from behind me. Finish him! It was Dienekes.

  His switch lashed me so hard it drove me to my knees. The delirium of voices overwhelmed the senses, all calling for me to polish Alexandros off. It was not anger at him. Nor were they rooting for me. The Peers could not have cared less about me. It was for him, to teach him, to make him eat the thousandth bitter lesson of the ten thousand more he would endure before they hardened him into the rock the city demanded and allowed him to take his place as an Equal and a warrior.

  Alexandros knew it and rose with the fury of desperation, choking for breath; he charged like a boar. I felt the lash. I swung with everything I had.

  Alexandros spun and dropped, face-first into the dirt, blood and spittle slinging from the side of his mouth.

  He lay there, motionless as a dead man.

  The Peers' shouting ceased instantly. Only the ungodly racket of the hounds continued at its maddening shrill pitch. Dienekes stepped across to the fallen form of his protege and knelt to feel his heart. In unconsciousness Alexandros' breath returned.

  Dienekes' hand scraped the sputum from the boy's lips.

  What are you gaping at! he barked at the circling Peers. It's over! Let him be!

  The army marched out next morning for Antirhion. Leonidas strode at the fore, in full panoplia including slung shield, with his brow wreathed and his plumeless, unadorned helmet riding the rolled battle pack atop his scarlet cloak, his long steel-colored hair immaculately dressed and falling to his shoulders. About him marched the companion guard of the Knights, a half call-up, a hundred and fifty, with Polynikes in the forerank of honor beside six other Olympic victors. They marched not rigidly nor in grim silent lockstep, but at ease, talking and joking with one another and their families and friends along the roadside. Leonidas himself, were it not for his years and station of honor, could easily have been mistaken for a common infantryman, so unprepossessing was his armament, so nonchalant his demeanor. Yet all the city knew that this march-out, as the two previous beneath his command, was driven by his will and his will alone. It was aimed at the Persian invasion the king knew would come, perhaps not this year, perhaps not five years from now, but surely and inevitably.

  The twin ports of Rhion and Antirhion commanded the western approach to the Gulf of Corinth.

  This avenue threatened the Peloponnese and all of central Greece. Rhion, the near-side port, stood already within the Spartan hegemony; she was an ally. But Antirhion across the strait remained haughtily aloof, thinking herself beyond the reach of Lakedaemonian power. Leonidas meant to show her the error of her ways. He would bring her to heel and bottle up the gulf, protecting central Hellas from Persian sea assault, at least from the northwest.

  Alexandras' father, Olympieus, marched past at the head of the Wild Olive regiment, with Meriones, the fifty-year-old battle captive and former Potidaean captain, beside him as his squire.

  This gentle fellow possessed a grand beard, white as snow; he used to secrete little treasures within its bushy nest and pluck them forth, as surprise gifts, for Alexandras and his sisters when they were children. He did this now, straying to the roadside, to place in Alexandras' hand a tiny iron charm in the shape of a shield. Meriones clasped the boy's hand with a wink and moved on.

  I stood in the crowd before the Hellenion with Alexandras and the other boys of the training platoons, the women and children, the whole city drawn up beneath the acacias and cypresses, singing the hymn to Castor, as the regiments trooped out along the Going-Away Street with their shields slung and spears at the slope, h
elmets lashed athwart the shoulders of their crimson cloaks, bobbing atop their polemothylakioi, the battle packs which the Peers bore now for show but which, like their armor, would be transferred, with all kit save spears and swords, to the shoulders of their squires when the army assumed column of march and stripped for the long, dusty hump north.

  Alexandras' beautiful broken face remained a mask as Dienekes strode into view, flanked by his squire, Suicide, at the head of his platoon of the Herakles lochos. The main body of troops passed on. Leading and accompanying each regiment trudged the pack animals laden with the supplies of the commissariat and thwacked merrily on the rumps by the switches of their helot herd boys. The train of armament waggons passed next, already obscured within a churning storm of road dust; then followed the tall victualry waggons with their cargo of oil pots and wine jars, sacks of figs, olives, leeks, onions, pomegranates and the cooking pots and ladles swinging on hooks beneath them, banging into each other musically in the dust of the mules' tread, contributing a ringing metronomic air to the cacophony of cracking whips and squalling wheel rims, teamsters' bawls and groaning axles.