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

by Steven Pressfield

  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 Ale
xandras 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, helmets 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.

  Behind the provisions bearers came the portable forges and armorers' kits with their spare xiphos blades and butt-spikes, lizard-stickers and long iron spear blades, then the spare eight-footers, uncured ash and cornel shafts lashed lengthwise along the waggon rails. Helot armorers strode in the cloud alongside, clad in their dogskin caps and aprons, forearms crisscrossed with the burn scars of the smithy.

  Last of all trooped the sacrificial goats and sheep, with their horns wrapped and leashes held by the helot herd urchins, led by Dekton in his already road-begrimed altar-boy white, trailering a haltered ass laden with feed grain and two victory roosters in cages, one on either side of the cargo frame. He grinned when he passed, a little flash of contempt escaping his otherwise impeccably pious demeanor.

  I was deep into slumber that night, on the stone of the portico behind the ephorate, when I felt a hand shake me awake. It was Agathe, the Spartan girl who had made Alexandras' charm to Polyhymnia. Get up, you! she hissed, so as not to alert the score of other youths of the agoge asleep and on watch around these public buildings. I blinked around. Alexandras, who had been asleep beside me, was gone. Hurry!

  The girl melted at once into shadow. I followed her swiftly through the dark streets to that copse of the double-holed myrtle they called Dioscuri, the Twins, just west of the start of the Little Ring.

  Alexandras was there. He had snuck away from his platoon without me (which would have put both of us, if caught, in line for a merciless whipping). He stood now, wearing his black pais' cloak and battle pack, confronted by his mother, the lady Paraleia, one of their male house helots and his two younger sisters. Hard words flew. Alexandras intended to follow the army to battle.

  I'm going, he declared. Nothing will stop me.

  I was ordered by Alexandras' mother to knock him down.

  I saw something flash in his fist. His xyele, the sicklelike weapon all the boys carried. The women saw it too, and the deadly-grim look in the lad's eye. For a long moment, every form froze. The preposterousness of the situation was becoming more and more apparent, as was the adamantine resolution of the boy.

  His mother straightened before him.

  Go, then, the lady Paraleia addressed her son at last. She didn't need to add that I would go with him. And may God preserve you in the lashing you receive when you return.

  Chapter Ten

  It was not hard to follow the army. The track along the Oenous was churned to dust, ankle-deep.

  At Selassia the perioikic Stephanos regiment had joined the expedition. Alexandros and I, arriving in the dark, could still make out the trodden-bare marshaling ground and the freshly dried blood upon the altar where the sacrifices had been performed and the omens taken. The army itself was half a day ahead; we could not stop for sleep, but pushed on all night.

  At dawn we came upon men we recognized. A helot armorer named Eukrates had broken his leg in a fall and was being helped home by two of his fellows. He informed us that at the frontier fort of Oion fresh intelligence had reached Leonidas. The Antirhionians, far from rolling over and playing dead as the king had hoped, had sent envoys in secret, appealing for aid to the tyrannos Gelon in Sikelia. Gelon could appreciate as well as Leonidas and the Persians the strategic indispensability of the port of Antirhion; he wanted it too. Forty Syrakusan ships bearing two thousand citizen and mercenary heavy infantry were on their way to reinforce the Antirhionian defenders. It would be a real battle after all.

  The Spartan force pressed on through Tegea. The Tegeates, member allies of the Peloponnesian League and obligated to follow the Spartans whithersoever they should lead, reinforced the army with six hundred of their own heavy infantry, swelling its fighting total to beyond four thousand. Leonidas had not been seeking parataxis, a pitched battle, with the Antirhionians.

  Rather he had hoped to overawe them with a show of such force that they would perceive the folly of defiance and enroll themselves of their own free will in the alliance against the Persians.

  Among Dekton's herd was a wrapped bull, brought in anticipation of celebration, of festive sacrifice in honor of this new addition to the League. But the Antirhionians, perhaps bought by Gelon's gold, inflamed by the rhetoric of some glory-hungry demagogue or betrayed by a lying oracle, had chosen to make a fight of it.

  When Alexandros spoke to the helots on the road, he had queried them for intelligence on the specific makeup of the Syrakusan forces: which units, under which commanders, reinforced by which auxiliaries. The helots didn't know. In any army other than the Spartan, such ignorance would have provoked a fierce tongue-lashing or worse. Yet Alexandros let it go without a thought.

  Among the Lakedaemonians, it is considered a matter of indifference of whom and in what the enemy consists.

  The Spartans are schooled to regard the foe, any foe, as nameless and faceless. In their minds it is the mark of an ill-prepared and amateur army to rely in the moments before battle on what they call pseudoandreia, false courage, meaning the artificially inflated martial frenzy produced by a general's eleventh-hour harangue or some peak of bronze-banging bravado built to by shouting, shield-pounding and the like. In Alexandros' mind, which already at age fourteen mirrored that of the generals of his city, one Syrakusan was as good as the next, one enemy strategos no different from another. Let the foe be Mantinean, Olynthian, Epidaurian; let him come in elite units or hordes of shrieking rabble, crack citizen regiments or foreign mercenaries hired for gold. It made no difference. None was a match for the warriors of Lakedaemon, and all knew it.

  Among the Spartans the work of war is demystified and depersonalized through its vocabulary, which is studded with references both agrarian and obscene. Their word which I translated earlier as fuck, as in the youths' tree-fucking, bears the connotation not so much of penetration as of grinding, like a miller's stone. The front three ranks fuck or mill the enemy. The verb to kill, in Doric theros, is the same as to harvest. The warriors in the fourth through sixth ranks are sometimes called harvesters, both for the work they do on the trampled enemy with the butt-spike lizard-stickers of their eight-footers and for that pitiless threshing stroke they make with the short xiphos sword, which itself is often called a reaper. To decapitate a man is to top him off or give him a haircut. Chopping off a hand or arm is called limbing.

  Alexandros and I arrived at Rhion, at the bluff overlooking the army's embarkation port, a little after midnight of the third day. The port lights of Antirhion shone, clearly visible across the narrow strait. The embarkation beaches were already packed with men and boys, women and children, a thronging festive mob gathered to watch the spectacle of the fleet of galleys a
nd coasters, conscripted merchantmen, ferries and even fishing boats assembled in advance by the allied Rhionians to transport the army in darkness west along the coast, out of sight of Antirhion, then across the gulf where it stood widest, some five miles down. Leonidas, respecting the seafighting reputation of the Antirhionians, had elected to make this passage at night.

  Among the blufftop farewell-bawlers Alexandros and I located a boy our age whose father, he claimed, owned a fast smack and would not be averse to pocketing the wad of Attic drachmas clutched in AlexandrosI fist in exchange for a swift silent crossing, no questions asked. The boy led us down through the crush of spectators and merrymakers to an obscure launching beach called the Ovens, behind an unlighted breakwater. Not twenty minutes after the last Spartan transport had cast off, we were on the water too, trailing the fleet out of sight to the west.

  I fear the sea anytime, but never more than on a moonless night and in the hands of strangers.

  Our captain had insisted on bringing along his two brothers, though a man and a boy could easily handle the light swift craft. I have known these coasters and man jacks and mistrust them; the brothers, if indeed that's what they were, were hulking louts barely capable of speech, with beards so dense they began just below the eyeline and extended thick as fur to the matted pelts of their chests.

  An hour passed. The smack was making far too much speed; across the dark water the plash of the transports' oar-blades and even the creaking of looms against tholepins carried easily.

  Alexandros ordered the pirate twice to retard his progress, but the man tossed it off with a laugh.

  We were downwind, he said, no one could hear us, and even if they did they would take us for part of the convoy, or one of the spectator boats, trailing to catch the action.

  Sure enough, as soon as the belly of the coastline had swallowed the lights of Rhion behind us, a Spartan cutter emerged out of the black and made way to intercept us. Doric voices hailed the smack and ordered her to heave-to. Suddenly our skipper demanded his money. When we land, Alexandros insisted, as agreed. The beards clamped oars in their fists like weapons. Cutter's getting closer, boys. How will it go with you if you're caught?