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

by Steven Pressfield

  When Alexandros and I scurried breathless and tardy upon the site, the Spartan Skiritai rangers had just finished setting the enemy refuse yards ablaze. The armies yet stood in formation, twofifths of a mile apart, with the burning hulks between them. All native merchantmen and fishing craft had been withdrawn by the enemy, either hauled to safety within the fortified portion of the anchorage or standing offshore beyond the invaders' reach. This did not deter the Skiritai from torching the wharves and warehouses of the harbor.

  The timbers of the ship sheds the rangers had saturated with naphtha; already they blazed in ruins to the waterline. The defenders of Antirhion, as Leonidas and the Spartans well knew, were militiamen, farmers and potters and fishermen, summertime soldiers like my father. The devastation of their harbor was meant to unnerve them, to dislocate their faculties unaccustomed to such sights and sear into their unseasoned senses the stink and scourge of coming slaughter. It was morning, about market time, and the shore breeze had gotten up. Black smoke from the careened wrecks began to obscure the field; the pitch and encaustic of their timbers blazed with fury, abetted by the wind, which turned the debris-pile smudge bums into howling bonfires.

  Alexandros and I had secured a vantage along the landward bluff, no more than a furlong above the site where the massed formations must clash. The smoke was already gagging us. We made our way across the slope. Others had claimed the site before us, boys and older men of Antirhion, armed with bows, slings and missile weapons they meant to hurl down upon the Spartans as they advanced, but these light-armed forces had been cleared early by the Skiritai, whose comrades below would advance as always from their position of honor on the Lakedaemonian left. The rangers took possession of half the face, driving the enemy skirmishers back where their slings and shafts were outranged and could work no harm to the army.

  Directly beneath us, an eighth of a mile away, the Spartans and their allies were marshaling into their ranks. Squires armed the warriors from the feet up, starting with the heavy oxhide soles which could tread over fire; then the bronze greaves, which the squires bent into place around the shins of their masters, securing them at the rear of the calf by the flex of the metal alone. We could see Alexandras' father, Olympieus, and the white beard of his squire, Mer-iones.

  The troops bound their private parts next, accompanied by obscene humor as each warrior mocksolemnly saluted his manhood and offered a prayer that he and it would still be acquainted when the day was over.

  This process of arming for battle, which the citizen-soldiers of other poleis had practiced no more than a dozen times a year in the spring and summer training, the Spartans had rehearsed and rerehearsed, two hundred, four hundred, six hundred times each campaigning season. Men in their fifties had done this ten thousand times. It was as second-nature to them as oiling or dusting their limbs before wrestling or dressing their long hair, which they, fitted now with the linen spolas corselet and bronze breastplate, proceeded to do with elaborate care and ceremony, assisting one another like a regiment of dandies preparing for a dress ball, all the while radiating an eerie presence of calm and nonchalance.

  Finally the men scribed their names or signs upon skytalides, the improvised twig bracelets they called tickets, which would distinguish their bodies should they, falling, be maimed too hideously to be identified. They used wood because it was valueless as plunder by the enemy.

  Behind the massing men, the omens were being taken. Shields, helmets and foot-long spearpoints had been burnished to a minor's gleam; they flashed brilliantly in the sun, investing the massed formation with the appearance of some colossal milling machine, made not so much of men as of bronze and iron.

  Now the Spartans and Tegeates advanced to their positions in the line. First the Skiritai, on the left, forty-eight shields across and eight deep; next the Selassian Stephanos, the Laurel regiment, eleven hundred perioikic hoplites. To the right of these massed the six hundred heavy infantry of Tegea; then the agema of the Knights in the line's center, Polynikes prominent among them, thirty shields across and five deep, to fight around and protect the person of the king. Right of these, dressing their line, moved into place the Wild Olive regiment, a hundred and forty-four across, with the Panther battalion adjacent the Knights, then the Huntress with Olympieus in the forerank, and the Menelaion. On their right, already to their marks, massed the battalions of the Herakles, another hundred and forty-four across, with Dienekes clearly visible at the head of his thirty-six-man enomotia, dividing now into four nine-man files, or stichoi, anchoring the right.

  The total, excluding armed squires ranging as auxiliaries, exceeded forty-five hundred and extended wing to wing across the plain for nearly six hundred meters.

  From our vantage, Alexandros and I could see Dekton, as tall and muscular as any of the warriors, unarmored in his altar-boy white, leading two she-goats swiftly out to Leoni-das, who stood garlanded with the battle priests before the formation in readiness for the sacrifice. Two goats were needed in case the first bled inpropitiously. The commanders' postures, like those of the massed warriors, projected an air of absolute insouciance.

  Across from these the Antirhionians and their Syrakusan allies had massed in their numbers, the same width as the Spartans but six or more shields deeper. The scrapyard hulks had now burned down to ashy skeletons, spewing a blanket of smoke across the field. Beyond these, the stones of the harbor sizzled black in the water, while the spikes of burned-black wharf timbers protruded from the flotsam-choked surface like burial stones; a clotted ash-colored haze obscured what was left of the waterfront.

  The wind bore the smoke upon the enemy, upon the massed individuals, the sinews of whose knees and shoulders shivered and quaked beneath the weight of their unaccustomed armor, while their hearts hammered in their breasts and the blood sang in their ears. It took no diviner's gift to discern their state of agitation. Watch their spearpoints, Alexandros said, pointing to the massed foe as they jostled and jockeyed into their ranks. See them tremble. Even the plumes on their helmets are quaking. I looked. In the Spartan line the iron-bladed forest of eight-footers rose solid as a spike fence, each shaft upright and aligned, dressed straight as a geometer's line and none moving. Across among the enemy, shafts wove and wobbled; all save the Syrakusans in the center were misaligned in rank and file. Some shafts actually clattered against their neighbors', chattering like teeth.

  Alexandros was tallying the battalions in the Syrakusans' ranks. He made their total at twentyfour hundred shields, with twelve to fifteen hundred mercenaries and an additional three thousand citizen militiamen from the city of Antirhion herself. The enemy's numbers totaled half again that of the Spartans'. It was not enough and the foe knew it.

  Now the clamor began.

  Among the enemy's ranks, the bravest (or perhaps the most fear-stricken) began banging the ash of their spear shafts upon the bronze bowls of their shields, creating a tumult of pseudoandreia which reverberated across and around the mountain-enclosed plain. Others reinforced this racket with the warlike thrusting of their spearpoints to heaven and the loosing of cries to the gods and shouts of threat and anger. The roar multiplied threefold, then five, and ten, as the enemy rear ranks and flankers picked the clamor up and contributed their own bluster and bronze-bangingSoon the entire fifty-four hundred were bellowing the war cry. Their commander thrust his spear forward and the mass surged behind him into the advance.

  The Spartans had neither moved nor made a sound.

  They waited patiently in their scarlet-cloaked ranks, neither grim nor rigid, but speaking quietly to each other words of encouragement and cheer, securing the final preparation for actions they had rehearsed hundreds of times in training and performed dozens and scores more in battle.

  Here came the foe, picking up the pace of his advance. A fast walk. A swinging stride. The line was extending and fanning open to the right, winging out as men in fear edged into the shadow of the shield of the comrade on their right; already one could see the e
nemy ranks stagger and fall from alignment as the bravest surged forward and the hesitant shrank back. Leonidas and the priests still stood exposed out front.

  The shallow stream yet waited before the enemy. The foe's generals, expecting the Spartans to advance first, had formed their lines so that this watercourse stood midway between the armies.

  In the enemy's plan, no doubt, the sinuous defile of the river would disorder the Lakedaemonian ranks and render them vulnerable at the moment of attack. The Spartans, however, had outwaited them. As soon as the bronze-banging began, the enemy commanders knew they could not restrain their ranks longer; they must advance while their men's blood was up, or all fervor would dissipate and terror flood inevitably into the vacuum.

  Now the river worked against the enemy. His foreranks descended into the defile, yet a quarter mile from the Spartans. Up they came, their already disordered dress and interval disintegrating further. They were again on the flat now, but with the river to their rear, the most perilous place it could be in the event of a rout.

  Leonidas stood patiently watching, flanked by the battle priests and Dekton with his goats. The enemy was now a fifth of a mile off and accelerating the pace of his advance. The Spartans still hadn't moved. Dekton handed over the first she-goat's leash. We could see him glancing apprehensively as the plain began to thunder from the pounding of the enemy's feet and the air commenced to ring with their fear- and rage-inspired cries.

  Leonidas performed the sphagia, crying aloud to Artemis Huntress and the Muses, then piercing with his own sword the throat of the sacrificial goat whose haunches he pinned from behind with his knees, his left hand hauling the beast's jaw exposed as the blade thrust through its throat. No eye in the formation failed to see the blood gush and spill into Gaia, maternal earth, splattering as it fell Leonidas' bronze greaves and painting crimson his feet in their oxhide battle soles.

  The king turned, with the life-fled victim yet clamped between his knees, to face the Skiritai, Spartiates, perioikoi and Tegeates, who still held, patient and silent, in their massed ranks. He extended his sword, dark and dripping the blood of holy sacrifice, first heavenward toward the gods whose aid he now summoned, then around, toward the fast-advancing enemy.

  Zeus Savior and Eros! his voice thundered, eclipsed but not unheard in that cacophonous din.

  Lakedaemon!

  The salpinx sounded Advance! trumpeters sustaining the eardrum-numbing note ten paces after the men had stepped off, and now the pipers' wail cut through, shrill notes of their auloi piercing the melee like the cry of a thousand Furies. Dekton heaved the butchered goat and the live one over his shoulders and scampered like hell for the safety of the ranks.

  To the beat the Spartans and their allies advanced, eight-footers at the upright, their honed and polished spearpoints flashing in the sun. Now the foe broke into an all-out charge. Leonidas, displaying neither haste nor urgency, fell into step in his place in the front rank as it advanced to envelop him, with the Knights flowing impeccably into position upon his right and left.

  Now from the Lakedaemonian ranks rose the paean, the hymn to Castor ascending from four thousand throats. On the climactic beat of the second stanza, Heaven-shining brother Skiborne hero the spears of the first three ranks snapped from the vertical into the attack.

  Words cannot convey the impact of awe and terror produced upon the foe, any foe, by this seemingly uncomplex maneuver, called in Lakedaemon spiking it or palming the pine, so simple to perform on the parade ground and so formidable under conditions of life and death. To behold it executed with such precision and fearlessness, no man surging forward out of control nor hanging back in dread, none edging right into the shadow of his rankmate's shield, but all holding solid and unbreakable, tight as the scales on a serpent's flank, the heart stopped in awe, the hair stood straight up upon the neck and shivers coursed powerfully the length of the spine.

  As when some colossal beast, brought to bay by the hounds, wheels in his fury, bristling with rage and baring his fangs, and plants himself in the power and fearlessness of his strength, so did the bronze and crimson phalanx of the Lakedaemonians now snap as one into its mode of murder.

  The left wing of the enemy, eighty across, collapsed even before the shields of their promachoi, the front-rankers, had come within thirty paces of the Spartans. A cry of dread rose from the throats of the foe, so primal it froze the blood, and then was swallowed in the tumult.

  The enemy left broke from within.

  This wing, whose advancing breadth had stood an instant earlier at forty-eight shields, abruptly became thirty, then twenty, then ten as panic flared like a gale-driven fire from terror-stricken pockets within the massed formation. Those in the first three ranks who turned in flight now collided with their comrades advancing from the rear. Shield rim caught upon shield rim, spear shaft upon spear shaft; a massive tangle of flesh and bronze ensued as men bearing seventy pounds of shield and armor stumbled and fell, becoming obstacles and impediments to their own advancing comrades. You could see the brave men stride on in the advance, crying out in rage to their countrymen as these abandoned them. Those who still clung to courage pushed past those who had forsaken it, calling out in outrage and fury, trampling the forerankers, or else, as valor deserted them too, jerked free and fled to save their own skins.

  At the height of the foe's confusion the Spartan right fell upon them. Now even the bravest of the enemy broke. Why should a man, however valorous, stand and die while right and left, fore and rear, his fellows deserted him? Shields were flung, spears cast wildly to the turf. Half a thousand men wheeled on their heels and stampeded in terror. At that instant the center and right of the enemy's line crashed shields-on into the central corps of the Spartans.

  That sound which all warriors know but which to Alexandras' and my youthful ears had been heretofore unknown and unheard now ascended from the clash and collision of the othismos.

  Once, at home when I was a child, Bruxieus and! had helped our neighbor Pierion relocate three of his stacked wooden beehives. As we jockeyed the stack into place upon its new stand, someone's foot slipped. The stacked hives dropped. From within those stoppered confines yet clutched in our hands arose such an alarum, neither shriek nor cry, growl nor roar, but a thrum from the netherworld, a vibration of rage and murder that ascended not from brain or heart, but from the cells, the atoms of the massed poleis within the hives.

  This selfsame sound, multiplied a hundred-thousandfold, now rose from the massed compacted crush of men and armor roiling beneath us on the plain. Now I understood the poet's phrase the mill of Ares and apprehended in my flesh why the Spartans speak of war as work. I felt Alexandras' fingernails dig into the flesh of my arm.

  Can you see my father? Do you see Dienekes?

  Dienekes waded into the rout below us; we could see his cross-crested curry brush at the right of the Herakles, in the fore of the third platoon. As disordered as were the ranks of the enemy, so held the Spartans' intact and cohesive. Their forerank did not charge wildly upon the foe, flailing like savages, nor did they advance with the stolid precision of the parade ground. Rather they surged, in unison, like a line of warships on the ram. I had never appreciated how far beyond the interleaved bronze of the promachoi's shields the murderous iron of their eight-footers could extend. These punched and struck, overhand, driven by the full force of the right arm and shoulder, across the upper rim of the shield; not just the spears of the front-rankers but those of the second and even the third, extending over their mates' shoulders to form a thrashing engine that advanced like a wall of murder. As wolves in a pack take down the fleeing deer, so did the Spartan right fall upon the defenders of Antirhion, not in frenzied shrieking rage, lip-curled and fang-bared, but predator-like, cold-blooded, applying the steel with the wordless cohesion of the killing pack and the homicidal efficiency of the hunt.

  Dienekes was turning them. Wheeling his platoon to take the enemy in flank. They were in the smoke now. It became impos
sible to see. Dust rose in such quantities beneath the churning feet of the men, commingling with the screen of smoke from the tindered hulks, that the entire plain seemed afire, and from the choking cloud arose that sound, that terrible indescribable sound. We could sense rather than see the Herakles lochos, directly beneath us where the dust and smoke were thinner. They had routed the enemy left; their front ranks now surged into the business of cutting down those luckless bastards who had fallen or been trampled or whose panic-unstrung knees could not find strength to bear them swiftly enough from their own slaughter. On the center and right, along the whole line the Spartans and Syrakusans clashed now shield-to-shield, helmet-to-helmet. Amid the maelstrom we could catch only glimpses, and those primarily of the rear-rankers, eight deep on the Lakedaemonian side, twelve and sixteen deep on the Syrakusan, as they thrust the three-foot-wide bowls of their hoplon shields flush against the backs of the men in file before them and heaved and ground and shoved with all their strength, the soles of their footgear churning up trenches in the plain and slinging yet more dust into the already choking air.

  No longer was it possible to distinguish individual men, or even units. We could see only the tidal surge and back-surge of the massed formations and hear without ceasing that terrible, bloodstill ing sound.

  As when a flood descends from the mountains and the wall of water crashes down the dry courses, smashing into the stone-founded stakes and woven brush of the husbandman's dam, so did the Spartan line surge against the massed weight of the Syrakusans. The dam's bulk, founded as firmly against the flood as fear and forethought may devise, seems itself to dig in and hold, to plant its force fiercely into the earth, and for long moments displays no sign of buckling. But then, as the anxious planter watches, before his eyes a surge begins to capsize one deep-sunken stake, another rush undermines a stacked stone revetment. Into each fraction of a breach, the force and weight of the downrushing wave thrusts itself irresistibly, hammering deeper, tearing and gouging, widening the gap and exploiting it with each successive ripping surge.