“Listen to me, boy. Only gods and heroes can be brave in isolation. A man may call upon courage only one way, in the ranks with his brothers-in-arms, the line of his tribe and his city. Most piteous of all states under heaven is that a man alone, bereft of the gods of his home and his polis. A man without a city is not a man. He is a shadow, a shell, a joke and a mockery….”
Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt has a custom, whenever he interviews a new guest, of catechizing them on books they might have read. One he always asks about is Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, a fictionalized account of the Battle of Thermopylae. So when a deal on the book showed up, I decided to buy it, though Greek antiquity is outside my usual field of interest.
What I encountered was a story of astonishing intensity. There were enough incidental resemblances to my own recently finished Erling Skjalgsson saga that I’m glad I waited till now to read it, so I can say without any doubt that I wasn’t influenced by it any way. (Though my books are not nearly so hard-barked.)
In the aftermath of the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans died in a heroic last stand against the invading forces of the Persian Empire, one severely wounded Greek is discovered on the battlefield, and brought before the victorious King Xerxes, who wishes to know what sort of men these were who stood so valiantly.
The Greek, whose name is Xeones, explains that he is not properly a Spartan, but a servant, a squire to one of the officers. He is happy, even proud, to tell the story of his life and of how he came to know the Spartans and their ways, and how they bore themselves up through that last terrible massacre.
Gates of Fire is a harrowing book, one that dives deep into the warrior ethos in its most purified form, not sparing the horrific details of what happens during a battle. I read it with both horror and fascination, as I imagine most readers will. This is not a book for the faint of heart.
Historically, from my own reading, I know that in spite of all this, author Pressfield has done a little covering up. The Spartans, whose courage is unquestioned, were in fact one of the cruelest cultures we know of in history. There are only hints in this novel of the pederasty that was taken for granted in their military training of boys, and the actual condition of the slaves is softened here – among other cruelties, the Spartan ritual of manhood involved hunting down and murdering a slave.
For all that, Gates of Fire is without question a monument of historical fiction. Author Pressfield dares to stare far more directly into the face of battle that I ever have in my own writing.
Highly recommended, for the strong-minded reader.
