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Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae Paperback – Unabridged, September 27, 2005
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At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army.
Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history—one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale. . . .
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBantam
- Publication dateSeptember 27, 2005
- Dimensions5.14 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-10055338368X
- ISBN-13978-0553383683
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“An incredibly gripping, moving, and literate work of art. Rarely does an author manage to re-create a moment in history with such mastery, authority, and psychological insight.”—Nelson DeMille
“A novel that is intricate and arresting and, once begun, almost impossible to put down.”—New York Daily News
“A timeless epic of man and war . . . Pressfield has created a new classic deserving of a place beside the very best of the old.”—Stephen Coonts
“Steven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life, and he does for that war what Charles Frazier did for the Civil War in Cold Mountain.”—Pat Conroy
From the Inside Flap
At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army.
Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history--one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale....
"From the Paperback edition.
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
There was an exercise we of the battle train practiced when we served as punching bags for the Spartan heavy infantry. It was called the Oak because we took our positions along a line of oaks at the edge of the plain of Otona, where the Spartiates and the Gentleman-Rankers ran their field exercises in fall and winter. We would line up ten deep with body-length wicker shields braced upon the earth and they would hit us, the shock troops, coming across the flat in line of battle, eight deep, at a walk, then a pace, then a trot and finally a dead run. The shock of their interleaved shields was meant to knock the breath out of you, and it did. It was like being hit by a mountain. Your knees, no matter how braced you held them, buckled like saplings before an earthslide; in an instant all courage fled our hearts; we were rooted up like dried stalks before the ploughman's blade.
That was how it felt to die. The weapon which slew me at Thermopylae was an Egyptian hoplite spear, driven in beneath the plexus of the ribcage. But the sensation was not what one would have anticipated, not being pierced but rather slammed, like we sparring fodder felt beneath the oaks.
I had imagined that the dead would be detached. That they would look upon life with the eyes of objective wisdom. But the experience proved the opposite. Emotion ruled. It seemed nothing remained but emotion. My heart ached and broke as never it could on earth. Loss encompassed me with a searing, all-mastering pain. I saw my wife and children, my dear cousin Diomache, she whom I loved. I saw Skamandridas, my father, and Eunike, my mother, Bruxieus, Dekton and "Suicide," names which mean nothing to His Majesty to hear, but which to me were dearer than life and now, dying, dearer still.
Away they flew. Away I flew from them.
I was keenly conscious of the comrades-in-arms who had fallen with me. A bond surpassing by a hundredfold that which I had known in life bound me to them. I felt a sense of inexpressible relief and realized that I had feared, more than death, separation from them. I apprehended that excruciating war survivor's torment, the sense of isolation and self-betrayal experienced by those who had elected to cling yet to breath when their comrades had let loose their grip.
That state which we call life was over.
I was dead.
And yet, titanic as was that sense of loss, there existed a keener one which I now experienced and felt my brothers-in-arms feeling with me. It was this.
That our story would perish with us.
That no one would ever know.
I cared not for myself, for my own selfish or vainglorious purposes, but for them. For Leonidas, for Alexandros and Polynikes, for Arete bereft by her hearth and, most of all, for Dienekes. That his valor, his wit, his private thoughts that I alone was privileged to share, that these and all that he and his companions had achieved and suffered would simply vanish, drift away like smoke from a woodland fire, this was unbearable.
We had reached the river now. We could hear with ears that were no longer ears and see with eyes that were no longer eyes the stream of Lethe and the hosts of the long-suffering dead whose round beneath the earth was at last drawing to a period. They were returning to life, drinking of those waters which would efface all memory of their existence here as shades.
But we from Thermopylae, we were aeons away from drinking of Lethe's stream. We remembered.
A cry which was not a cry but only the multiplied pain of the warriors' hearts, all feeling what I, too, felt, rent the baleful scene with unspeakable pathos.
Then from behind me, if there can be such a thing as "behind" in that world where all directions are as one, came a glow of such sublimity that I knew, we all knew at once, it could be nothing but a god.
Phoebus Far Darter, Apollo himself in war armor, moved there among the Spartiates and Thespaians. No words were exchanged; none were needed. The Archer could feel the men's agony and they knew without speech that he, warrior and physician, was there to succor it. So quickly that surprise was impossible I felt his eye turn toward me, me the last and least who could expect it, and then Dienekes himself was beside me, my master in life.
I would be the one. The one to go back and speak. A pain beyond all previous now seized me. Sweet life itself, even the desperately sought chance to tell the tale, suddenly seemed unendurable alongside the pain of having to take leave of these whom I had come so to love.
But again, before the god's majesty, no entreaty was possible.
I saw another light, a sicklier, cruder, more coarse illumination, and knew that it was the sun. I was soaring back. Voices came to me through physical ears. Soldiers' speech, in Egyptian and Persian, and leather-gauntleted fists pulling me from beneath a sheaf of corpses.
The Egyptian marines told me later that I had uttered the word lokas, which in their tongue meant "fuck," and they had laughed even as they dragged my shattered body out into the light of day.
They were wrong. The word was Loxias--the Greek title of respect for Apollo the Cunning, or Apollo Crabwise, whose oracles arise ever elusive and oblique--and I was half crying to him, half cursing him for laying this terrible responsibility on me who had no gift to perform it.
As poets call upon the Muse to speak through them, I croaked my inarticulate grunt to the Striker From Afar.
If indeed you have elected me, Archer, then let your fine-fletched arrows spring from my bow. Lend me your voice, Far Darter. Help me to tell the tale.
Thermopylae is a spa. The word in Greek means "hot gates," from the thermal springs and, as His Majesty knows, the narrow and precipitous defiles which form the only passages by which the site may be approached--in Greek, pylae or pylai, the East and West Gates.
The Phokian Wall around which so much of the most desperate fighting took place was not constructed by the Spartans and their allies in the event, but stood in existence prior to the battle, erected in ancient times by the inhabitants of Phokis and Lokris as defense against the incursions of their northern neighbors, the Thessalians and Macedonians. The wall, when the Spartans arrived to take possession of the pass, stood in ruins. They rebuilt it.
The springs and pass themselves are not considered by the Hellenes to belong to the natives of the area, but are open to all in Greece. The baths are thought to possess curative powers; in summer the site teems with visitors. His Majesty beheld the charm of the shaded groves and pool houses, the oak copse sacred to Amphiktyon and that pleasantly meandering path bounded by the Lion's Wall, whose stones are said to have been set in place by Herakles himself. Along this in peacetime are customarily arrayed the gaily colored tents and booths used by the vendors from Trachis, Anthela and Alpenoi to serve whatever adventurous pilgrims have made the trek to the mineral baths.
There is a double spring sacred to Persephone, called the Skyllian fountain, at the foot of the bluff beside the Middle Gate. Upon this site the Spartans established their camp, between the Phokian Wall and the hillock where the final tooth-and-nail struggle took place. His Majesty knows how little drinking water is to hand from other sources in the surrounding mountains. The earth between the Gates is normally so parched and dust-blown that servants are employed by the spa to oil the walkways for the convenience of the bathers. The ground itself is hard as stone.
His Majesty saw how swiftly that marble-hard clay was churned into muck by the contending masses of the warriors. I have never seen such mud and of such depth, whose moisture came only from the blood and terror-piss of the men who fought upon it.
When the advance troops, the Spartan rangers, arrived at Thermopylae prior to the battle, a few hours before the main body which was advancing by forced march, they discovered, incredibly, two parties of spa-goers, one from Tiryns, the other from Halkyon, thirty in all, men and women, each in their separate precincts, in various states of undress. These pilgrims were startled, to say the least, by the sudden appearance in their midst of the scarlet-clad armored Skiritai, all picked men under thirty, chosen for speed of foot as well as prowess in mountain fighting. The rangers cleared the bathers and their attendant perfume vendors, masseurs, fig-cake and bread sellers, bath and oil girls, strigil boys and so forth (who had ample intelligence of the Persian advance but had thought that the recent down-valley storm had rendered the northern approaches temporarily impassable). The rangers confiscated all food, soaps, linens and medical accoutrements and in particular the spa tents, which later appeared so grimly incongruous, billowing festively above the carnage. The rangers reerected these shelters at the rear, in the Spartan camp beside the Middle Gate, intending them for use by Leonidas and his royal guard.
The Spartan king, when he arrived, refused to avail himself of this shelter, deeming it unseemly. The Spartiate heavy infantry likewise rejected these amenities. The tents fell, in one of the ironies to which those familiar with war are accustomed, to the use of the Spartan helots, Thespaian, Phokian and Opountian Lokrian slaves and other attendants of the battle train who suffered wounds in the arrow and missile barrages. These individuals, too, after the second day refused to accept shelter. The brightly colored spa tents of Egyptian linen, now in tatters, came as His Majesty saw to protect only the beasts of transport, the mules and asses supporting the commissariat, who became terrorized by the sights and smells of the battle and could not be held by their teamsters. In the end the tents were torn to rags to bind the wounds of the Spartiates and their allies.
When I say Spartiates, I mean the formal term in Greek, Spartiatai, which refers to Lakedaemonians of the superior class, full Spartans--the homoioi--Peers or Equals. None of the class called Gentleman-Rankers or of the perioikoi, the secondary Spartans of less than full citizenship, or those enlisted from the surrounding Lakedaemonian towns, fought at the Hot Gates, though toward the end when the surviving Spartiates became so few that they could no longer form a fighting front, a certain "leavening element," as Dienekes expressed it, of freed slaves, armor bearers and battle squires, was permitted to fill the vacated spaces.
His Majesty may nonetheless take pride in knowing that his forces defeated the flower of Hellas, the cream of her finest and most valiant fighting men.
As for my own position within the battle train, the explanation may require a certain digression, with which I hope His Majesty will be patient.
I was captured at age twelve (or, more accurately, surrendered) as a heliokekaumenos, a Spartan term of derision which means literally "scorched by the sun." It referred to a type of nearly feral youth, burned black as Ethiopians by their exposure to the elements, with which the mountains abounded in those days preceding and following the first Persian War. I was cast originally among the Spartan helots, the serf class that the Lakedaemonians had created from the inhabitants of Messenia and Helos after they in centuries past had conquered and enslaved them. These husbandmen, however, rejected me because of certain physical impairments which rendered me useless for field labor. Also the helots hated and mistrusted any foreigner among them who might prove an informer. I lived a dog's life for most of a year before fate, luck or a god's hand delivered me into the service of Alexandros, a Spartan youth and protege of Dienekes. This saved my life. I was recognized at least ironically as a freeborn and, evincing such qualities of a wild beast as the Lakedaemonians found admirable, was elevated to the status of parastates pais, a sort of sparring partner for the youths enrolled in the agoge, the notorious and pitiless thirteen-year training regimen which turned boys into Spartan warriors.
Every heavy infantryman of the Spartiate class travels to war attended by at least one helot. Enomotarchai, the platoon leaders, take two. This latter was Dienekes' station. It is not uncommon for an officer of his rank to select as his primary attendant, his battle squire, a freeborn foreigner or even a young mothax, a noncitizen or bastard Spartan still in agoge training. It was my fortune, for good or ill, to be chosen by my master for this post. I supervised the care and transport of his armor, maintained his kit, prepared his food and sleeping site, bound his wounds and in general performed every task necessary to leave him free to train and fight.
My childhood home, before fate set me upon the road which found its end at the Hot Gates, was originally in Astakos in Akarnania, north of the Peloponnese, where the mountains look west over the sea toward Kephallinia and, beyond the horizon, to Sikelia and Italia.
The island of Ithaka, home of Odysseus of lore, lay within sight across the straits, though I myself was never privileged to touch the hero's sacred soil, as a boy or later. I was due to make the crossing, a treat from my aunt and uncle, on the occasion of my tenth birthday. But our city fell first, the males of my clan were slaughtered and females sold into slavery, our ancestral land taken, and I cast out, alone save my cousin Diomache, without family or home, three days before the start of my tenth year to heaven, as the poet says.
Product details
- Publisher : Bantam; First Edition (September 27, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 055338368X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0553383683
- Item Weight : 10 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.14 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #10,073 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #32 in Military Historical Fiction
- #107 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #182 in War Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Steven Pressfield is the author of The War of Art which has sold over a millions copies globally and been translated into multiple languages. He is a master of historical fiction with Gates of Fire being on the required reading list at West Point and the the recommended reading list of the Joint Chiefs. His other books include A Man at Arms, Turning Pro, Do the Work, The Artist's Journey, Tides of War, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Last of the Amazons, Virtues of War, The Afghan Campaign, Killing Rommel, The Profession, The Lion's Gate, The Warrior Ethos, The Authentic Swing, An American Jew, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t, and The Knowledge.
His debut novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance was over 30 years in the making. He hasn't stopped writing since.
Steve lives and writes in California. You can following him on IG @steven_pressfield. Sign up for his weekly writing newsletter at stevenpressfield.com
"It is one thing to study war, and another to live the warrior's life."
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Author Steven Pressfield’s portrayal on The Battle of Thermopylae in his novel “Gates of Fire,” captured the power, strength, and fortitude of the ancient Greek Spartans. Told in vivid details, Pressfield’s depiction easily transpires the reader’s senses into the storyline. I couldn’t help but ‘feel’ the battle, tragedy, doom, and hope that unfolded during the historical narrative. Although grim at times, I couldn’t stop reading about the savage nature and mechanized killing employed by the Spartans during the battles. While in battle formation – the Spartans – were a combination of lethal supermen and mechanical machines – amazing warriors – functioning closely together as a windmill of death and defending their compatriots, all while ‘robotically’ killing everything that approached them. Pressfield’s written pictorial of the Battle of Thermopylae is astonishing! A kindling of hope was lit at that rocky mountain pass by 300 of the most feared and admired soldiers ever imageable. The Spartans stand at Thermopylae became the turning point for a future victory against the invading Persian Army. No wonder this book is on the US Marine Corps Reading List. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this eBook.
Gates of fire follows the story of Xeo, a Greek who falls in with the Spartans after his own city is sacked by the Argives. Through his story readers get a look at the arduous Spartan training program and culture, and through his eyes readers get to know the characters who will make the events at Thermopylae personal. Although most of the book takes place prior to the battle itself, the setup gives the battle context and gives the reader the background and tools to make sense of what transpires in the story. When you've learned a few things by seeing the Spartan soldiers on the practice field, seeing their ranks at Thermopylae is more vivid and easily understood. For context and visualizing the battle itself, I found the History Channel episode "Last Stand of the 300" helpful and Pressfield is one of the folks interviewed to describe the events at Thermopylae. The "300" film, although full of visually stunning special effects and some decent art direction, is reductive and cartoonish in the extreme. Even the History Channel chose to emphasize only the Spartans in their title when actually there were several thousand Greeks at the battle right until the last day. Surely the Spartans deserve a place of special remembrance, but it seems that the other Greeks have been forgotten entirely in the way we describe this battle in popular culture.
I very much appreciated the range of emotion which was not simply testosterone driven jingoism. The characters were connected by more stories than their shared status as soldiers. But there are still plenty of gung-ho moments, honor, valor, and also humor, "Weck up to thees!"
It's a very enjoyable novel and well worth your time as a reader. This is one of those events in history that one would wish we had a play-by-play, moment to moment account of simply because of it being such a moment of sacrifice worth remembrance.
Pressfield is a painter with words in the way in which he sets up the telling of the story. The Spartan squire, Xeones, was found barely clinging to life after the legendary 300 finally perished after dispatching tens of thousands of Persians in the narrow pass known as "The Gates of Fire" at Thermopylae. Brought from the battlefield barely breathing, he was nursed back to health and taken before the Persian King, Xerxes. The king wanted to hear in detail how the Spartans had trained and fought against overwhelming odds and in the face of vastly superior numbers.
Xeones' telling of the story is the heart and soul of Pressfield's epic novel. His comments about the arduous training of the Spartans reminds me of tales I have heard and read of Navy SEAL training or the rigors of Army Ranger screening.
"The purpose of an eight-nighter [training exercise] is to drive the individuals of the division, and the unit itself, beyond the point of humor. It is when the jokes stop, they say, that the real lessons are learned and each man, and the mora as a whole, makes those incremental advances which pay off in the ultimate crucible. The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has its legs under it; the real test comes when all strength is fled and the men must produce victory on will alone." (Page 69)
The author, through the voice of Xeones, philosophizes about the traits that make an effective officer in battle:
"This, I realized now watching Dienekes rally and tend to his men, was the role of the officer: to prevent those under his command , at all stages of battle - before, during and after - from becoming `possessed.' To fire their valor when it flagged and rein in their fury when it threatened to take them out of hand. That was Dienekes' job. That was why he wore the transverse-crested helmet of an officer." (Page 112)
As the Spartans prepare for battle, King Leonidas speaks eloquently of the divided loyalties and sensibilities of the warrior:
"When a man seats before his eyes the bronze face of his helmet and steps off from the line of departure, he divides himself, as he divides his `ticket' [the Spartan version of dog tags] in two parts. One part he leaves behind. That part which takes delight in his children, which lifts his voice in the chorus, which clasps his wife to him in the sweet darkness of their bed.
That half of him, the best part, a man sets aside and leaves behind. He banishes from his heart all feelings of tenderness and mercy, all compassion and kindness, all thought or concept of the enemy as a man, a human being like himself. He marches into battle bearing only the second portion of himself, the baser measure, that half which knows slaughter and butchery and turns the blind eye to quarter. He could not fight at all if he did not do this.'
. . . Then this man returns, alive, out of the slaughter. He hears his name called and comes forward to take his ticket. He reclaims that part of himself which he had earlier set aside.
This is a holy moment. A sacramental moment. A moment in which a man feels the gods as close as his own breath.
What unknowable mercy has spared us this day? What clemency of the divine has turned the enemy's spear one handbreadth from our throat and driven it fatally in to the breast of the beloved comrade at our side? Why are we still here above the earth, we who are no better, no braver, who reverenced heaven no more than these our brothers whom the gods have dispatched to hell?
When a man joins the two pieces of his ticket and sees the weld in union together, he feels that part of him, the part that knows love and mercy and compassion, come flooding back over him. This is what unstrings his knees.
What else can a man feel at that moment than the most grave and profound thanksgiving to the gods who, for reasons unknowable, have spared his life this day? Tomorrow their whim may alter. Next week, next year. But this day the sun still shines upon him, he feels its warmth upon his shoulders, he beholds about him the faces of his comrades whom he loves and he rejoices in their deliverance and his own." (Pages 115-6)
I would offer the observation that perhaps the essence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the failure of these two bisected halves of the warrior's ticket - his sense of "self" - to reunite seamlessly after returning from the battlefield.
Pressfield's vivid and fetid word pictures of the horrors of close combat parallel the cinematic imagery of such masterpieces as "Saving Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers":
"Only the dirt itself possessed clemency. Alone the stinking soup beneath the warrior's tread proffered surcease and succor. The men's feet churned it into broth ankle-deep; their driving legs furrowed it to the depth of the calf, then they themselves fell upon it on their knees and fought from there. Fingers clawed at the blood-blackened muck, toes strained against it for purchase, the teeth of dying men bit into it as if to excavate their own graves with the clamp of their jaws. Farmers whose hands were taken up with the pleasure of the dark clods of their native fields, crumbling between their fingers the rich earth which brings forth the harvest, now crawled on their bellies in this sterner soil, clawed at it with the nubs of their busted fingers and writhed without shame, seeking to immure themselves within the earth's mantle and preserve their backs from the pitiless steel. (Page 306)
With elegant strokes of his pen Pressfield offers a sense of historical perspective on the heroism that characterized the band of 300 who stood and fell before the onslaught of the Persian forces at Thermopylae:
"Instead he [King Leonidas] spoke, in words few and plain, of the valley of the Eurotas, of Parnon and Taygetos and the cluster of five unwalled villages which alone comprise that polis and commonwealth which the world calls Sparta. A thousand years from now, Leonidas declared, two thousand, three thousand years hence, men a hundred generations yet unborn may for their private purposes make journey to our country.
`They will come, scholars perhaps, or travelers from beyond the sea, prompted by curiosity regarding the past or appetite for knowledge of the ancients. They will peer out across our plain and probe among the stone and rubble of our nation. What will they learn of us? Their shovels will unearth neither brilliant palaces nor temples; their picks will prise forth no everlasting architecture or art. What will remain of the Spartans? Not monuments of marble or bronze, but this, what we do here today.'" (Page 356)
So, on this Memorial Day weekend, as we consider the courage displayed at "The Gates of Hell" so long ago, let us also remember with gratitude and affection our own warriors - grandfathers, fathers, brothers, sons and daughters - who fought valiantly on our behalf in recent wars.
Al
Top reviews from other countries
The journey into the mindset of the people of Sparta and the ethos of this unique culture is faultlessly displayed around the story of the epic battle that cemented their reputation as one of the hardest, most stoic cultures in history.
An inspiring book that, if like me, after reading it, makes you want to become a better person after seeing what they put themselves through.
Highly recommended.