Steven Pressfield - Gates of Fire - An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

I envy you comrades, the merchant continued when the emotion had cleared from his throat. I have searched all my life for that which you have possessed from birth, a noble city to belong to. His smithy-scarred hand indicated the fires springing to life across the camp and the warriors, old and young, now settling beside them. This will be my city. I will be her magistrate and her physician, her orphans' father and her fool.

He handed out his pears and moved on. One could hear the laughter he brought to the next fire, and the one after that.

The allies had been on station at the Gates for four nights then. They had observed the scale of the Persian host, on land and sea, and knew well the odds insuperable that faced them. Yet it was not until that moment, I felt, at least for my master's platoon, that the reality of the peril to Hellas and the imminence of the defenders' own extinction truly struck home. A profound soberness settled with the vanishing sun.

For long moments no one spoke. Alexandros was skinning the hare, I was grinding barley meal in a handmill; Medon prepared the ground oven, Black Leon was chopping onions. Bias reclined against the stump of an oak felled for firewood, with Leon Donkeydick upon his left. To the startle-ment of all, Suicide began to speak.

There is a goddess in my country called Na'an, the Scythian broke the silence. My mother was a priestess of this cult, if such a grand title may be applied to an illiterate countrywoman who lived all her life out of the back of a waggon. My mind is recalled to this by our friend the merchant and the two-wheeled cart he calls his home.

This was as much speech at one time as I, or any other, had heard Suicide give voice to. All expected him to halt right there. To their astonishment, the Scythian continued.

His priestess mother taught him, Suicide said, that nothing beneath the sun is real. The earth and everything upon it is but a forestander, the material embodiment of a finer and more profound reality which exists immediately behind it, invisible to mortal sense. Everything we call real is sustained by this subtler fundament which underlies it, indestructible, unglimpsed beyond the curtain.

My mother's religion teaches that those things alone are real which cannot be perceived by the senses. The soul. Mother love. Courage. These are closer to God, she taught, because they alone are the same on both sides of death, in front of the curtain and behind.

When I first came to Lakedaemon and beheld the phalanx, Suicide went on, I thought it the most ludicrous form of warfare I had ever seen. In my country we fight on horseback. This to me was the only way, grand and glorious, a spectacle that stirs the soul. The phalanx looked like a joke to me. But I admired the men, their virtue, which was so clearly superior to that of every other nation I had observed and studied. It was a puzzle to me.

I glanced to Dienekes across the fire, to see if he had previously heard these thoughts articulated by Suicide, perhaps in the years before I had entered his service, when the Scythian alone stood as his squire. Upon my master's face was written rapt attention. Clearly this bounty from Suicide's lips was as novel to him as to the others.

Do you remember, Dienekes, when we fought the Thebans at Erythrae? When they broke and ran? This was the first rout I had witnessed. I was appalled by it. Can there exist a baser, more degrading sight beneath the sun than a phalanx breaking apart in fear? It makes one ashamed to be mortal, to behold such ignobility even in an enemy. It violates the higher laws of God.

Suicide's face, which had been a grimace of disdain, now brightened into a cheerier mode. Ah, but the opposite: a line that holds! What can be more grand, more noble?

One night I dreamt I marched within the phalanx. We were advancing across a plain to meet the foe. Terror froze my heart. My fellow warriors strode all around me, in front, behind, to all sides.

They were all me. Myself old, myself young. I became even more terrified, as if I were coming apart into pieces. Then all began to sing. All the 'me's,' all the 'myself's.' As their voices rose in sweet concord, all fear fled my heart. I woke with a still breast and knew this was a dream straight from God.

I understood then that it was the glue that made the phalanx great. The unseen glue that bound it together. I realized that all the drill and discipline you Spartans love to pound into each other's skulls were really not to inculcate skill or art, but only to produce this glue.

Medon laughed. And what glue have you dissolved, Suicide, that finally allows your jaws to flap with such un-Scyth-ian immoderation?

Suicide grinned across the fire. Medon was the one, it was said, who had originally given the Scythian his nickname, when he, guilty of a murder in his country, had fled to Sparta, where he asked again and again for death.

When I first came to Lakedaemon and they called me 'Suicide,' I hated it…But in time I came to see its wisdom, unintentional as it was. For what can be more noble than to slay oneself? Not literally. Not with a blade in the guts. But to extinguish the selfish self within, that part which looks only to its own preservation, to save its own skin. That, I saw, was the victory you Spartans had gained over yourselves. That was the glue. It was what you had learned and it made me stay, to learn it too.

When a warrior fights not for himself, but for his brothers, when his most passionately sought goal is neither glory nor his own life's preservation, but to spend his substance for them, his comrades, not to abandon them, not to prove unworthy of them, then his heart truly has achieved contempt for death, and with that he transcends himself and his actions touch the sublime. This is why the true warrior cannot speak of battle save to his brothers who have been there with him.

This truth is too holy, too sacred, for words. I myself would not presume to give it speech, save here now, with you.

Black Leon had been listening attentively. What you say is true, Suicide, if you will forgive me for calling you that. But not everything unseen is noble. Base emotions are invisible as well. Fear and greed and lust. What do you say about them? Yes, Suicide acknowledged, but don't they feel base? They stink to heaven, they make one sick within the heart. The noble invisible things feel different. They are like music, in which the higher notes are the finer.

This was another thing that puzzled me when I arrived in Lakedaemon. Your music. How much of it there was, not alone the martial odes or war songs you sing as you advance upon the foe, but in the dances and the choruses, the festivals and the sacrifices. Why do these consummate warriors honor music so, when they forbid all theater and art? I believe they sense that the virtues are like music. They vibrate at a higher, nobler pitch.

He turned to Alexandros. That is why Leonidas chose you for the Three Hundred, my young master, though he knew you had never before stood among the trumpets. He believes you will sing here at the Gates in that sublime register, not with this-he indicated the throat-but with this. And his hand touched his heart. Suicide drew up, suddenly awkward and abashed. Around the fire each face regarded him soberly and with respect. Dienekes broke the silence with a laugh.

You're a philosopher, Suicide.

The Scythian grinned back. Yes, he nodded, week up to thees!

A messenger appeared, summoning Dienekes to Leoni-das' council. My master motioned me to accompany him. Something had changed within him; I could sense it as we picked our way among the network of trails that crisscrossed the camps of the allies.

Do you remember the night, Xeo, when we sat with Ariston and Alexandras and spoke of fear and its opposite?

I said I did.