Review: Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield

We’ve all heard of the 300 Spartans who held the pass at Thermopylae against the Persians, and who died to the last man. What we mostly don’t know is who they were, and why they were fighting. Who don’t know who the Persians were, or why they were threatening Greece. Steven Pressfield’s novel Gates of Fire makes up for this lack.

I’d read a bit about the Spartans over the years, enough to know that they were unusual even for Ancient Greece. By our standards, they were brutal and violent; most of their people were “helots”, a word that means slave down to our day, and the lives of their citizens were, if anything, harder than the lives of their slaves.

Pressfield takes as his viewpoint character the “squire” of a Spartan captain, a freeman from another Greek city who came to Sparta after the Argives destroyed his home—for the Spartans and the Argives were enemies. This man, Xeones, came to Thermopylae with his master, served him and fought with him, and was struck down. The Persians found him near death when they broke the Spartans after six days of battle, and he was brought to the Emperor of Persia who wanted to hear his story, and to learn what kind of men were these Spartans.

And so Xeones tells the Emperor his own story in his own way. We hear of his childhood and the wrack of his home; we hear of his youth in Sparta and the training that the youth of Sparta receive in the warlike arts, and, oddly, singing. And through it all we hear of the battle of Thermopylae, proceeding day by day, until the Persians finally win by means of treachery.

This is a bloody book and a crude book—it’s a soldier’s book, about a people for whom the discipline of the soldier was the way of life, unleavened by any hint of Christian compassion. But it is also a deeply human book, and a book about real virtue. Pressfield brings the three-hundred under King Leonidas home to us, and makes them human; he shows us clearly why they fought, and why they joked, and why they stood for those six bloody days, and why we still remember them.

This is not a book to everyone’s taste, but if this description appeals to you at all, I think you will like it very much indeed. Highly recommended.