Gates of Fire
Steven Pressfield
The Battle of Thermopylae is one of the best-known in Western military history. The assault on the fortified pass began at 11:30 AM, with the fate of Greece in the balance. Within 24 hours, the last Australians and New Zealanders evacuated after destroying over a dozen Nazi Panzers.
Oops, wrong battle. My notes got mixed up. One sec. Okay. Sorry about that. Here we go.
This Battle of Thermopylae raged 2,400 years before the Germans drove through the pass that won the Spartans immortal fame. From this distance, it’s hard to imagine what that suicidal stand must have been like — but Steven Pressfield’s novel gets you as near the battle as anything could. Pressfield is quite good at immersing the reader in the feel of 5th-century Sparta, a place that would test the mettle of almost any modern. Every Greek city-state had its citizen-soldiers who mobilized and trained and fought, but no one built their entire society for war the way Sparta did.
The tale is told through the eyes of Xeones, a perioikos (free second-class resident) of Sparta who rises to become a squire of the peer Dienekes. The novel unfolds as the transcription of a Persian scribe relaying the words of Xeones, a severely-wounded Hellenic survivor, to the King of Kings. Xeones is a great vantage-point protagonist. His station midway between helot and citizen exposes him both to the brutality and to the glory of Sparta. Pressfield presents both sides of the obol without approving or condemning, letting his characters tell their own stories. I appreciate that he does this rather than hemming in his characters with modern moralizing.
Even the structure of the narrative supports his grounded approach to historical fiction, dividing his novel into multiple “books” in the style of Herodotus and Thucydides. Of course, deep dives into cultural history isn’t why most of us open a war novel, and Pressfield delivers in his portrait of ancient war. This is actually a perennial problem in Bronze Age military history because no one alive today has fought a war of spear and shield, and the ancients left no tactical manuals. That said, Pressfield is excellent at portraying the shock and terror of massed man-to-man combat. Warriors descend into a hell of blood, guts, and viscera with nothing but the strength of their own arms, the honor of their brothers, and the hope that the gods might allow them (like Persephone) to emerge from Hades on the other side of horror.
For anyone who wants to read about the Battle of Thermopylae, I still first recommend Herodotus’s Histories as a surprisingly fresh and gripping account in its own right. But if you want a solid narrative grounded in the dust and blood and sweat of the “dance floor,” you could do worse than “Gates of Fire.”
Author: Steven Pressfield
Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Military Fiction
Tags: Greek History