Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

"I chose this because I wanted to pick a work of fiction . I could have gone for the graphic novel, Three Hundred —but it’s too clichéd. I could have gone for the graphic novel Three , which is set in the 360s and actually takes the perspective of the Helots, but I thought that was maybe a bit too obscure. So, I went for Pressfield’s Gates of Fire , a full-scale novel with a Thermopylae theme, a halfway house between Three Hundred and Three. Gates of Fire is about the Spartans and the Spartans are the heroes, but Pressfield doesn’t hide the murky part of Spartan society. The Helots are very prominent. One of the main characters is a Helot who is the bastard son of a Spartan citizen. The story is told by a foreign boy who’s made his way to Sparta and voluntarily made himself a slave of Sparta. He ends up being able to tell the story of Thermopylae because he’s at the battle as a servant for Dienekes, the ‘we’ll-fight-in-the-shade’ guy. It’s an imaginative account of the Spartans and the Spartans in Gates of Fire look a lot like US Marines, which is not that surprising when you find out that Steven Pressfield was a marine. His first book was The Legend of Bagger Vance . I saw him talking recently and he said he didn’t really have an idea for his second book and then he read Herodotus. He said that when he got to the line ‘we’ll fight in the shade’ he thought ‘I recognize these guys’, so decided he could tell the story of the Spartans based on his own background. He did a lot of work reading secondary scholarship. He’s written a series of other books about the ancient world and a series on Alexander the Great ‘s conquests of Asia. In one of them, set in Afghanistan, you can see the modern and ancient overlapping. He spent a lot of time researching with classicists. So, there’s a lot of rigour in there, while being a fictional story. And that’s one of the reasons why I chose it. It’s a really good read, but it is a really imaginative recreation of what Spartan society could have been like. Herodotus says there were 300 Spartans and then, every now and then, he mentions Helots. He mentions two Spartans being afflicted by an eye problem. Herodotus is unclear about what the eye problem is, but they’re blind on the final day and one of them decides to go home and the other one asks his Helot to lead him into the battle. His Helot takes him into the battle and then he just plunges into the mêlée and dies and the Helot runs away. So you’ve suddenly got a Helot appearing. Then, after the battle, Herodotus says that the Persian king, Xerxes, was trying to hide how many of his own men had been killed by burying them. But Herodotus then says that the Greeks who visited the site could see that a lot of the dead ‘Spartans’ were actually Helots who died alongside their masters on the final day. “There’s been a real seachange in Spartan studies since the late 1980s” So there’s an uncertain number of Helots at Thermopylae. One of our later sources says there were 700 perioikoi with the Spartans at Thermopylae. They are the people who sat between the Helots and the Spartans in Spartan society. Their name literally means ‘the dwellers around’. Sometimes people try and rationalize what Diodorus says and what Herodotus says and say, ‘Oh, there would have been 700 Helots.’ But Herodotus knows who the perioikoi are and it’s odd that he doesn’t mention them, if they were there. His numbers don’t quite add up. There is a gap. Herodotus says more than two million. An epigram set up after the battle said, ‘Here 4000 stood against three million’. Modern estimates are more like 100,000. The highest figure that no one has had a fit about is about 300,000. There’s no way of really telling. It’s lots, but not nearly as many as Herodotus said. Two Spartans got home and the allies got home as well, apart from the Thespians and the Thebans, who fought on with the Spartans on the final day. One of Spartans who got home was Pantites. He was sent away as a messenger and when he got home, he was so shamed by the others that he hanged himself. The other one was Aristodemus—the other guy with an eye problem. He was reviled as a coward. Herodotus says no one would share fire with him or even talk to him. And the next summer he fought at the Battle of Plataea and, according to Herodotus, he charged out from the ranks and died a spectacular death. Herodotus said that all the other Greeks thought Aristodemus was the bravest, but the Spartans said he wasn’t brave because he wanted to die, which is so harsh, but you can understand their attitude. You should die in spite of wanting to live, rather than because you want to die. It was part of a successful defence of Greece and it certainly had an inspiration factor. Diodorus, who was writing in the first century BC and the first century AD, actually said that the men who fought and died at Thermopylae were more important and had done more for the freedom of Greece than the Greeks who won at Salamis and Plataea, because their incredible bravery in the face of overwhelming odds had inspired the Greeks. He said that every time the Persians remembered the Spartans at Thermopylae it made them quake with fear and anytime the Greeks thought of the Spartans at Thermopylae it inspired them to achieve greater things themselves. So, it’s a spectacular defeat, but a morale-inspiring one, if you want to think about it that way. It’s a really good read. The other reason I chose it was to read it in relation to the Pomeroy book. One of the really interesting parts of his imagining of Spartan society is the prominence he gives to Spartan women and the way they behave. Spartan women know everything that’s going on in Sparta and they are happy to tell their men what to do. There’s a wonderful scene in which Leonidas explains to one of the Spartan women why he’s chosen the 300 he’s taking to Thermopylae. And he hasn’t chosen them because they’re the best men. He’s chosen them because they are husbands or sons of the women who can cope with them dying. So he’s chosen his 300 because their women are going to be strong enough to cope with them having sacrificed their lives in that way. It’s a nice portrayal of Spartan women in all of their freedom. He was Agiad King of Sparta. He had come comparatively recently to the throne. His co-King was Leotychidas, whom no one ever mentions in the popular culture versions of events."