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The national bestseller!
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.
- Sales Rank: #4420 in Books
- Brand: Bantam
- Published on: 2005-09-27
- Released on: 2005-09-27
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.20" h x .81" w x 5.10" l, .70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
- War
Amazon.com Review
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.
Thus reads an ancient stone at Thermopylae in northern Greece, the site of one of the world's greatest battles for freedom. Here, in 480 B.C., on a narrow mountain pass above the crystalline Aegean, 300 Spartan knights and their allies faced the massive forces of Xerxes, King of Persia. From the start, there was no question but that the Spartans would perish. In Gates of Fire, however, Steven Pressfield makes their courageous defense--and eventual extinction--unbearably suspenseful.
In the tradition of Mary Renault, this historical novel unfolds in flashback. Xeo, the sole Spartan survivor of Thermopylae, has been captured by the Persians, and Xerxes himself presses his young captive to reveal how his tiny cohort kept more than 100,000 Persians at bay for a week. Xeo, however, begins at the beginning, when his childhood home in northern Greece was overrun and he escaped to Sparta. There he is drafted into the elite Spartan guard and rigorously schooled in the art of war--an education brutal enough to destroy half the students, but (oddly enough) not without humor: "The more miserable the conditions, the more convulsing the jokes became, or at least that's how it seems," Xeo recalls. His companions in arms are Alexandros, a gentle boy who turns out to be the most courageous of all, and Rooster, an angry, half-Messenian youth.
Pressfield's descriptions of war are breathtaking in their immediacy. They are also meticulously assembled out of physical detail and crisp, uncluttered metaphor: The forerank of the enemy collapsed immediately as the first shock hit it; the body-length shields seemed to implode rearward, their anchoring spikes rooted slinging from the earth like tent pins in a gale. The forerank archers were literally bowled off their feet, their wall-like shields caving in upon them like fortress redoubts under the assault of the ram.... The valor of the individual Medes was beyond question, but their light hacking blades were harmless as toys; against the massed wall of Spartan armor, they might as well have been defending themselves with reeds or fennel stalks. Alas, even this human barrier was bound to collapse, as we knew all along it would. "War is work, not mystery," Xeo laments. But Pressfield's epic seems to make the opposite argument: courage on this scale is not merely inspiring but ultimately mysterious. --Marianne Painter
From Publishers Weekly
Pressfield's first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was about golf, but here he puts aside his putter and picks up sword and shield as he cleverly and convincingly portrays the clash between Greek hoplites and Persian heavy infantry in the most heroic confrontation of the Hellenic Age: the battle of Thermopylae ("the Hot Gates") in 480 B.C. The terrifying spectacle of classical infantry battle becomes vividly clear in his epic treatment of the Greeks' magnificent last stand against the invading Persians. Driven to understand the courage and sacrifice of his Greek foes, the Persian king, Xerxes, compels Xeones, a captured Greek slave, to explain why the Greeks would give their lives to fight against overwhelming odds. Xeones' tale covers his years of training and adventure as the loyal and devoted servant of Dienekes, a noble Spartan soldier, and he describes the six-day ordeal during which a few hundred Greeks held off thousands of Persian spears and arrows, until a Greek traitor led the Persians to an alternate route. Rich with historical detail, hot action and crafty storytelling, Pressfield's riveting story reveals the social and political framework of Spartan life?ending with the hysteria and brutality of the spear-thrusting, shield-bashing clamor that defined a Spartan's relationship with his family, community, country and fellow warriors. Literary Guild and Military Book Club selections; film rights sold to Universal Studios for George Clooney and Robert Lawrence's Maysville Pictures; UK rights to Bantam, Spanish rights to Grijalbo Mondadori, Italian rights to Rizzoli.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
On a memorial stone placed at the ancient battlefield of Thermopylae are the words, "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie." Those simple words end and encapsulate this brilliant and brutal epic tale. Beginning at the training fields of Sparta, Pressfield (The Legend of Bagger Vance, LJ 4/1/95) ushers the reader through the climactic Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E, fought by the combined armies of Sparta, Athens, and their allies against the invading soldiers of Persia. Narrated by the sole survivor of the battle at the "Hot Gates," in which 300 Spartans, hundreds of their allies, and tens of thousands of Persians died, this work portrays the men and women of ancient Sparta in intimate, dynamic detail. Pressfield weaves a fascinating tale of valor, fear, comradeship, and a courage that takes a handful of warriors beyond human frailty into immortality. An unforgettable novel.?Jane Baird, Anchorage Municipal Libs., AK
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
166 of 181 people found the following review helpful.
Tell the Spartans, Stranger Passing By
By Edwin C. Pauzer
Pressfield manages to bring one of the most historic and pivotal battles of civilization to life through characters of his invention. The battle is Thermopylae where 7000 Greeks led by 300 Spartans held an enormous Persian army of 200,000 at bay for several days, an army that would have changed our civilization had the Greeks not died fighting it. Never before or since has such a badly outnumbered army fought so valiantly nor effectively.
This story is told through the eyes of a Spartan slave who comes to admire his Spartan masters' fraternity, loyalty, and pride they have for themselves, their laws, and their city. It begins after the battle where the slave is wounded, and through a Persian interpreter, recounts his odyssey to Sparta, and his life that led to the moment the battle is over.
Pressfield brings us several ironies in this tale based upon historical fact. The Spartans who ruled the Peloponnesus ruthlessly seem to be the least likely saviors of a civilization from which we draw our roots. The Spartans were the only city-state that could have rallied the other Greeks to fight. And King Leonidas was the only Spartan who thought the best way to preserve his city was to preserve everything Greek. He sacrificed his life and lives of his men to rally a disunited country to attack, and defeat a ruthless invader which they did within the year.
It is also ironic that the Spartans who owned and killed slaves on a regular basis, saved their countrymen from becoming slaves themselves, and in a time of absolute crisis provided the leadership they were so reluctant to give, that saved Greece in the end.
In King Leonidas, Pressfield describes a king who feels it his duty to serve his people rather than being served. Leonidas is the pivotal Spartan, at a pivotal time and place in history that establishes his immortality making him as important as Charles Martel. He could not get his city to move his army, but he got all of Greece to move against the invader.
The fictitious characters in this story seem all too real. We admire them because they know they are making the supreme sacrifice for something greater than themselves. In spite of their society, it provided them with the means to make that sacrifice.
Some have criticized this book because the Spartans owned slaves. Slavery was the consequence of the loser from then until the Age of Progress. It is the valor, sacrifice, and skill that armies ever since have admired about Sparta, not the weakness of their Lycurgic tradition. Their culture, peace, and ruling others sealed their fate. Anyone who judges this story and Spartan society by 20th century standards misses the point, and the debt we owe a warrior class of people who protected the democratic traditions that survived them.
The story ends with the Persian defeat on the Plains of Plataea, and the death of the Spartan slave whose story was faithfully recorded. The Persian interpreter is spared the sword by calling the names of the dead and living Greeks he learned from the dying slave. With his life spared, he is able to establish the fate of the dead and the living he had come to admire and respect.
Every Spartan mother handed her son his shield and said, "[Come home] with it, or on it." The Spartans certainly did. It is everything Greek, it is ironic and it is tragic.
The Persians never attacked Greece again.
Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
that here obedient to their laws we lie.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A superb retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae
By Mary Soon Lee
This is a superb retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae and of the protagonist's life leading up to the battle. I note that it took a little while for the book to fully hook me, but then I was captured by it. The scenes about the soldiers' training, the scenes of actual battle, and most particularly the scenes after or between battles, are all excellent. The discussions of fear, and of how officers and soldiers should behave are likewise excellent. The characters are surprisingly diverse (including among them servants who have varying degrees of loyalty to the Spartans, plus a Spartan boy who is not by nature a warrior though he is being trained to be one, a merchant, a supreme young warrior, and an older platoon leader). Unsurprisingly the book portrays the Spartan warriors as heroic and honorable--and does so extremely well. But it did surprise me that it also includes very strong portrayals of women as secondary characters, the strongest depictions of women I've met in fiction for a while. The women don't fight in the battles, yet are courageous and compassionate, intelligent and influential. I was also very taken by the portrayal of Leonidas, the Spartan king who commanded at Thermopylae. One of my favorite speeches in the book is addressed to Xerxes, the King of Persia, and contrasts Xerxes with Leonidas: "I will tell His Majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men's loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his back and the pains he endures for their sake...." A wonderful book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Terrific book on warrior mentality and why Soldiers fight
By Chris
One of the best books on why Soldier's fight, the warrior mentality, and the horrors of war. This book was mandatory reading for one of my classes, and it is still one of my favorite books many years later.
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