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. Pressfield's descriptions of war are breathtaking in their immediacy. 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. 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. Xeo, however, begins at the beginning, when his childhood home in northern Greece was overrun and he escaped to Sparta. 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. In the tradition of Mary Renault, this historical novel unfolds in flashback. In Gates of Fire, however, Steven Pressfield makes their courageous defense-and eventual extinction-unbearably suspenseful. From the start, there was no question but that the Spartans would perish. 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. Thus reads an ancient stone at Thermopylae in northern Greece, the site of one of the world's greatest battles for freedom. Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.
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