Praise for the Novels of Steven Pressfield
TIDES OF WAR
“ON EVERY PAGE ARE COLOR, SPLENDOR, SORROW, THE UNFORGIVING DETAILS OF BATTLE, DAILY LIFE, AND OF THE FIGHTER’S LOT…. PRESSFIELD PRODUCES AN EVEN GREATER SPECTACLE—AND, IN ITS HONEST, INCREMENTAL WAY, AN EVEN GREATER HEART-TUGGER—THAN IN HIS ACCLAIMED TALE OF THE BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAE, GATES OF FIRE.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Pressfield] continues to excel in depth of research, humanization of antiquity, and power of description.”
—Los Angeles Times
“While Pressfield excels at portraying battles and naval contests, the whole pivotal era leaps to life under his skilled and exciting pen.”
—Booknews
“It’s a painful tale to read, but that very pain is testimony to Pressfield’s ability to make us feel and believe in his re-creation of the Greek world. Like all great historical fiction, he does not alter the facts, but merely illuminates them with enlightened speculation. Pressfield ends his story with a reminder that his story is fiction, not history. It’s a necessary reminder. After living in his world for 400 pages, it’s difficult to believe it’s not the real thing.”
—The Herald-Sun(North Carolina)
GATES OF FIRE
“Vivid and exciting … Pressfield gives the reader a perspective no ancient historian offers, a soldier’s-eye view … remarkable.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Impressive … vivid.”
—USA Today
“Majestic … monumental … epic … once begun, almost impossible to put down.”
—Daily News (New York)
“Gates of Fire lives up to its billing as an epic novel…. His Greeks and Persians come across as the real thing.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Steven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life, and he does for that war what Charles Frazier did for the Civil War in Cold Mountain.”
—Pat Conroy
“An incredibly gripping, moving, and literate work of art. Rarely does an author manage to re-create a moment in history with such mastery, authority, and psychological insights.”
—Nelson DeMille
“A timeless epic of man and war … Pressfield has created a new classic deserving of a place beside the very best of the old.”
—Stephen Coonts
ALSO BY
STEVEN PRESSFIELD
GATES OF FIRE
THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE
FOR CHRISTY
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Book I - Against Polemides
Chapter I - My Grandfather Jason
Chapter II - Murder in Melissa
Chapter III - In Polemides’ Cell
Chapter IV - Ordeal and Commission
Chapter V - The Indispensable Man
Book II - The Long Walls
Chapter VI - A Young Man’s Sport
Chapter VII - A Significant Silence
Chapter VIII - Prognosis: Death
Chapter IX - A Calling Acquired
Book III - The Firs Modern War
Chapter X - The Joys of Soldiering
Chapter XI - Mantinea
Chapter XII - A Companion of the Flee
Chapter XIII - Three Times The Victor’s Name
Chapter XIV - A Prospectus of Conques
Chapter XV - A Lecture from Nicias
Chapter XVI - A Soldier’s Dream
Chapter XVII - A Documen of the Admiralty
Book IV - Sicily
Chapter XVIII - A Dislocation of Recall
Chapter XIX - A Chronicler of Strife
Chapter XX - Schoolmasters of War
Chapter XXI - Disaster on Epipolae
Chapter XXII - The Averted Face of Heaven
Chapter XXIII - Upon The Wall of Ships
Chapter XXIV - The Issue of Defea
Book V - Alcibiades in Sparta
Chapter XXV - The Soldier in Winter
Chapter XXVI - Among the Sons of Leonidas
Chapter XXVII - On the Quay at Samos
Chapter XXVIII - The Hill of the Dolphins
Book VI - Victory at Sea
Chapter XXIX - The Intersection of Necessity and Free Will
Chapter XXX - Beside the Tomb of Achilles
Chapter XXXI - The Intrepidity of the Gods
Chapter XXXII - On the Virtue of Cruelty
Book VII - Feeding the Monster
Chapter XXXIII - The Blessings of Peace
Chapter XXXIV - Strategos Autokrator
Chapter XXXV - Beyond the Reach of Envy
Chapter XXXVI - A Disrefracting Glass
Chapter XXXVII - A Hunt on Parnes
Book VIII - Thrice Nine Years
Chapter XXXVIII - The Gravity of Gold
Chapter XXXIX - Bawlers and Crawlers
Chapter XL - The Red Rag of Sparta
Chapter XLI - Fire from the Sea
Chapter XLII - The Chore of Pillage
Book IX - Tides of War
Chapter XLIII - Between the Earth and the Sea
Chapter XLIV - A Witness to Homicide
Chapter XLV - An Advocate at the Gate
Chapter XLVI - Across the Iron Cour
Chapter XLVII - The Tale to Its End
Chapter XLVIII - Thraceward
Chapter XLIX - Aegospotami
Chapter L - Upon Road’s Turn
Chapter LI - A Death on Deer Mountain
Chapter LII - A Magistracy of Mercy
Chapter LIII - The Holm Oak’s Bloom
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from The Profession
About the Author
Copyright
HISTORICAL NOTE
By their epochal victories over the Persians in 490 and 480/479 B.C., Sparta and Athens established themselves as the preeminent powers in Greece and the Aegean—Sparta on land, Athens at sea.
For half a century the states maintained a tenuous equilibrium. At Athens these years inaugurated the Golden Age of Periclean democracy. The Parthenon was constructed, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides commenced performance; Socrates began to teach.
By 431, however, Athens’ power had become too great for the free states of Greece to endure. War came—that struggle called by Thucydides “the greatest in history,” which lasted, as the oracle had foretold, thrice nine years and ended with the capitulation of Athens in 404.
One man set his stamp upon this conflict, for good or ill, beyond all others. This was Alcibiades of Athens.
Kinsman of Pericles, intimate of Socrates, he was, the ancient sources attest, the handsomest and most brilliant man of his era, as well as the most lawless. As a general he was never beaten.
THE FIFTH CENTURY B.C.
490 Athenians defeat Persians at Marathon
480 300 Spartans stand at Thermopylae
Athenians and allies defeat Persians in sea battle of Salamis
479 Spartans and allies defeat Persians in land battle at Plataea
454 Pericles establishes Athenian Empire
431 Peloponnesian War begins
429 Great Plague; death of Pericles
415–413 Sicilian Expedition
410–407 Alcibiades’ victories in the Hellespont
405 Lysander’s victory at Aegospotami
404 Surrender of Athens
399 Execution of Socrates
… the worst enemies of Athens are not those who, like you, have only harmed her in war, but those who have forced her friends to turn against her. The Athens I love is not the one which is wronging me now, but that one in
which I used to have secure enjoyment of my rights as a citizen. That country that I am attacking does not seem to be mine any longer; it is rather that I am trying to recover a country that has ceased to be mine. And the man who really loves his country is not the one who refuses to attack it when he has been unjustly driven from it, but the man whose desire for it is so strong that he will shrink from nothing in his efforts to get back there again.
—Alcibiades addressing the
Spartan Assembly, in Thucydides’
History of the Peloponnesian War
She [Athens] loves, and hates, and longs to have him back….
—Aristophanes,
on Alcibiades, in The Frogs
Book I
AGAINST
POLEMIDES
I
MY GRANDFATHER JASON
My grandfather, Jason the son of Alexicles of the district of Alopece, died just before sunset on the fourteenth day of Boedromion, one year past, two months prior to his ninety-second birthday. He was the last of that informal but fiercely devoted circle of comrades and friends who attended the philosopher Socrates.
The span of my grandfather’s years ran from the imperial days of Pericles, the construction of the Parthenon and Erechtheum, through the Great Plague, the rise and fall of Alcibiades, and the full tenure of that calamitous twenty-seven-year conflagration called in our city the Spartan War and known throughout greater Greece, as recorded by the historian Thucydides, as the Peloponnesian War.
As a young man my grandfather served as a sail lieutenant at Sybota, Potidaea, and Scione and later in the East as a trierarch and squadron commander at the battles of Bitch’s Tomb, Abydos (for which he was awarded the prize of valor and incidentally lost an eye and the use of his right leg), and the Arginousai Islands. As a private citizen he spoke out in the Assembly, alone save Euryptolemus and Axiochus, against the mob in defense of the Ten Generals. In his years he buried two wives and eleven children. He served his city from her peak of preeminence, mistress of two hundred tributary states, to the hour of her vanquishment at the hands of her most inclement foes. In short he was a man who not only witnessed but participated in most of the significant events of the modern era and who knew personally many of its principal actors.
In the waning seasons of my grandfather’s life, when his vigor began to fail and he could move about only with the aid of a companion’s arm, I took to visiting him daily. There appears ever one among a family, the physicians testify, whose disposition invites and upon whom falls the duty to succor its elderly and infirm members.
To me this was never a chore. Not only did I hold my grandfather in the loftiest esteem, but I delighted in his society with an intensity that frequently bordered upon the ecstatic. I could listen to him talk for hours and, I fear, tired him more severely than charity served with my inquiries and importunities.
To me he was like one of our hardy Attic vines, assaulted season after season by the invader’s torch and ax, blistered by summer sun, frost-jacketed in winter, yet unkillable, ever-enduring, drawing strength from deep within the earth to yield up despite all privations or perhaps because of them the sweetest and most mellifluent of wines. I felt keenly that with his passing an era would close, not alone of Athens’ greatness but of a caliber of man with whom we contemporary specimens stood no longer familiar, nor to whose standard of virtue we could hope to obtain.
The loss to typhus of my own dear son, aged two and a half, earlier in that season, had altered every aspect of my being. Nowhere could I discover consolation save in the company of my grandfather. That fragile purchase we mortals hold upon existence, the fleeting nature of our hours beneath the sun, stood vividly upon my heart; only with him could I find footing upon some stony but stabler soil.
My regimen upon those mornings was to rise before dawn and, summoning my dog Sentinel (or, more accurately, responding to his summons), ride down to the port along the Carriage Road, returning through the foothills to our family’s mains at Holm Oak Hill. The early hours were a balm to me. From the high road one could see the naval crews already at drill in the harbor. We passed other gentlemen upon the track to their estates, saluted athletes training along the roads, and greeted the young cavalrymen at their exercises in the hills. Upon completion of the morning’s business of the farm, I stabled my mount and proceeded on foot, alone save Sentinel, up the sere olive-dotted slope to my grandfather’s cottage.
I brought him his lunch. We would talk in the shade of the overlook porch, or sometimes simply sit, side by side, with Sentinel reclining on the cool stones between us, saying nothing.
“Memory is a queer goddess, whose gifts metamorphose with the passage of the years,” my grandfather observed upon one such afternoon. “One cannot call to mind that which occurred an hour past, yet summon events seventy years gone, as if they were unfolding here and now.”
I interrogated him, often ruthlessly I fear, upon these distant holdings of his heart. Perhaps for his part he welcomed the eager ear of youth, for once launched upon a tale he would pursue its passage, like the tireless campaigner he was, in detail to its close. In his day the scribe’s art had not yet triumphed; the faculty of memory stood unatrophied. Men could recite extended passages from the Iliad and Odyssey, quote stanzas of a hundred hymns, and relate passage and verse of the tragedy attended days previous.
More vivid still stood my grandfather’s recollection of men. He remembered not alone friends and heroes but slaves and horses and dogs, even trees and vines which had graven impress upon his heart. He could summon the memory of some antique sweetheart, seventy-five years gone, and resurrect her mirage in colors so immediate that one seemed to behold her before him, yet youthful and lovely, in the flesh.
I inquired of my grandfather once, whom of all the men he had known he adjudged most exceptional.
“Noblest,” he replied without hesitation, “Socrates. Boldest and most brilliant, Alcibiades. Bravest, Thrasybulus, the Brick. Wickedest, Anytus.”
Impulse prompted a corollary query. “Was there one whom memory has driven deepest? One to whom you find your thoughts returning?”
At this my grandfather drew up. How odd that I should ask, he replied, for yes, there was one man who had, for cause to which he could not give name, been of late much upon his mind. This individual, my grandfather declared, stood not among the ranks of the celebrated or the renowned; he was neither admiral nor archon, nor would his name be found memorialized among the archives, save as a dark and self-condemned footnote.
“Of all I knew, this man could not but be called the most haunted. He was an aristocrat of the district of Acharnae. I helped to defend him once, on trial for his life.”
I was intrigued at once and pressed my grandfather to elaborate. He smiled, declaring that to launch upon this enterprise may take many hours, for the events of the man’s tale transpired over decades and covered on land and sea most of the known world. Such prospect, far from daunting me, made me the more eager to hear. Please, I entreated; the day is well spent, but let us at least make a beginning.
“You’re a greedy whelp, aren’t you?”
“To hear you speak, Grandfather, the greediest.”
He smiled. Let us start, then, and see where the tale takes us.
“In those days,” my grandfather began, “that class of professional rhetorician and specialist in affairs of the courts had not yet arisen. On trial a man spoke in his own defense. If he wished, however, he might appoint an associate—a father or uncle, perhaps a friend or gentleman of influence—to assist in preparing his case.
“By letter from prison this man solicited me. This was odd, as I shared no personal acquaintance with the fellow. He and I had served simultaneously in several theaters of war and had held positions of responsibility in conjunction with the younger Pericles, son of the great Pericles and Aspasia, whom both of us were privileged to call friend; this, however, was far from uncommon in those days and could in nowise be construed as constituting a
bond. Further this individual was, to say the least, notorious. Though an officer of acknowledged valor and long and distinguished service to the state, he had entered Athens at her hour of capitulation not only beneath the banner of the Spartan foe but clad in her mantle of scarlet. I believed, and told him so, that one guilty of such infamy must suffer the supreme penalty, nor could I contribute in any way to such a criminal’s exoneration.
“The man persisted nonetheless. I visited him in his cell and listened to his story. Though at that time Socrates himself had been convicted and sentenced to death, and in fact resided awaiting execution within the walls of the same prison, and to his aid I must before all attend, not to mention the affairs of my own family, I agreed to assist the man in the preparation of his defense. I did so not because I believed he could be acquitted or deserved to be (he himself readily ratified his own inculpation), but because I felt the publication of his history must be accomplished, if only before a jury, to hold the mirror up to the democracy which, by its conviction of the noblest citizen it had ever produced, my master Socrates, had evinced such wickedness as to crown and consummate its own self-immolation.”
My grandfather held silent for long moments. One could see his eye turn inward and his heart summon the memory of this individual and the tone and tenor of that time.
“What was the man’s name, Grandfather?”
“Polemides the son of Nicolaus.”
I recalled the name vaguely but could not place it in quarter or context.
“He was the man,” my grandfather prompted, “who assassinated Alcibiades.”
II
MURDER IN MELISSA
The assassination party [my grandfather continued] was led by two nobles of Persia acting under orders of the Great King’s governor of Phrygia. They proceeded by ship from Abydos on the Hellespont to the stronghold in Thrace to which Alcibiades had repaired in his final exile, whence, discovering their prey absconded, the party pursued him back across the straits to Asia. The Persians were accompanied by three Peers of Sparta whose chief, Endius, had been Alcibiades’ guest-friend and intimate since boyhood. These had been appointed by the home government, not to participate in the murder, but to serve as witnesses, to confirm with their own eyes the extinction of this man, the last left alive whom they still feared. Such was Alcibiades’ renown for escape and resurrection that many believed he could cheat even that final magistrate, Death.