Steven Pressfield's

book 'The Gates of Fire' has done more than any other to bring awareness to the Battle of Thermopylae and the legendary warriors collectively known as the 300 Spartans. This book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world and not surprisingly, was and is loved by the nation of Greece. As a testament to the impact of 'Gates of Fire', Steven Pressfield was made an honorary citizen of Sparta.
His books on ancient Greece are accepted readings by many universities, as the topics covered include not only the aforementioned Battle of Thermopylae, but the Peloponnesian Wars and campaigns of Alexander the Great as well.

MY BIG FAT GREEK BOOK TOUR

(Reprinted with permission from Steven Pressfield)

Tuesday and Wednesday, September 9 and 10

Two years ago I got a letter from Dimosthenis Matalas, who introduced himself as the Mayor of Sparta. He said the municipality would like to honor me, for what most Greeks seemed to feel was an extremely realistic portrayal of the Three Hundred at Thermopylae, and for helping, with Gates of Fire, to restore some much-missed attention to the glorious past of the city. Unfortunately Mr. Matalas' term expired (it was his fourth; sixteen years all together). Money ran out. The plan fizzled.

Now it's on again, with a new mayor, Mr. Sarandos Andonakos. But Dimosthenis is picking me up. He has driven all the way from Sparta, 140 miles, and now we're going to drive back. Dimosthenis (with the accent on the third syllable) is a wonderful guy, exactly my age, an attorney and a fierce patriot for his hometown. I take to him instantly. We drive out of the crush of Athens, past the port of Piraeus, whose roadsteads are cheek-by-jowl with freighters and tankers, past Corinth, into the Peloponnese. "Everything stops at Corinth," my new friend explains, meaning tourists, government money, interest.

Nothing makes it down to Sparta except visitors coming to tour Mystras, the medieval city. They stay one day and get the hell out.

We're in farm country now. Orange and olive groves. The road becomes two-lane. We crest a rise and the Eurotas Valley unfolds beneath us. We track down by slow switchbacks. "The engineer who laid out this road," Dimosthenis tells me, "just followed a donkey down the track." Across the valley, there's the mountain. Taygetus. Ta--EE-get-OS. Like a miniature Grand Teton, the range stands right above the town. It has power. It gives the place grandeur. We cross the river. There's a story from the ancient days of an Athenian and a Spartan trading boasts. "We have buried many Spartans," the Athenian brags, "beside the Cephisos." The Cephisos is the river of Athens. "Yes," replies the Spartan, "but we have buried no Athenians beside the Eurotas." Meaning none of them got that far.

In ancient Sparta there was a law against hewing roofbeams to any shape except their natural round. Once a Spartan visiting Athens, noticing that his host's roofbeams were limned at perfect right angles, asked if trees grew square in Athenian country. "Of course not," replied the host, "but round, as they do everywhere." "And if they grew square," the Spartan inquired, "Would you make them round?"

Sparta is a country town now. The Leonidas statue rises next to the ball field. Dirt bikes blast along the old Acropolis. I was here seven years ago with Carol. We were "sussing the vibes." Carol is worse than me; at Olympia she stood in the ancient starter's blocks; suddenly she was bolting down the track. She said she felt a hand push her. Sparta's streets today are packed with Fiats and Yugos. Moms with strollers cruise the sidewalks. It's hot and sunny. Dimosthenis checks me into the Hotel Menelaion and immediately I'm swept up into the little travelling circus of directors, art directors, actors and musicians who will be my mates for the next two days.

There's a summerlong festival in Sparta, the Sainopoulou (named after Mr. and Mrs. Sainopoulos, who built the ancient-style amphitheatre in the country beneath Mystras and planted every one of the 5000 trees by hand), with events each week. This is the last week. The event is me. I hadn't realized. I thought I would just be one act in a revue. But the whole night is to honor me. It's overwhelming. I can't think about it…….

I ask Panos what he wants me to do on festival night.

"Can you give us twenty minutes?"

"You mean speak?"

"Twenty-five would be better."

I have to lie down. I'm choking like a dog…….

What do I want to do in Sparta? I want to get up in the hills by myself. I want to get on Mt. Taygetos, where the ancient Spartans hunted and trained. The mountain is Sparta to me, the mountain and the river. That first night we go out--Dimosthenis, Panos, Alona, Spiros and his wife Lina, with an artist named Georgia and Janna, our archaeologist--to a taverna directly beneath Taygetos. When I say directly, I mean the rock wall is towering right above our heads. The moon is almost full. Ancient Sparta is closer in the dark. If you use your imagination you can almost get back there. Surely few places on earth are so different, ancient to modern, as Sparta. In Athens you've got the Acropolis; it's not hard to picture the city in its classical glory. But Sparta, even in its heyday, was only five villages. No walls. No monuments. Thucydides predicted that, were Sparta to fall into ruin, subsequent generations would have a hard time believing, from what they could dig up, that the place had been as powerful as it was. On festival night when I make my speech, I read that passage (or Alona does, in Greek). It brings down the house.

Festival day. I meet the new mayor, Mr. Andonakos. Everyone at City Hall comes in to shake my hand. I'm trying to grasp what exactly my presence means to everyone. Clearly it's not me personally. I represent something. What? Festival headquarters is across from the hotel. Panos takes me there to meet Mr. Sainopoulos, the founder of the event. It's like meeting Churchill in retirement. Mr. Sainopoulos is 87, he moves slowly, with a cane. And he doesn't speak English. But the light in his eyes tells everything. Suddenly I understand the festival and I understand the city. What the hell am I gonna say tonight? It better be good. I don't want to let Mr. S down.

In ancient Sparta they had a law against ingratitude. If you did me a favour and I failed to requite it, the magistrates could haul me up and fine me. The modern Spartans are not far off, I'm beginning to see.

In a letter, I asked my friend Joanna why contemporary Greeks seem to neglect their ancient battlefields. If we Americans had Marathon or Thermopylae we'd Disney-ize the sites with Imax theatres, theme hotels, re-enactors. "Time is different," Joanna wrote back, "for Greeks than for Americans." She herself came here from the U.S., like Jim Mimikos and, like Jim, she's not going back. "In some weird way, those battles didn't happen 2500 years ago, they happened yesterday. They're still happening, unspoken, in the blood."

"Greeks feel burdened by their past," one of the journalists told me in Athens, "in the sense that they feel sometimes overshadowed by it in the eyes of the world. Is that ALL we're known for? Haven't we done anything since 480 B.C.? But we revere the past too. And maybe we resent Americans a little because it's their time now, and not ours."

I rest all afternoon in my hotel room, working in my head on what I'll say tonight. Being honoured by the city of Sparta seems surreal. When I started on Gates, it was only my second book. I had no publisher, no contract. I was not a classical scholar; I had never been to Greece; I was doing research as I went along. I never expected the book to find a market, even in the States. Americans have never heard of Thermopylae; they can barely remember Vietnam. Who's gonna buy an obscure book about ancient Greek arcana? When Gates came out and found an audience, no one was more surprised than I. When my agent told me the rights had been sold in Greece, I thought nothing of it. Greeks will hate it, I imagined. A book about their history, written by an American? Readers in Sparta would be particularly hard on the book, I thought, taking it to task for every historical glitch or fault in research. I have a bit of a mystical bent, and I imagined in my more lurid moments that the ghosts of the Three Hundred would in some parallel dimension be examining the text themselves. I pictured myself, after death, attending a celestial cocktail party. Two gentlemen appear at my shoulder and ask if I'm the guy who wrote Gates of Fire. When I say yes, they tell me: 'We were there with Leonidas ... and you got it all wrong.' Then they take me out back and beat the crap out of me.

Five o'clock. Thunder. Panos is getting nervous. Will the show be rained out? Night falls; we motor in a caravan to the amphitheatre. "How many people will be there?" "

The theatre holds fifteen hundred but there could be twenty-five hundred."

Eleni is my chaperone from Patakis. She's young and pretty and petrified; she has to speak to introduce me. The auditorium holds about three hundred. It's packed. I don't know what the temp is Celsius but it must be 100 Fahrenheit and 100 percent humidity. Everyone is dressed up. Panos makes a speech, Eleni follows; Mayor Andonakos officially greets me. It's all in Greek. Then Mr. Sainopoulos speaks. He meets my eyes and holds them. I don't know what he's saying and it's probably for the best. I get the passion. He loves this city, he loves this country; I'm someone, a stranger from halfway around the world, who has honoured them by his prose. What could be more natural than to honor me in return? Poor Panos. Poor Barbara. The whole outdoor show has been sunk. They're devastated. They'll regroup with an indoor reading, but it won't be the same.

It's my turn now. Alona and I mount the stage. I'll speak in short bursts and wait for her to translate.

Why did I write about Sparta and Thermopylae? I cite the Dienekes anecdote from Herodotus: that when the Spartans first occupied the pass but had not yet seen the Persians, a native of the place came dashing in; he had seen the enemy and was bug-eyed in terror at their numbers, reporting that the Persian archers were so many that when they fired their volleys, the mass of arrows actually blocked out the sun.

Dienekes, however, quite undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh, "Good. Then we'll have our battle in the shade."

I make a point about Spartan wit. It's warrior humour. Its purpose is to dispel fear. Dienekes, Herodotus tells us, was famous for other laconic quips. All the Spartans were. This was no accident. Wit was prized in Sparta. (The word laconic itself comes from Sparta's province, Laconia.) Boys were schooled from childhood to break fear's spell with a smart remark.

I cite two more famous lines from Thermopylae. Leonidas, when the Persian king Xerxes demanded that the defenders lay down their arms, replied, "Molon labe." Come and take them. On the final morning the Spartan king instructed his troops:

"Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we'll all be sharing dinner in hell."

I call the audience's attention to two things about these remarks. First, they don't attempt to deny reality. They don't say No, we're not going to die. Second, they make no mention of glory or patriotism. There's great wisdom in this. These seemingly off-hand quips are the product of a profound warrior philosophy.

There's a type of person today, I continue, called a terrorist. A suicide bomber. One might say, comparing him to an ancient Spartan, that the two are similar. Both know they're going to die and both advance to their end head-on. But no distinction could be more fallacious. The suicide bomber (forget his civilian targets or the duplicity of his approach) works himself into a state, either of hope for paradise or of numb denial; he renders himself inhuman in order to perform his deed. The Spartans and Thespians at Thermopylae were not like that. They were rational men, in full possession of their faculties. They were not fanatics. They loved their families; they wanted to live. They did not worship death, but understood what sacrifice the hour called for. And they kept their wry, laconic wit right up to the end.

I wrote about Sparta, I say, because I thought she always got a raw deal. To readers of history, it was always Athens, Athens, Athens. At this the auditorium roars. Alona translates, "Athenai, Athenai, Athenai." The place erupts again.

I talk about Spartan women. They're always ignored in the lionization of the Spartan male warrior. I tell the (fictional) anecdote from Gates about how Leonidas came to choose the three hundred he did. Not for their courage, he explains, but for the courage of their women. Leonidas says that the fate of the three hundred is sealed. None, including himself, will come back. The fight against Persia will not be won at Thermopylae, Leonidas continues, but in subsequent battles fought by other armies of Greece. When the Three Hundred have fallen, as they must, the other Greek cities will look to Sparta. If she stays strong, they will too. If she cracks, they will fall apart. But who, Leonidas asks, will the Spartans look to? To the wives and mothers of the three hundred. If they remain strong, so will the city. If they break, Sparta will break too.

I wanted to show in Gates of Fire that the valour of Spartan warriors was only half the story, that it rested upon the courage of Spartan women. I wanted to honor them for that.

I make the point that we think of Thermopylae and of the ancient Spartans as legends, a story, a saga. But we shouldn't forget: they were real. Real men marched out from this real place, to fight a real enemy and to give their real lives; real women watched them go and bore up under the grief of their loss. It really happened, and much more, right here beneath this mountain, among these fields, on the banks of this river. I thank our modern Spartans for honouring me this night. But in truth, I say, we're both honouring those men and women who are the forebears of you who sit here now. They were Spartans and you are Spartans too.