17 The Guts and the Glory: Pressfield’s Spartans at the Gates of Fire

Abstract

One artistic genre that has received comparatively little attention in studies of the reception of ancient history is that of the historical novel. This chapter shows that literary snobbery regarding novels concerning the Persian Wars can to some extent be justified — many 20th-century novelistic depictions of the conflict with Persia read simply as exercises in reproducing the Persian Wars topoi with little imagination and few attempts to engage the reader in a believable representation of the historical past. There are, however, some notable exceptions to such sanitized fictionalizations. The chapter focuses on Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire (1998). This version of the Thermopylae story stands out largely because of Pressfield's refusal to shrink from dealing with many of the less appealing aspects of Spartan society and military training, as well as his vivid imagining of the horrors of war and the effects of conflict on the mentality of its very real human participants.

Sparse Spartan Verse: Filling Gaps in the Thermopylae Epigram

“…On the positive portrayal of Sparta in modern fiction with an emphasis on 300 , see Fotheringham (2012). See also Levene (2007), on Maté's 1962 film The 300 Spartans ; Bridges (2007), on Pressfield's novel Gates of Fire. On the Spartan tradition in European thought, see Rawson (1969).…”