The first thing* anyone visiting Thermopylae will notice is that it looks nothing like it should. The shore has expanded outwards dramatically and a highway has been plowed through the middle. Visitors to the site spend upwards of five minutes wandering the short distance from the little parking lot to the hill of the last stand before passing by on their way to more inspiring destinations (2.5 millennia later Thermopylae is still the gateway to the north). They could be forgiven for wondering w

The central frame seems a little forced. Xerxes demanding a novel-length account from a Greek survivor? That’s not what this book reads like at all.

There were too many timeline shifts given to us in an unnecessarily complex way. We need to keep three timelines in our head: immediately after the battle of Thermopylae, Xeones’ early childhood after his city was sacked, and his rise to status among the Spartans and eventual journey to Thermopylae. And there are even timejumps within these timejumps, further impeding our ability to understand.

At least partly as a result of this the characterization suffers and it takes us longer than it should to get to know these characters.

To some degree I also think the characters’ backstory is not as engaging as it could be. Greece was a pretty brutal place to grow up, but it still had its pleasures and at no point did there seem much worth living for (as opposed to dying for). I suppose it would be fair to say that I enjoyed the characters but didn’t care much for any of their journeys before the last.

The first thing* anyone visiting Thermopylae will notice is that it looks nothing like it should. The shore has expanded outwards dramatically and a highway has been plowed through the middle. Visitors to the site spend upwards of five minutes wandering the short distance from the little parking lot to the hill of the last stand before passing by on their way to more inspiring destinations (2.5 millennia later Thermopylae is still the gateway to the north). They could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about. Why was this unimpressive site, of all places, chosen for the Greek stand against the vast armies of Persia? And how could a few thousand men possibly imagine they could block any decently-sized force from coming through? You can see what I mean by watchingfilmed on location at the Hot Gates just before the highway went up. You can’t get closer to real life than that, yet it doesn’t lookNot anymore. And so we have to turn to literature to bring the place to life. And no account of the battle is more famous thanI’ve got to be honest: until about the halfway point I was underwhelmed, suspecting that this book has been massively overrated. It wasn’t bad precisely, but it wasn’t great either. I have issues. To be specific:These are significant issues and, although not really ruinous to the book as a whole, they don’t exactly bode well.But then the buildup to the battle starts and everything develops a purpose. By this point you know, at least, who Xeones is and why he’s found himself there, and you’re familiar with all the other characters as well. Even if the dishing out of their backstory could have been improved all that matters now is where they’re going. And the account of Thermopylae is spectacular. The battle feels real and intimate and bloody. The first day’s fighting alone occupies two chapters and feels like the battlefield memoirs of a survivor.Pressfield was a Marine and it shows vividly in his writing. There are times when reading ex-soldiers attempting historical fiction where I find myself thinking that these are just transposed Americans/British/whatever soldiers in funny costumes but with their values and fighting styles intact. This was not one of those times. Generally at least. The description of hoplite warfare felt real, particularly the way the scrum oozes through the cracks of the enemy line. Spartan values are not modern values, and even if the training sounds like a more intense version of boot camp it’s very clear that this violence is being directed at literal children. The various elements of the Spartan state (the assembly, the dual monarchy, the krypteia, the agoge...) are present, although it doesn’t really take us in-depth enough for my taste (see The Fox for a better example of that). About the only thing that’s been edited out for the benefit of “modern” sensibilities is the homosexuality. Odd too, since the mentorship between Alexandros and Dienekes seems very much the sort of structured homosexual relationships the Spartans (and Greeks more generally) encouraged. Yet the only reference to gay sex is when the Greeks are mocking the Persians(!) for it.One element I appreciated was that the book doesn’t read like creepy fascist propaganda the way 300 and so many modern pro-Spartan takes would have it. Xeones is an outsider to Sparta, little more than a slave, and is often abused by those he idolizes. The Spartans are the heroes but they’re also slave-owning aristocrats and are capable of acts of murder and immense cruelty, even leaving aside the child abuse. Outside the bonds of battlefield brotherhood they don’t feel very likable at all. Best of all to my mind was that the book didn’t sugarcoat the ideal of Greek unity in the face of the barbarian horde. The first conflict we see is one of the many minor Greek-on-Greek conflicts as one city-state sought to dominate another. And that is what the Greeks will return to as soon as the Persian War is over.I was a little surprised that the oncoming Persian invasion was dealt with in such isolation. We get references to Spartan efforts to shore up alliances, but we get little specific and never really find out what obstacles they faced (aside from fear). We also get little to no detail about Marathon, the Ionian Revolt (not even mentioned), the causes of the invasion more generally, or the grand Hellenic council. We don’t even hear about the famous scene of Spartans throwing the Persian ambassadors down a well. I think this was a bit of a missed opportunity to show the tenuous nature of the Greek alliance and what held them together, but I can tell that Pressfield is a bit singleminded in his focus on the experience of war.One thing that did disappoint me though was the acceptance of Herodotus’ statement that there were two million men in the Persian army. Only an absolute idiot would believe this claim (which didn’t stop several older Classicists from making it) and I never thought Pressfield an idiot. Even in the days of modern armies we don’t have two million men all clustered together but spread them out over a wide area; which is not what the Persians did and isn’t really possible when invading Greece anyway. A modern army of that size marching on modern roads would stretch for 1,000 miles. It’d be chaos. In WW2, America could only field an army of seven million. That’s 5% of the total population. Can anyone honestly claim that Persia, an empire with perhaps a quarter (at the very highest) of America’s then-population, could field more of its men (7-12.5%)? And that they could keep them supplied in enemy teritories without access to trains, trucks, motorized ships, or any of the various types of farm equipment and fertilizer available to modern man? Yeah right. A British army officer stationed in the region once did the math and determined that for such an army even draining the rivers dry would not stop it dying of thirst if it tried to invade Greece. If he’d just limited the claim of such an immense army to the Greeks (who were used to small armies and couldn’t contextualize the army’s true scale) it would have been fine, but he has Persians claim it too. Gah!This is probably the best account of Thermopylae out there. The battle comes to life in a way only the best novels can achieve. The brotherhood formed by combat is really pushed here and characters who seem unlikable at first become more so over time. The book’s small-scale focus on a minor player means that we don’t get any real considerations of the broader organization or issues (really, Persia’s decision to invade is never explained), so if you want to see that I’d recommend a book like Farewell, Great King . This tells the story of Themistocles and his leadership of Athens during and after the war and can provide a useful counterpoint to the more gung-ho account in this book. Alas, I haven’t seen any naval officers try to do for Salamis what Pressfield does for Thermopylae here. Naval warfare is truly underdeveloped in historical fiction for this period.* The second thing you notice is the horrible modern memorial with “heroic” nudes reclining daintily on couches. We do not speak of the modern memorial.