Gates of Fire: Chapter 23 Summary & Analysis

That night, Dienekes is restless. Xeo watches his master give up sleep and join the king’s fireside. Xeo looks across the slumbering camp and thinks about Thermopylae. The “hot gates” have hosted battles for centuries, everything from clashes between hill tribes to barbarian invaders: “The tides of war and peace had alternated in this site for centuries, bathers and warriors, one come for the waters, the other for blood.”

As Alexandros stirs awake, he gazes toward the king’s fireside as well and wonders aloud, “How will we do? […] Will we find the answer to Dienekes’ question? Will we discover within ourselves ‘the opposite of fear?’”

Three days before the march to Sparta, Dienekes had taken his platoon on a hunt. As the warriors gather around the campfire that night, Dienekes raises the subject of fear. All his life, he has been preoccupied with fear’s opposite. But this “opposite,” he says, cannot simply be fearlessness, or playing off fear of death against fear of disgrace. And the gods cannot help, because they do not have flesh, “the factory of fear.”

Dienekes tells the youthful warriors that veterans are not exempt from fear; in fact, they feel it more keenly, because they have more experience of it. Although he always manages to cobble together courage in battle, the best he can do is to act despite his terror.

Achilles, Dienekes says, was mostly invulnerable. Therefore, he cannot be said to have possessed true andreia. Polynikes, too, though the bravest of the Spartans, fights out of “greed for glory,” which also isn’t true andreia. In fact, the person who possesses pure andreia, more than any other he has known, is his wife, Arete, and Alexandros’s mother, Paraleia. Dienekes suspects that the women’s “higher valor” holds the key to his question about fear.

At this, the youthful warrior Ariston speaks up. He argues that men, from the time they are boys, instinctually fight. In the same way, he says, women naturally bear and nurture children. What, then, “could be more contrary to female nature, to motherhood, than to stand unmoved and unmoving as her sons march off to death?” By somehow summoning the will to act against their natures in this way, the women demonstrate that their courage is, in fact, superior to men’s.

Then Alexandros speaks up. He argues that there’s more to women’s courage than Ariston has said. It’s not just that women send their sons and husbands off to war without weeping, but that they do this in service of a higher cause: donating their men’s lives for the sake of the nation. This willingness to set the whole above the part, Alexandros argues, is what’s so admirable about women’s sacrifice. Dienekes promises to later tell them a story about Leonidas that will give them insight both into women’s courage and into the question of fear overall.

Back in the present, a Persian messenger suddenly approaches the camp. He requests an audience with four Spartan officers: Olympieus, Aristodemos, Polynikes, and Dienekes. It turns out that the messenger is Ptammitechus, “Tommie,” the Egyptian marine the Spartan officers had met on embassy a few years ago. Tommie is accompanied by his young son, who speaks Attic Greek and interprets the exchange. Tommie has a message from King Xerxes for the Spartans alone. Olympieus tells him that his message must be delivered to the Greeks as a whole.

With a friendly manner, Tommie begs the Greeks not to resort to bloodshed, in light of the Persians’ evident superiority. He warns them that “death alone awaits [them] here.” If they surrender to the Persians, they will be ruled with respect; more than that, Xerxes will grant the Spartans dominion over Greece and grant them whatever they ask. The allies hold their breaths as they listen to this exchange.

Tommie continues to beg the Spartans not to act out of pride. He describes Xerxes’ ambitions for Persia. Greece is merely the beginning; having conquered Asia, he now has his gaze fixed on Europe. If the Spartans join forces with the Persians, he promises, they will be fellow world-conquerors. At this, an elderly Spartan in a homespun cloak steps forward. He suggests that, instead, Xerxes surrender to the Greeks, as they will not fail to match Xerxes’ generosity. Tommie asks that he be taken to the King instead of wasting further time in this discussion. The old man explains that it’s no use, as the King is a crusty old drunk. Tommie realizes with amusement that the elderly speaker is Leonidas himself.

Accepting the outcome of the exchange, Ptammitechus offers Leonidas a gift before he leaves: a heavy golden goblet that had belonged to an ancestor of the Spartans. He exchanges sorrowful glances with the unyielding Spartans, and the men take their leave, until they meet again in battle.