Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (41 page)

Thermopylae

The battlefield of Isandlwana in kwaZulu Natal, South Africa, is marked here and there by memorials to the dead. It’s a vast and wild place dominated from every angle by a mountain shaped like the back and loins of a resting lion. Scattered among stunted trees, aloe bushes and endless swaths of parched grass, the monuments of stone and bronze seem incongruous—not least the
iziqu
that remembers Zulu valor. Another is dedicated to 22 men of the Royal Natal Carbineers and has written on it:

Not theirs to save the day

But where they stood, falling to dye the earth

With brave men’s blood for England’s sake and duty

Be their names sacred among us

Neither praise nor blame add to their epitaph

But let it be simple like that which marks Thermopylae

Tell it in England, those who pass us by

Here, faithful to their charge, her soldiers lie.

 

The comrades of 22 South African soldiers killed in 1879 found the need to recall a battle fought by Greeks and Persians 5,000 miles away and 2,359 years before. It was the greatest honor they could bestow, this comparison, this self-conscious echoing of words in Greek on another stone in another place. They wanted to believe their fallen had been part of something as deserving of eternal memory as that other battle, fought in the shadow of another lion.

Looming over all of it was a man more legend now than real. The place where he fell was marked for a time with a stone lion—a deliberate choice, since
leon,
the Greek word for lion, recalled the first four letters of the hero’s name. He was Leonidas, King of Sparta, and commander of “the 300” who,
in the summer of 480
BC
, fell alongside him on a low hill overlooking the Malian Gulf of the Aegean Sea at the place they called Thermopylae.

The seeds of the trouble that would lead to war and the immortal battle had been sown in that ancient world around the year 491
BC
. Heralds of the expanding Persian Empire of King Darius the Great had arrived in the independent Greek city-state of Sparta requesting proof that the inhabitants would submit to imperial rule.

“Greece” in the 5th century
BC
was not the unified country of modern times but rather a collection of perhaps 1,000 tiny independent states, many openly hostile to one another and scattered around the rims of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Plato described them as frogs around the edge of a pond.

The Persian Empire, founded around 550
BC
, stretched from India to the eastern coast of the Aegean Sea and had spread from its source in modern Iran faster than anything the world had seen before. The proof required by those heralds was an offering of earth and water, symbolic of submission, and samples had already been peacefully handed over by many other Greek states. The citizens of Sparta, however, were made of sterner stuff than many of their neighbors. For them, freedom was all and death preferable to life lived beneath a tyrant’s yoke. When the heralds requested Spartan earth and water they were put to death—in fact they were told to get it themselves and thrown down a well. The heralds who arrived in Athens were also killed and now both states were united—willingly or unwillingly—by the blood of a vengeful foe.

The Persian Empire had placed the shadow of its hand over scores of different peoples and civilizations—but it’s the way of the Spartan that is most alien, most incomprehensible, when viewed with our modern eyes. Yet it is their way of thinking and of
being
that has set the standard by which countless acts of valor and self-sacrifice have been measured ever since. Great indeed was the
shadow cast by the Persian multitude, but the blinding light of Leonidas and his 300 would not be dimmed by all the years from then until now.

Sparta was the principal city within a territory more accurately described as Lacedaemon. It was regarded, by its neighbors of the 5th century
BC
, as the strongest military power on mainland Greece—and the reason for this supremacy lay in the way it governed its subject population. Full Spartan citizens—those living as free men and women—were a privileged minority greatly outnumbered by an underclass of Greek people they called “helots,” literally slaves. These people the Spartans forced, under perpetual threat of death, to work as laborers and domestic staff. It was helots who toiled in the fields, cooked and cleaned in Spartan homes and provided every other menial function necessary to the smooth running of the society.

All of the Greek city-states depended to some extent upon the labor of slaves but everywhere else these were “barbarians”—people of other races or civilizations captured in war or by invasion. Only in Sparta did Greek enslave Greek.

Freed from normal labors, Spartan men were ordered to devote all their time and energy to preparing and training for war. War was the ultimate occupation and the Spartans its ultimate practitioners. They were forbidden by law to practice any other trade or craft but soldiery, and from the age of seven boys were taken from the family home and lodged in barracks where they embarked upon a harsh and relentless military training that set the pattern for the rest of their lives. Every Spartan man was a soldier in what was effectively a standing army—but an army with no clear objective beyond the borders of its own territory. Rather than a force primed for invading or oppressing its neighbors, the primary concern of the Spartan Army was to hold itself in readiness to suppress any revolt by the helots within Lacedaemon itself. In fact every year the state declared
“war” upon the helots. At the first sign of revolt any ringleaders could be slaughtered with impunity—thus absolving their Spartan executioners of any “contamination” of the soul as a result of such an otherwise unclean act.

The Spartans—men and women, children and adults—led lives so foreign to our own that they might have been lived on another planet, let alone in another time. Soon after birth, infants were dunked into bowls of wine and, depending on how they reacted in front of the elders tasked with administering the test, were either allowed to live or were taken and thrown to their deaths in a ravine outside the city. Babies born with any kind of defect or disability were similarly dispatched. This was merely the start of a life of endless tests—of constant scrutiny by self and by others to ensure each citizen was worthy of the name…Spartan.

Death and the expectation of death lived within and among this civilization like members of the family. Rather than being buried in separate cemeteries or burial grounds outside the city, the dead were cremated or inhumed close at hand. Mortal remains were not to be shunned or feared but accepted, inevitable as the passage of time.

While living in the barracks, boys in their early teens were routinely paired with older boys who became their mentors, protectors and usually their lovers. The influence of the older man over the life of the younger might continue into adulthood—long after the marriage of both to Spartan women. A powerful senior partner might secure a path to promotion and social advancement for his younger protégé.

The greatest aspiration for any Spartan man—his duty, in fact—was to die a beautiful death in combat. Spartan burial rites forbade the inclusion of much in the way of grave goods or even a headstone for the vast majority of the deceased. Only the greatest warriors, who had given up their lives in a way admired by their
fellows, were accorded the honor of a stone bearing their names and the two-word acknowledgment, “in war.” Spartans called themselves Lacedaemonians—or Lakones—and it is from this root that we get our English word “laconic,” descriptive of a person of few words. This brevity extended even to the veneration of their war dead.

(In 346
BC
Philip II of Macedon was busy conquering everyone within reach. To the Spartans he sent this message: “You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land I will destroy your farms, slay your people and raze your city.” The Spartans’ one-word reply stopped Philip in his tracks: “If.”)

For Spartan women the principal obligation was the production of healthy children, preferably sons who would become soldiers. Those who died in childbirth—like men who died the most beautiful deaths in battle—were granted headstones over their graves. Women too had their wars to fight in the name of Sparta, and valiant deaths suffered in that single combat commanded as much respect as any won upon the edge of a sword or at the point of a spear.

With the domestic duties around the home being performed by helots, Spartan girls and women were free to concentrate on higher matters—like encouraging their boys and men to seek glory in war. They were expected to shun any man or male behavior that was not brave or valorous. Their instruction to husbands, brothers and sons departing for battle was “with it, or on it,” a reference to the warrior’s shield. Spartan infantrymen were called “hoplites”—literally shield bearers—and to throw away or otherwise lose a shield guaranteed ridicule and, worse, dishonor. The women were telling their men they expected to see them return carrying their shields in victory or carried home dead upon them by their comrades.

Spartan women enjoyed freedoms unknown by those in other Greek states, including the right to own property. It’s worth pointing
out that while homosexual relationships were accepted between unmarried boys in the barracks, such behavior was expected to stop once the men married and took on their part of the job of making children. Sparta was about being a soldier and making soldiers.

Parallel to the belief in the rightness and the glory of war was a profound belief in the overarching power of their gods. If Spartans believed themselves subject to anything, it was to the will of a pantheon of gods—all of whom they visualized armored and armed for battle. Central to their religion was a dependency on divination. It was normal, even expected, for commanders to delay decisions in the thick of battle while they repeatedly examined the entrails of sacrificed animals or consulted other oracles, signs or portents in hope of being told what to do for the best.

Here was a society that had evolved with the intention of inuring its citizens to hardship, pain and any fear of death. Armed with their commitment to the beauty of combat, the rightness of death and an unquestioning belief in the power of their gods, Spartans were known to smile in the face of near-annihilation of their warriors—just so long as the news of the bloodbath included references to brave lives lived and beautiful deaths won.

And this then was the tree of life and death that produced Leonidas, its finest flower. As the younger half-brother of King Cleomenes I, he could hardly have expected ever to come into one of the twin kingships of Sparta. But he was married to Gorgo, Cleomenes’s only daughter, and when the king died without male issue Leonidas found himself elevated to the throne as its most rightful heir. (It has been suggested that Leonidas had a hand in the death of his predecessor, but historians are undecided.)

Having grown up without the expectation of kingship, he had experienced the rites of passage of the fighting men he now commanded. As a rule, crown princes are sheltered or otherwise
removed from the lives of other men, and had Leonidas been born to kingship, this story might have been altogether different. As it was, he had spent his boyhood and early manhood in the barracks and had acquired the same mindset as the men he would take with him to Thermopylae.

The threat from the Persian Empire had certainly not been removed by throwing its heralds down a Spartan well in 491
BC
. Instead it loomed and rumbled beyond the horizon like a coming storm. Darius the Great was dead now and had been succeeded by his son and heir Xerxes, self-styled King of Kings. When it came to extending the reach of the empire it was very much a case of like father, like son. The disparate Greek states had reacted to the imperial threat in different ways over the years—some by throwing in their lot with the would-be conqueror—but by 480
BC
a coalition of resistance had formed around the hard core of Athens and Sparta.

Intent on conquest and domination as he was, Xerxes had, by 480
BC
, already ordered his Egyptian engineers to construct a huge, double-pontoon bridge a mile and a quarter long across the Hellespont—more familiar to us as the Dardanelles. This was impressive—but as nothing compared to the might of the naval and land forces he now mobilized against the Greeks. Herodotus—regarded by many as the father of history, and certainly blessed with a gift for hyperbole—reckoned Xerxes might have sent as many as 5 million infantry and cavalry, along with more than 1,200 ships. Huge exaggeration though this undoubtedly was, most historians are agreed that the Persian land force could have numbered at least 80,000 men and perhaps as many as 200,000. As well as the fighting men came the camp-followers—the wives, womenfolk and servants as well as the hangers-on and bounty-hunters that follow in the wake of war like flies. In any event, it seems fair to imagine a veritable host on the move toward the Greek heartlands.