51 pages • 1 hour read
Steven PressfieldGates of Fire
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 20-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary
The narrative returns to Xeones’s perspective. He now describes the muster of the Three Hundred, and the custom of the Spartans to spend the week before a campaign with their families.
During this rest week, Arete pulls Xeones aside and gives him the supplies he will need to tend to Dienekes during the campaign. Arete also gives Xeones a large sum of Athenian currency and asks him if he has seen Diomache. Xeones demurs, pointing out that both he and his cousin are married. Arete replies that he “would not be the first husband bound by love to someone other than his wife. Nor she the first wife” (287).
She then tells him how she had first been married to Iatrokles, Dienekes’s brother, but fell in love with Dienekes the first time she saw him. She wept when she was betrothed to Iatrokles but was filled with shame when her husband died in battle, worrying that the gods had picked him to die.
Following Iatrokles’s death and the appropriate mourning period, Arete and Dienekes married, but they both suspect that their lack of sons is the gods’ punishment. When the call-up for Thermopylae was announced, she had thought Dienekes safe, but her actions in the krypteia have now guaranteed that she will be widowed.
Arete now urges Xeones to flee and find his cousin. When Xeones refuses, she becomes angry and strikes him. She masters her emotions and promises Xeones that Diomache will receive word of him after Thermopylae.
Later, when the expedition is being mustered, Leonidas gives a speech praising the women of Sparta and the law of Lykurgus, the city’s legendary lawgiver.
Chapter 21 Summary
Xeones describes the arrival of the Spartans and their allies at Thermopylae and the flood of desperate refugees the army has witnessed streaming south.
The Spartans arrive at Thermopylae ahead of the Persians but are spooked when a soldier named Perses is bitten by a nest of baby vipers. A seer named Megistias explains that it is a good omen; the baby snakes represent the Greek allies, who are divided but will nevertheless strike together to defeat the Persians.
After Perses’s death, Leonidas has the men restore the dilapidated wall stretching across the coastal pass. While engineers from other cities bicker about the proper way to restore the wall, Leonidas simply begins stacking rocks, and the others join him.
An outlaw has fallen in with the army, and Leonidas asks him about the local geography. Xeones is shocked to discover that the outlaw is Sphaireus, the “Ball Player” from his youth.
That night, a local man delights in scaring the soldiers by describing the size of the Persian forces. When Dienekes stops to listen, the man does not desist. He tells them that the volleys of Persian arrows block out the sun. Dienekes coolly replies, “Good…then we’ll have our battle in the shade” (309). The chapter ends with first sight of the approaching Persians.
Chapter 22 Summary
Two days pass as the Persian army assembles before the northern pass. Leonidas gives a speech to his enomotarchai, or platoon leaders. He enjoins them to keep their normal habits and treat this battle as any other. By acting with complete normalcy, he hopes the Spartans will inspire the allies to stand fast. Leonidas also gives advice to the leaders of the allied forces.
Chapter 23 Summary
The next morning, Dienekes instructs the younger warriors in the nature of fear and asks them what its opposite is.
Dienekes describes how dogs find courage in a pack and that their fear of being excluded from the pack overcomes their fear of death. He says that this is a method the Spartans use but that fear of exclusion is not really the opposite of fear of death.
When Alexandros asks Dienekes if he believes that there is any Spartan who possesses true andreia, or courage, Dienekes replies that Polynikes comes closest but that his fearlessness is driven by his thirst for fame. He says that he has witnessed it in his brother Iatrokles and in Leonidas but surprises the young men by saying that Arete and Paraleia also possess it.
Ariston, a young warrior, tells Dienekes that he believes that women’s courage is of a different nature than that of men’s. His reasoning is that men are given to fight by their very nature. Women, on the other hand, are nurturing and loving by nature, and so it requires still greater courage to go against their nature and “stand unmoved and unmoving as her sons march off to death” (326). Alexandros augments Ariston’s idea by noting that women subordinate their personal grief to the good of the nation.
A Persian embassy led by Tommie approaches. The Spartans reject Xerxes’s offer to be spared and made overlords of Greece and, when Tommie asks to bring his offer directly to Leonidas, it soon emerges that the unidentified old man arguing with Tommie is Leonidas.
Chapters 20-23 Analysis
These chapters mostly consist of the Spartans’ preparations for Thermopylae. The tension between love and duty is highlighted by Arete asking Xeones about Diomache and by her relating how she came to marry Dienekes. Arete’s story reveals how the emotional turmoil she experienced has created a desire in her to see love triumph over duty, even if it is only vicariously through Xeones.
The rest of these chapters details the arrival of the Spartans at Thermopylae and their preparations for battle. The theme of phobos (fear) is repeatedly raised. The importance of leaders such as Dienekes and Leonidas to appear calm, unafraid, and as if there is nothing out of the ordinary is remarked upon several times. The discussion between Dienekes, Alexandros, Xeones, and Ariston further refines the novel’s approach to the nature of courage, and the difference between men and women’s respective forms of courage. The scene in which Tommie wishes to deliver terms to Leonidas plays up the differences between Leonidas and Xerxes; Leonidas is so immersed in the work of his men that Tommie doesn’t even recognize him as of a different rank than them.
