Free Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

Greek cities, preparing on-site as prescribed by heaven’s law. These competitors, in their youthful prime and peerless in speed and prowess, surrounded my master on the instant of his arrival, clamorous for intelligence of the Persian advance and torn by the Olympic proscription from bearing arms. It was not my place to inquire of my master’s mission; one could only surmise, however, that it entailed a request for dispensation from the priests.
    I waited outside the precinct while Dienekes conducted his business within. Several hours of daylight remained when he finished; our two-man party, unescorted as it was, should have turned about and pushed on for Sparta at once. But my master’s troubled mood continued; he seemed to be working something out in his mind. “Come on,” he said, leading toward the Avenue of the Champions, west of the Olympic stadium, “I’ll show you something for your education.”
    We detoured to the steles of honor, where the names and nations of champions of the Games were recorded. There my own eye located the name of Polynikes, one of my master’s fellow envoys to Rhodes, graven twice for successive Olympiads, victor in the armored
stadion
race. Dienekes pointed out the names of other Lakedaemonian champions, men now in their thirties and forties whom I knew by sight from the city, and others who had fallen in battle decades and even centuries past. Then he indicated a final name, four Olympiads previous, in the victors’ lists for the pentathlon.

    Iatrokles
    Son of Nikodiades
    Lakedaemonian

    â€œThis was my brother,” Dienekes said.
    That night my master took shelter at the Spartan dormitory, a cot being vacated for him within and space set aside for me beneath the porticoes. But his mood of disquiet had not abated. Before I had even settled on the cool stones, he appeared from within fully dressed and motioned me to follow. We traversed the deserted avenues to the Olympic stadium, entering via the competitors’ tunnel and emerging into the vast and silent expanse of the agonists’ arena, purple and brooding now in the starlight. Dienekes mounted the slope above the judges’ station, those seats upon the grass reserved during the Games for the Spartans. He selected a sheltered site beneath the pines at the crest of the slope overlooking the stadium, and there he settled.
    I have heard it said that for the lover the seasons are marked in memory by those mistresses whose beauty has enflamed his heart. He recalls this year as the one when, moonstruck, he pursued a certain beloved about the city, and that year, when another favorite yielded at last to his charms.
    For the mother and father, on the other hand, the seasons are numbered by the births of their children—this one’s first step, that one’s initial word. By these homely ticks is the calendar of the loving parent’s life demarcated and set within the book of remembrance.
    But for the warrior, the seasons are marked not by these sweet measures nor by the calendared years themselves, but by battles. Campaigns fought and comrades lost; trials of death survived. Clashes and conflicts from which time effaces all superficial recall, leaving only the fields themselves and their names, which achieve in the warrior’s memory a stature ennobled beyond all other modes of commemoration, purchased with the holy coin of blood and paid for with the lives of beloved brothers-in-arms. As the priest with his
graphis
and tablet of wax, the infantryman, too, has his scription. His history is carved upon his person with the stylus of steel, his alphabet engraved with spear and sword indelibly upon the flesh.
    Dienekes settled upon the shadowed earth above the stadium. I began now, as was my duty as his squire, to prepare and apply the warm oil, laced with clove and comfrey, which were required by my master, and virtually every other Peer past thirty years, simply to settle himself