Gates of Fire is incredible. Framed as the story of the sole Spartan survivor of the Battle of Thermopylae, telling his story to the Persian Emperor Xerxes, Gates of Fire is about more than the battle. It's about the world of the warrior, and the psychology that leads men to triumph in battle.

Our narrator, Xeo, went through childhood in an unremarkable minor city until it was sacked by the Argives. He lived as a refugee in the hills with his cousin Diomanche and a blind slave, learning to hunt and track, and then went to Sparta because the Spartans were the finest warriors in all of Greece. The story moves on two tracks towards the confrontation at Themopylae, where 300 handpicked Spartans and a larger number of Greek allies fought a desperate rearguard action against the massive Persian army to give the rest of Greece time to gather forces and fight back.

The spiritual core of this book (and it does have one), is the centrality of fear in the warrior's experience, and the way that fear can be conquered. The Spartans have an entire discipline around mastering fear, and there are long and fascinating discussions of what courage is. I'll not spoil the answers, since they are worth waiting for.

On a personal level, I'm a Spartan revisionist. We need to acknowledge that they were a brutal slave state built on pederasty. So all the noble Spartan lords carping on about freedom and liberty is a kind of dark joke. But Gates of Fire is fantastic that even this revisionist loves it.