Steven Pressfield's The Gates of Fire is set in the fifth century B.C. in Greece. The story revolves around the famous battle of Thermopylae where three hundred Spartans held off hundreds of thousands of Persians, saving Greece. Pressfield creates a fictional story around the battle where one man, a squire named Xeones, survives to tell the Spartan story of the battle and the events preceding it. Xeones, who is the protagonist, tells his life story to the royal Persian historian while in captivity. This life history of Xeones constitutes the body of the book.
Xeones tale starts when he was a young boy living in Astakiots, a small Greek polis. Xeones is ten and lives a happy life with his mother and father, who are prosperous farmers. Xeones closest friends are his cousin Diomache, and a wise elderly slave Bruxieus. The first conflict of the book is the sacking of Astakiots by their supposed allies Pleuron and Kalydon. Astakiots is completely destroyed and distributed to the......
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Approximate Word Count: 666
Approximate Pages: 3 (260 words per double-spaced page) |