Gates of Fire

I was watching The Last Samauri last night, which is a highly underrated movie, in my humble opinion, and Tom Cruise's character made reference to the battle of Thermopylae (pronounced: Thermopoly). It brought back to my memory one of the best books I've ever read, called Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. So apparantly, this was quite a famous battle, and maybe if I had attended a school that had the Spartan as their mascot, I'd have known this bit of history, but alas, I was a blackcat (yes all one word) and I had never heard of it.

For those of you who were tigers or whippets or bears, this is the story. The Persian army was invading Greece with 2 million soldiers and the Greek city states sent 7000 men and 300 Spartan elite to the narrow mountain pass at Thermopylae ('the hot gates') to buy some time for the Greek armies to rally. A traitor informed the Persians about another way around this mountain pass. They planned to encircle the vastly outnumbered men, but the good guys got wind of this plot, the Greeks retreated and the Spartans held the narrow pass with 300 men for days. It bought enough time enough for the Greeks to retreat, and the rest of the Greek army to assemble and gather strength to eventually defeat the Persian invasion and protected the birthplace of western culture as we know it.

There are rumors of a movie being made from this book and it' s going to star George Clooney, but I wish they would come to their senses and cast Joaquin Phoenix...

Anyway.. this book made me cry. Rarely does a book do that.