Spartians and Gates of Fire

Morning Everyone,

How is life going on? Hope all is well, at your end by the grace of god. At my end, everything seems to be hectic and yet boring!! Hope I post regularly from now. For today, let us have a book tour. I mean, I am not going to post a review until the later part of this week, but going to show few glimpses of the book I am currently reading.

Gates of Fire:

          Gates of Fire, is a historical fiction novel by Steven Pressfield that recounts the Battle of Thermopylae through Xeones, a Spartan Helot and the sole Greek survivor of the battle.

Here is an excerpt from the book, something astonishing, since the men in question are Spartians:

--x--

None of this entered into the scheme of the lady Paraleia, nor Arete either. Her peplos robe was split up the side in the Spartan style, revealing her bare leg to the thigh. This in any other city would have been lewd to the point of scandalous. Yet here in Lakedaemon it was unremarkable in the extreme. This is a leg. We women possess them just like you men. For Spartan males to leer at or ogle a lady in this dress would have been unthinkable. They had beheld their mothers and sisters and daughters naked since they were old enough to open their eyes, both in the girls' and women's athletic training and in the festivals and the other women's processions.

Still these ladies, both of them, were not unaware of their personal magnetism and the effect it produced, even upon a boy in service drawn up before them. After all, wasn't Helen herself a Spartan? The wife of Menelaus,

she whom Paris had carried off to Troy,

the cause of endless suffering

among Trojans and Greeks, and for

whose peerless beauty's sake so many

brave Achaeans lost their lives in Troy

far from their native country.

--x--

My goodness, what the hell is it? Spartian men, always training for war aren’t much interested in women?? I thought it would be other way around, since most of them work hard hard  and harder all day, training for war. There are a lot of such fantastic characteristics of Spartians, which the movie couldn’t portray. Have you seen the movie (300)? Have you read the book, is there anything that the movie missed??

With warm regards

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