Gates of Fire

The narrative shifts back to Gobartes’s perspective. The scribe writes that the Persian navy is defeated at the Straits of Salamis on the same day that Xeones finishes his account. There are many wounded from Salamis, and doctors can no longer be spared to tend to Xeones. Xerxes, meanwhile, is furious and having many of his ministers and generals executed.

Mardonius instructs Gobartes to kill Xeones and burn the transcripts. Orontes, however, tells the scribe to ignore Mardonius’s order, believing that Xerxes will eventually wish to enjoy Xeones’s story.

When Gobartes and Orontes meet Xeones, the prisoner is cheerful and accepting of his fate. Orontes expresses his unwillingness to kill Xeones and offers to have him snuck out of the camp. Xeones declines. Orontes delays the execution by pointing out that Xeones has left a loose thread in his story: “a tale of Leonidas and the lady Paraleia, on the subject of courage and of what criteria the Spartan king employed to select the Three Hundred” (504).

Several evenings before the Three Hundred left Sparta, Paraleia came to the house of Dienekes and Arete and told them that she had come from Leonidas’s residence. There, Gorgo informed Paraleia that both Olympieus and Alexander, her husband and son respectively, have been selected to go to Thermopylae. Gorgo counsels her: “This is women’s trial and triumph, ordained by God, to abide with pain, to endure grief, to bear up under sorrow’s yoke and thus to endow others with courage” (506).

Leonidas arrives and asks Paraleia if she hates him. He knows that the citizens cannot figure out what criteria were used to select the Three Hundred, since it is not composed solely of the best warriors. Leonidas explains that he “chose them not for their own valor […] but for that of their women” (508).

He explains that, from the strength of its women, all of Sparta would find its strength. And from Sparta’s strength, the rest of Greece would find its own as well. Paraleia collapses, sobbing, into Leonidas’s arms. When she has finished crying, she tells Leonidas that “[t]hose were the last tears of mine, my lord, that the sun will ever see” (510). 

The final two chapters are entirely from the record of Gobartes. Upon finishing Paraleia’s story, Xeones immediately dies. As the Persian army evacuates Athens, Orontes pays some Greek captives to take Xeones’s corpse to Diomache’s temple. Orontes and Gobartes then join the rest of the army in retreat. 

Xerxes departs for home, leaving Mardonius with 300,000 men to winter in the north of Greece. The next spring, the Greeks and Persians meet on the plain of Plataea where the Greeks, led by the full Spartan army, inflict a terrible defeat upon the Persians.

When Gobartes’s position is overrun, he is almost killed, but is saved by calling out the names of Spartans from Xeones’s story. Rooster, having heard Gobartes shout his name, questions Gobartes, and the scribe explains how he met Xeones. Gobartes convinces Rooster that he is telling the truth by knowing the fate of Xeones’s corpse.

Gobartes is held in Athens for two years, during which time the city is rebuilt, and the Athenian Navy pushes the Persian fleets out of the Aegean Sea entirely. Gobartes gives some description of the political and artistic flourishing of the Athenians in this period.

Gobartes is eventually ransomed back to the Persian Empire. On his return journey, he encounters a ship carrying a party of Spartans, including many women, to a beach near Thermopylae. Upon interrogating the ship’s captain, Gobartes learns that the Spartans buried several bodies and an urn–obviously containing Xeones’s ashes–in a burial mound, over which they erected a monument. Despite Gobartes’s urgent inquiries, the captain does not know the names of any of the Spartans he transported. He does, however, remember the inscription on the monument, which translates as: “Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie” (523).