The Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

 When Xeones is a young man his town was conquered by an invading army. He escapes and lives as a vagabond for a few years, but eventually unites himself with the Spartans because he sees in them prowess and valor that would have saved his hometown if they had been there.  He becomes a squire to a young spartan noble, Alexandros, and later to a Spartan commander, Dienekes, who is enlisted to stand at Thermopylae with 300 Spartans and their allies to off the overwhelmingly larger Persian Army.  It is a suicide mission and of the 300 Spartans and their squires that are called as defenders, Dienekes is the only survivor.  He is captured by the Persians, and Xerxes compels him to tell his story and explain how a group of 4000 men were able to kill tens of thousands of Xerxes best fighters before they were overcome. Xeones not only tells about the battle, but about the lives of the brave Spartan warriors, their families and their training.  He contrasts the code of honor and the self discipline of the Spartans to the excesses of the Persian court.  Through the Spartan's heroism, the Persian army's advance is delayed long enough for the Greeks to later launch a sea offensive that halted the Persian invasion of Greece. 

This is an older books someone recommended to me when they heard that I studied classics in college.  As I listened to it I was transported back to my years reading Homer and Virgil in my Greek and Latin classes. The subtitle of the book is "A Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae" it is just that.  It is written in the high epic style of the old classics.  I loved the long descriptive similes, just as one finds in Homer, and the rousing and wise speeches of the military leaders and leading women.  I kept asking myself, "who is this guy" meaning the writer.  He is clearly familiar with the Greek and Roman classics. I expected to discover that Pressfield was a professor of ancient languages or something, but no. He is a man who struggled for 30 years to get something published, going from one minimum wage job to another. He is a military veteran, so he does understand the idea of comrades at arms.  I am still shaking my head as to how he was able to capture the feeling of an epic with no formal training. I enjoyed the book quite a bit, despite very descriptive battle scenes, and lots of crude references as one might expect among fighting men.  The whole book is very masculine, and a reader can almost feel hair growing on their chest as they read it.  It brings up interesting philosophical questions about the nature of valor and the meaning of honor.  Wikipedia says that it is required reading in several military academies. (400 p. 1998)