“Nothing fancy, brothers,” the king guided the construction. “For a wall of stone will not preserve Hellas, but a wall of men.”

There is a force beyond fear. More powerful than self-preservation. You glimpsed it today, in a crude and unself-aware form, yes. But it was there and it was genuine.

“Because a warrior carries helmet and breastplate for his own protection, but his shield for the safety of the whole line.”

Skill in singing in Sparta is counted second only to martial valor and in fact is closely related, through the heart and lungs, within the discipline of the phobologia. This is why the Lakedaemonians sing as they advance into battle. They are schooled to open the throat and gulp the air, work the lungs till the accumulators relent and break the con

“How does one conquer fear of death, that most primordial of terrors, which resides in our very blood, as in all life, beasts as well as men?”

If you show fear, they will be afraid. If you project courage, they will match it in kind. Our deportment here must not differ from any other campaign. On the one hand, no extraordinary precautions; on the other, no unwonted recklessness. Above all, the little things. Maintain your men’s training schedule without alteration. Omit no sacrifice to th

This process of arming for battle, which the citizen-soldiers of other poleis had practiced no more than a dozen times a year in the spring and summer training, the Spartans had rehearsed and re-rehearsed, two hundred, four hundred, six hundred times each campaigning season. Men in their fifties had done this ten thousand times. It was as second-na

A king does not expend his substance to enslave men, but by his conduct and example makes them free.

Someone told the story of the Spartiate whose shield bore no crest at all, but only a common housefly painted life-size. When his rankmates made sport of him for this, the Spartan declared that in line of battle he would get so close to his enemy that the housefly would look as big as a lion.