Telling us about the Spartans

The phrase "Go tell the Spartans" is well known, though the context of it is less familiar. The adjective "spartan", meaning austere and hardy, is in common use. The Spartans, though, seem incorrigibly alien. They are most famous for an episode of great but preposterous heroism, when at Thermopylae in 480 BC, 300 Spartan soldiers amid a total force of 4,000 held off an invading Persian army of, according to Herodotus, two million men, before being completely slaughtered.

Steven Pressfield has recreated the battle of Thermopylae in Gates of Fire (paper, £9.99, 0385600143), which Doubleday publishes on 4th February. According to rave notices in the US, he has succeeded in bringing alive these remote events, and making sympathetic the people who took part in them.

"Does for (Thermopylae) what Charles Frazier did for the Civil War in Cold Mountain," the author Pat Conroy said. "Rarely does an author manage to recreate a moment in history with such mastery, authority and psychological insight," was the view of Nelson DeMille. "A triumph in historical fiction," said the magazine Kirkus.

Pressfield says that Gates of Fire took root in his imagination 25 years ago, when he read an anecdote in Herodotus' Histories about the Spartan warrior Dienekes. On the eve of battle, Dienekes had been told that the Persian archers were so numerous that their arrows would block out the sun. "Good," Dienekes replied. "Then we'll have our battle in the shade."

"That anecdote lit it up for me," Pressfield says. "Across 2,500 years, I could relate to this guy. What a cool guy, I thought; what a funny guy."

He found the Spartans more appealing than their image suggested. "I was in service, in the infantry, and I found that there's a lot to be said for that way of life. There's a lot more humour and individualism than one would think.

"So I felt that if we could beam ourselves back to ancient Sparta, it would not be the dour, brutalistic society it has been painted as—that it would be packed with interesting, colourful characters, and that there would be a lot of humour in it."

Pressfield began writing fiction in the 1960s, producing several unpublished manuscripts. "They were just the kinds of novels that you should leave in a drawer," he says. "After that I gave it up."

In the 1980s he began a career in Hollywood as a screenwriter. He has been responsible for "no films I particularly want to mention". But he did learn a craft.

"The novels I had written were highly autobiographical, and that's what made them bad—embarrassingly bad. When I started work as a screenwriter I took a much more professional attitude to it. These were stories that had nothing to do with me: cop stories, westerns."

Then he got an idea that seemed to demand the form of a novel rather than of a script. This was The Legend of Bagger Vance, the story of a golf match between Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen and a third, mythical player; underpinning the plot was the Bhagavadgita, the Hindu poem. It sounds like one of a kind.

The epic and mythic clearly appeal to him; as does the escapism of historical fiction. "One of the great things about historical fiction is that you can write in another person's voice—and in the voice of someone who is more intelligent than you are."

He is aware that in Gates of Fire, and in his next novel, which will be set in ancient Athens, he is entering territory guarded watchfully by specialist historians. "I try to be as true to the facts as I can. But I am not a scholar on the level that the professionals are; I'm an amateur. I'm doing it for the love of it."