基本信息出版社：Bantam
页码：400 页
出版日期：2005年09月
ISBN：055338368X
International Standard Book Number：055338368X
条形码：9780553383683
EAN：9780553383683
装帧：平装
正文语种：英语

内容简介 The national bestseller!

At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army.

Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history--one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale....


From the Paperback edition.
作者简介 Steven Pressfield is the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance. a mystical golf novel currently under option with Robert Redford and Jake Eberts (Dances with Wolves, Driving Miss Daisy) for feature film adaptation.  He makes his home in Malibu, California.


From the Paperback edition.
编辑推荐 "Steven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life, and he does for that war what Charles Frazier did for the Civil War in Cold Mountain."
--Pat Conroy

"Gripping and swashbuckling...an exciting, romantic, star-crossed story."
--The New York Times

"An incredibly gripping, moving, and literate work of art. Rarely does an author manage to re-create a moment in history with such mastery, authority, and psychological insight."
--Nelson DeMille

"A novel that is intricate and arresting and, once begun, almost impossible to put down."
--Daily News

"A timeless epic of man and war...Pressfield has created a new classic deserving of a place beside the very best of the old."
--Stephen Coonts


From the Paperback edition.
文摘 I had always wondered what it felt like to die.

There was an exercise we of the battle train practiced when we served as  punching bags for the Spartan heavy infantry. It was called the Oak  because we took our positions along a line of oaks at the edge of the  plain of Otona, where the Spartiates and the Gentleman-Rankers ran their  field exercises in fall and winter. We would line up ten deep with  body-length wicker shields braced upon the earth and they would hit us,  the shock troops, coming across the flat in line of battle, eight deep, at  a walk, then a pace, then a trot and finally a dead run. The shock of  their interleaved shields was meant to knock the breath out of you, and it  did. It was like being hit by a mountain. Your knees, no matter how braced  you held them, buckled like saplings before an earthslide; in an instant  all courage fled our hearts; we were rooted up like dried stalks before  the ploughman's blade.

That was how it felt to die. The weapon which slew me at Thermopylae was  an Egyptian hoplite spear, driven in beneath the plexus of the ribcage.  But the sensation was not what one would have anticipated, not being  pierced but rather slammed, like we sparring fodder felt beneath the  oaks.

I had imagined that the dead would be detached. That they would look upon  life with the eyes of objective wisdom. But the experience proved the  opposite. Emotion ruled. It seemed nothing remained but emotion. My heart  ached and broke as never it could on earth. Loss encompassed me with a  searing, all-mastering pain. I saw my wife and children, my dear cousin  Diomache, she whom I loved. I saw Skamandridas, my father, and Eunike, my  mother, Bruxieus, Dekton and "Suicide," names which mean nothing to H
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