Before the warriors left for the fateful battle, Paraleia, mother and wife to two of the Spartan Three Hundred felled at Thermopylae:
What I tell you, Dienkes [a Spartan commander], you must not repeat to my son. Not until you reach the Hot Gates, and not then, until the proper moment. That hour may be, if the gods so ordain, that of your own death or his. You will know it when it comes.
This forenoon I received a summons from the king. I went at once, presenting myself within the courtyard of his home…In a moment Leonidas himself entered. He had just come from the marshaling ground and bore his dusty footgear in his hand…
With apology for his tardiness he sat, thanking me for presenting myself so punctually and inquiring after my ailing father and others of our family. Though it was plain he bore a thousand burdens of the army and the state, not excepting the prescience of his own imminent death and the bereavement of his beloved wife and children, yet as he took his bench he dismissed all from his mind and addressed himself to me alone with undiverted attention.
‘Do you hate me, lady?’ These were his initial words. ‘Were I you, I would. My hands would now be trembling with fury hard suppressed.’ He cleared a space upon his bench. ‘Come, daughter. Sit here beside me.’
I obeyed. The lady Gorgo moved subtly closer upon her settle. I could smell the king’s sweat of his exercise and feel the warmth of his flesh beside me as, when a girl, I had known my own father’s when he had called me to his counsel. Again the heart’s surfeit of grief and anger threatened to take me out of hand. I fought this back with all my force.
‘The city speculates and guesses,’ Leonidas resumed, ‘as to why I elected those I did to the Three Hundred. Was is it for their prowess as individual men-at-arms? How could this be, when among champions such as Polynikes, Dienekes, Alpheus and Maron I nominated as well unbloodied youths such as Ariston and your own Alexandros? Perhaps, the city supposes, I divined some subtle alchemy of this unique aggregation. Maybe I was bribed, or paying back favors. I will never tell the city why I appointed these three hundred. I will never tell the Three Hundred themselves. But I now tell you.
‘I chose them not for their own valor, lady, but for that of their women.’
At these words of the king a cry of anguish escaped my breast, as I understood before he spoke what further he would now say. I felt his hand about my shoulder, comforting me.
‘Greece stands now upon her most perilous hour. If she saves herself, it will not be at the Gates (death alone awaits us and our allies there) but later, in battles yet to come, by land or sea. Then Greece, if the gods will it, will preserve herself. Do you understand this, lady? Well. Now listen.
‘When the battle is over, when the Three Hundred have gone down to death, then will all Greece look to the Spartans, to see how they bear it.
‘But who, lady, who will the Spartans look to? To you. To you and the other wives and mothers, sisters and daughters of the fallen.
‘If they behold your hearts riven and broken with grief, they, too, will break. And Greece will break with them. But if you bear up, dry-eyed, not alone enduring your loss but seizing it with contempt for its agony and embracing it as the honor that it is in truth, then Sparta will stand. And all Hellas will stand behind her.
‘Why have I nominated you, lady, to bear up beneath the most terrible of trials, you and your sisters of the Three Hundred? Because you can.’
From my lips sprang these words, reproving the king: ‘And is this the reward of women’s virtue, Leonidas? To be afflicted twice over, and bear a double grief?’
On this instant the queen Gorgo reached for me, to offer succor. Leonidas held her back. Instead, yet securing my shoulder within the grasp of his warm arm, he addressed my outburst of anguish.
‘My wife reaches for you, Paraleia, to impart by her touch intelligence of the burden she has borne without plaint all her life. This has ever been denied her, to be simply bride to Leonidas, but always she must be wife to [the Spartan city-state) Lakedaemon. This now is your role as well, lady. No longer may you be wife to Olympieus or mother to Alexandros, but must serve as wife and mother of our nation. You and your sisters of the Three Hundred are the mother now of all Greece, and of freedom itself. This is stern duty, Paraleia, to which I have called my own beloved wife, the mother of my children, and have now as well summoned you. Tell me, lady, was I wrong?’
Upon these words of the king, all self-command fled my heart. I broke down, weeping. Leonidas pulled me to him in kindness; I buried my face in his lap, as a girl does with her father, and sobbed, unable to constrain myself. The king held me firmly, his embrace neither stern nor unkind, but bearing me up with gentleness and solace.
As when a wildfire upon a hillside at last consumes itself and flares no more, so my fit of grief burned itself out. A peace settled clemently upon me, as if gift not alone of that strong arm which clasped me yet in its embrace, but of some more profound source, ineffable and divine. Strength returned to my knees and courage to my heart. I rose before the king and wiped my eyes. These words I addressed to him, not of my own will it seemed, but prompted by some unseen goddess whose source and origin I could not name.
‘Those were the last tears of mine, my lord, that the sun will ever see.’
From Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield
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