The boy stood at attention without flinching while the panicked fox chewed his heart out.
Ye Spartans of the wide, encircling plain,
Look to see sons of Perses overwhelm
Your fabled state…
—A Pythian goddess's prophecy as a small band of Spartans gathered to face the Persian hordes at Thermopylae (from The Histories of Herodotus, c. 450 B.C.)
Universally, boys have longed to be brave. This may be the "good" side of testosterone, the other being endless war and violence. Hey, it's not our fault. As we evolved — pre-Biblically — with danger lurking just outside the cave, an aggressive gene was key to the survival of the species. It remains a functioning force in contemporary society: A recent study showing that testosterone diminishes as young men have families may worsen our problems by scaring young rascals away from marriage. Boys learn early on that girls still expect guys to be brave. Evolution, unlike the Tea Party version of Creation, is excruciatingly slow.
Fighting in the Shade, the new book by my friend and Eckerd College colleague Sterling Watson, brings these ideas powerfully into play. Billy Dyer, a football star for a high school team not far from Tampa, gets caught up in the dark side of the sport, tangled in a twisted web of sadism, capitalism, racism and misogyny. And all he wants is to be brave, to sacrifice for a cause larger than himself.
His team's called the Spartans. The battle of Thermopylae is a major symbol of courage in the Western world, and it sometimes seems that half the football teams in America are Spartans. Our kids went to Lakewood High School, "Home of the Spartans." We have the University of Tampa Spartans; I once taught at UNC/Greensboro; their Spartans practiced near our house. The Michigan State Spartans won last year's Big 10 title. It's a name with great power. During the Korean War, several friends of ours joined the Marines — often called America's Spartans — and their undying loyalty to the Corps remains a major force in their lives today. (Though I recall my fellow soldiers with affection, my loyalty to the Army is more complicated.)
When I was young, I was mesmerized by the ancient story, first recorded by Plutarch, of the Spartan boy who stole a fox cub, stuffing it under his shirt. Before he could hide it in his bunk at his military school, he met his teachers and had to join the daily lineup. Stealing was a major shame, so the boy stood at attention without flinching while the panicked fox chewed his heart out. To have lived, and disgraced himself, would be against the Spartan code: Honor and loyalty were far more important than death. Crazy, of course, but young boys are crazy. Could I do that, or anything like that? I wondered, throwing myself under 200-pound fullbacks on the football field.
In college we read the The Histories of Herodotus, from which Sterling's book takes its title. At the battle of Thermopylae, a messenger tells Dienekes, a doomed Spartan warrior, that the Persians were so numerous their arrows would blot out the sun; and Dienekes replies, "So much the better. We shall fight them in the shade!" Jeanne and I saw this attitude when we lived in Poland. With no natural borders, the Poles had been overrun time and again by Russia and Germany, but in their minds they weren't defeated. They would quote, impressively, Emily Dickinson back to me: Success is counted sweetest / by those who ne'er succeed… Loss and suffering sharpen our moral sense.
Sterling Watson's an old bud, and in the summer of 1998, with him and his wife Kathy, we sailed the Aegean Sea from Athens to Thessaloniki, stopping at the less touristy islands. We have a photo of Kathy on deck, reading to us from the Argonautica, the Greek legend of Jason and 50 heroes in search of the Golden Fleece — like Fighting in the Shade, a tale full of deceit, with the gods tricking mere mortals for their own desires. One of the islands we visited was Skyros, where the poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) lies buried in an olive grove, having died on a ship bound for battle at Gallipoli. Brooke — handsome, brilliant, and athletic — was ready for this, and had already written:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England…
—from "The Soldier" (1914)
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2011.