Part of text: Directly above rose a copse of oak, lit by-iron cressets howling in the gale, and beyond, past a single picket line of Egyptian marines, could be glimpsed the pennanted kingposts of a pavillion so vast it looked like it housed a battalion. "That's it." Rooster pointed. "That's Xerxes' tent."
Response: First of all it was nice how the Pressfield describes the place to almost exagerate it. Also it was nice how it left the chapter in suspense to make the reader want to keep on reading.
Journal 2 book 7
Part of text: The warrior's thoughts at the brink of action, my master had often observed (as the student of fear he ever declared himself to be), follow a pattern unvarying and ineluctable. There appears always an interval, often brief as a heartbeat, wherein the inward eye summons the following tripartite vision, often in the selfsame order:
Response: This kind of brings in the element of Spartan training that they do early on in life that is somewhat explained in the contents of the book (primarily in the beggining) but it kind of explains how they get in the zone before they strike at their enemies.
Journal 1 book 8
Part of text: As when a hailstorm descends unseasonably from the mountains and hurls from the sky its icy pellets upon the husbandman's newly sprouted crop, so did the bolts of the Persians in their myriads thunder down upon the Spartans and Thespians. Now the farmers assumes his anxious station in the doorway, hearing the deluge upon the titles of the roof, watching its bullets of ice clatter and rebound upon the stones of the walk. How fare the sprouts of spring barley? One here and there survives, as if by miracle, and holds yet its head aloft. But the planter knows this state of clemency cannot endure. He turns his face away, in obedience to the laws of god, while without, beneath the storm, the final shaft breaks and falls, overwhelmed by the insuperable onslaught of heaven
Response: This is another example of building suspense it leaves kind of a gap in the story. The simile in the text is also nice as they compare the arrows that supposedly "block out the sun", as they compare it to hail. Also describing the arrows hitting sheilds.
Journal 2 book 8: Such was the end of Leonidas and the defenders of the pass at Thermopyle, as it related by the Greek Xeones and complied in transcription by his Majesty's historaian Gobartes the son of Artabazos and completed the fourth day of Arahsamnu, year five of his majesty's accension.
Response: This seems like a very nice semi-emotinal way to start the ending the book. The way they even start in with just this paragrph with simple words like "such" when put in context like this make the story come to epic proportions.
