Fear

I remember posting something about "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressfield some time ago and promising to revisit it by way of a review later. Well, I'm not going to review it because I'm too lazy and my word bank is running low on cash. Instead, I will quote some stuff from it.

The Spartans have a discipline they call phobologia, the science of fear. As his mentor, Dienekes worked with Alexandros privately on this, after evening mess and before dawn, while the units were forming up for sacrifice.

Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercies, each focusing upon a seperate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck.

A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercies, is the face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans phobosynakteres, fear accumulators.

Fear spawns in the body, phobologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself, mounting into a "runaway" of terror. Put the body into a state of aphobia, fearlessness, the Spartans believe, and the mind will follow.

Under the oaks, in the still half-light before dawn, Dienekes practiced along with Alexandros. He would tap the boy with an olive bough, very lightly, on the side of the face. Involuntarily the muscles of the trapezius would contract. "Feel the fear? There. Feel it?" The older man's voice crooned soothingly, like a trainer gentling a colt. "Now. Drop your shoulder." He popped the boy's cheek again. "Let the fear bleed out. Feel it?" Man and boy worked for hours on the "owl muscles," the ophthalmomyes surrounding the eyes. These, Dienekes instructed Alexandros, were in many ways the most powerful of all, for God in His wisdom made mortals' keener defensive reflex that which protects the vision. "Watch my face when the muscles
constrict," Diekenes demonstrated. "What expression is this?"

"Phobos. Fear."

Diekenes, schooled in the discipline, commanded his facial muscles to relent.

"Now. What does this expression indicate?"

"Aphobia. Fearlessness."