" 'Go tell the Spartans, Passerby, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.' Thus did the poet Simonides remember the three hundred elite Spartan warriors, who, led by their king, Leonidas, faced the vast, inrushing Persian army at the "hot gates" of Thermopylae and fought to the death for an ideal dearer to them that life itself - the ideal of freedom. ..."--Back cover.