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Would his be the last face I would see? This Scythian, mentor and instructor to me since I was fourteen. He had taught me cover and interval, dress and shadow; how to stanch a puncture wound, set a broken collarbone; how to take down a horse upon the open field, drag a wounded warrior from battle using his cloak. This man with his skill and fearlessness could have hired himself out as a mercenary to any army in the world. To the Persians if he wished. He would have been appointed captain-of-a-hundred, achieved fame and glory, women and wealth. Yet he chose to remain in the harsh academy of Lakedaemon, in service for no pay.
Xeones, Gates of Fire. (c) Steven Pressfield. All rights reserved. |
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Name: Suicide
Real Name: Unknown
Age: 37 Ht.: 6'5" Wt: 201 lbs.
Hair: Gray Eyes: Brown
Bio: All of our information about Suicide is conjectural at best. We don't know much about him; his age, his appearance, even his real name are all mysteries. What we do know is that when King Xerxes' Ten Thousand Immortals charged the line in 480 B.C., more than one of them fell victim to the javelins of a man named for his wish to die.
The man called 'Suicide' is a character in Steven Pressfield's novel Gates of Fire. This novel tells the story of the legendary Three Hundred, a group of noble Spartan warriors who were charged to head the defense of the pass at Thermopylae- a hopeless mission, intended to give the rest of Greece enough time to marshall its forces against the invading armies of Persia. |
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According to the story, Suicide was not a Spartan; he was a native of Scythia, a tribal nation much like that of the Mongols and based in or around the Caucasus and Altay Mountains. Nobody knew much about his past. All we're told is that, when he was a young man, he had come to Sparta in despair, searching for someone who would kill him. He had slaughtered a member of his family- either a father or a father-in-law- in a dispute over a woman, and could not commit suicide for fear of the dishonor, so he sought someone who would do it for him. No man dared to grant the young foreigner's request; they all feared that he might have some sort of curse on him, and that to kill him would bring the curse upon them, too.
After weeks of wandering, the young man happened upon Iatrokles, a great Spartan nobleman and accomplished knight. Iatrokles had taken pity on him: "If you want to die," he said, "join the army. That'll finish you off." |
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But it didn't. The young foreigner did indeed join the Spartan army as a squire- a personal servant and backup for a higher-ranking warrior, unpaid and only one step up from a slave. In every battle, he threw himself into the fray, wearing no armor and charging with the first-rankers into the lines of the enemy. He should have died, but his lunatic courage and utter fearlessness kept him alive. His comrades, admiring his skill and lack of fear, began calling him "Suicide." The name stuck.
Over the years, Suicide's master Iatrokles died himself, and he became instead the squire of Iatrokles' brother Dienekes, another nobleman and a second-in-command to the Spartan king Leonidas. Through dozens of campaigns, his skill and knowledge of war grew; when Dienekes' head was laid open by a blow from an enemy shield, it was Suicide who stitched him up, laughing and cracking jokes the whole time. |
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Death waits for no man. When it came to Suicide, though, it only hung around for a while. The Scythian fell on the fifth day of fighting at Thermopylae; his right foot hacked off, he draped himself over fellow squire Xeones' back and acted as a human shield, taking a dozen wounds from arrows and javelins. Here his story officially ended. Unofficially, however, he was resurrected by a couple of extracanonical agents from the Society of Literary Rescue.
With a prosthetic foot and a clean-shaven face, Suicide still fights on- this time, in the service of the canon. After the collapse of the Society, he was shunted sideways into the PPC, and later paired with former Sue and pyromaniac Diocletian Astreth. Today, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, he continues to battle Mary Sues, bad slash, and canon ruptures with all the fervor that used to go into smashing a Persian soldier's head with the butt of a javelin. |
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