On the Nature of Sovereignty

On rare occasions in this life you will encounter art - a book, a film, a poem, a picture - that moves you profoundly. You find truth of such beauty it brings a tear to the eye; for a moment, it becomes hard to breathe.

Gates of Fire by Stephen Pressfield is such a work for me, historical fiction written about the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae. The narrator here is the Spartan slave Xeones, and he is giving his Persian captors an account of the battle from the perspective of the Greeks. In the passage I quote below, he is summarizing the last stand of Leonidas, the Spartan King destined to die at the hot gates. Xeones speaks of the man, yes - but beyond this, he speaks of the very nature of sovereignty itself.

I will tell His Majesty [Xerxes] what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command men's loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require the service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.
In the final moments before the actual commencement of battle, when the lines of Persians and Medes and Sacae, the Bactrians and Illyrians, Egyptians and Macedonians, lay so close across from the defenders that their individual faces could be seen, Leonidas moved along the Spartan and Thespaian foreranks, speaking with each platoon commander individually. When he stopped beside Dienekes [Xeones' master], I was close enough to hear his words.
"Do you hate them, Dienekes?" the king asked in the tone of a comrade, unhurried, conversational, gesturing to those captains and officers of the Persians proximately visible across the oudenos chorion, the no-man's-land.
Dienekes answered at once that he did not. "I see faces of gentle and noble bearing. More than a few, I think, whom one would welcome with a clap and a laugh to any table of friends."
Leonidas clearly approved my master's answer. His eyes seemed, however, darkened with sorrow.
"I am sorry for them," he avowed, indicating the valiant foemen who stood so proximately across. "What wouldn't they give, the noblest among them, to stand here with us now?"
That is a king, Your Majesty. A king does not expend his substance to enslave men, but by his conduct and example makes them free. His Majesty may ask, as Rooster [a fellow slave] did, and the lady Arete [Dienekes' wife], why one such as I whose station could most grandly be called service and most meanly slavery, why one of such condition would die for those not of his kin and country. The answer is, they were my kin and country. I set down my life with gladness, and would do it again a hundred times, for Leonidas, for Dienekes and Alexandros and Polynikes, for Rooster and Suicide, for Arete and Diomache, Bruxieus and my own mother and father, my wife and children. I and every man there were never more free than when we gave freely obedience to those harsh laws which take life and give it back again.

In all my studies, I have found many men who attempted to live up to this standard of kingship. In all of human history, there are few men we can look to, men who for a moment or a short period of time attained the ideal.

But there has been only one man - and he, no mere man, which in itself is instructive - in all of human history that lived out the ideal every day of his life: the Son of God, Jesus, the Christ. In Him alone do all the sovereigns of this world find their standard for the governance of those entrusted by God into their care. In Him alone all men find a True Sovereign worthy of their utmost devotion. For it is He alone who, through the brutality of the Cross and the triumph of the Empty Tomb, truly takes our lives, and gives them back again.