I've recently read Gates of Fire, Tides of War, and the Afghan Campaign, and was curious how well these novels follow the facts that we know about the time period. I'm guessing that most of the dialog involving real people (e.g. Leonidas, Alcibiades, Alexander) is fictional, but is it something that they might have said? Would soldiers in Alexander's army have some means of communicating with home (I imagine they didn't have paper, but maybe wax tablets or something)? Does the experience of the protagonist in the Syracuse naval battle match what we know about marine combat of the period?
I'm mostly interested in a general evaluation of the books. These questions are just examples of things I was wondering about.
I recently read K.J. Parker's Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (bear with me on this). The story is what you might call "fantasy-historical": it tells a down-to-earth and arguably realistic story without magic or fantasy creatures, but it's set in an unnamed fictional Empire and features an unnamed fictional City with no relation to the real world. Despite this clear distancing from real history, the book is extremely obvious, studied and competent historical fiction set in the Byzantine Empire. Anyone with a background in history will immediately see that it is directly inspired by the 7th-century Sasanid and Arab sieges of Constantinople.
Pressfield's work is the exact opposite of that. Where Parker writes historical fiction dressed up as fantasy to allow for liberties and inaccuracies, Pressfield writes fantasy dressed up as historical fiction to... Well, I don't really know why, if we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it's not to spread deliberate misinformation beneath a veneer of apparent historicity. Probably it's just to sell more books.
The point is that his stories are fantasy. They have at best a tentative, superficial connection to the societies they claim to describe. I'm most familiar with his book on Sparta (though I haven't been able to subject myself to the agonising ordeal of reading the whole thing); while the common view of Sparta is already at best a harmful caricature, Pressfield's vision of Sparta is like a caricature of a caricature.
Most of what you'll read in these books is made up. It is the brutish product of an author trying to describe the most warlike society his imagination can conjure. It is, of course, loosely inspired by a jumble of ancient evidence, but this information is handled in irresponsible ways that lead to an extremely misleading picture with many fantasy elements. The way characters speak and behave is no more realistic than the way their armies are shown to function. More specifically, the actual historical Spartans are made to think and talk and behave like a present-day military elite. Gates of Fire is a book that asks, "what if the USMC had spears and ruled a country?" It is not a book about Sparta.
As you can see from the posts linked here and in the other post by u/crrpit, I spend a good deal of time on this sub trying to drag unfortunates out of the Pressfield abyss. The fact that his fantasy characters have historical names misleads many people into the unhappy belief that his stories say something about history. For the unnecessary workload alone, I am obviously not happy with him. But as Professor Stephen Hodkinson has recently stressed,^1 Pressfield's vision of Sparta is not just wrong but very dangerous. The positive portrayal of Sparta as an ultramasculine, hypermilitarised society begins with Pressfield's work (and that of Frank Miller, written around the same time). In recent times this idea that the violent single-mindedness of Sparta is a good thing has provided symbols and rallying cries to far right extremists from the US to Greece, who wish to see themselves as the descendants of this imagined culture of eugenically purified super-warriors defending "the West" against a supposed foreign menace. We must reject this unhistorical image as forcefully as we can.
I'm afraid I can't speak to his other novels, but the fact that the novel about Alkibiades apparently features the naval battle at Syracuse (at which Alkibiades was emphatically not present) does not bode well.