For anyone who saw the movie and wonder how close was it to history here’s an article
that I’m stealing, originally publish in the newspaper by a historian on the how real was “300″
Here’s the link to the original article by Ephraim Lytle of University of Toronto
The
battle of Thermopylae was real, but how real is 300? Ephraim Lytle,
assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of
Toronto, has seen the movie and offers his view.
History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of
breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic
necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages
bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.
We
know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for
him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their
mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They
were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside,
forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground.
But future kings were exempt.
And had Leonidas undergone the
agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by
murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots
were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery
by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan “freedom.” By
living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be
professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a
brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were
required to ritually declare war on the helots.
Elected
annually, the five Ephors were Sparta’s highest officials, their powers
checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed
Leonidas’ campaign, despite 300‘s subplot of Leonidas
pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good. For adolescents ready
to graduate from the graphic novel to Ayn Rand, or vice-versa, the
historical Leonidas would never suffice. They require a superman. And
in the interests of portentous contrasts between good and evil, 300‘s Ephors are not only lecherous and corrupt, but also geriatric lepers.
Ephialtes,
who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local Malian of
sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured troll who
by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die.
Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift
his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent
defence of Spartan eugenics, and laughably convenient given that
infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened
birthmark.
300‘s Persians are ahistorical monsters and
freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and
garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied
Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300,
qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that
pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan’s education. This was a
frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb “to Spartanize”
meant “to bugger.” In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.
This touches on 300‘s
most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into
monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human.
According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks.
These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed
at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they
held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished
there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and
the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which
Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and
they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded,
this contingent flees. In Herodotus’ time there were various accounts
of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained,
fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.
No mention is made in 300 of
the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by
Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to
Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by
destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300‘s vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.
This
moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it
does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in
Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my
apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.
now I just have to find time for them… 
. Seem like Nintendo
