March 14, 2007

• Alright a short little entry about the movie “300″
  It was…. interesting I guess, the plot was alright. The graphics are very nice
  while the movie had a very “epic” feel to it. As much as it is fantasy (being adapted
  from a graphic novel) the movie was still trying to pass itself off as being semi-historic.
  When I first saw “300′s Spartans”, I actually smiled picturing how my old history
  professor would cringe at the sight of these “300′s Spartans” who had enough sense
  to put on helmets but was brave enough (or stupid enough) to go to battle without
  body armor. I did enjoy the movie tho as you just have to accept that all validity went
  out the window as soon as the story started.

  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

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  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.

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  • 11:44 am
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