Nyeshet said:
Here is some new info for you:
http://www.livescience.com/history/070312_300_movie.html
A historian well versed in the history of ancient greece discusses the movie and how realistic (and unrealistic) it was in various respects.
Needless to say, unrealism won out.
It always does. Perhaps '300' will set the stage for some more serious examination of the battle at Thermopolae, but I doubt it. Pressfield's 'Gates of Fire' would have been more welcome, but even it has historical inaccuracies for the sake of clarity to the modern reader and I'm certain Hollywood would make a hash of it.
PC or not, I do really believe that at Thermopolae, the near term future of rational thought, individual rights, and emphirical research was in danger, and that had the Spartans failed to hold at Thermopolae as long as they did that history as we know it would not exist. Certainly rational thought, empiricism, the rights of man, and so forth would have arisen somewhere, but it would have taken alot longer.
But, what makes this story more than a simple tale of good vs. evil, is that the Spartans make very uncomfortable champions of what they ended up defending. We can romanticize them only because ultimately thier sacrifice ended up saving not Sparta but Greece. Had thier sacrifice ultimately saved Sparta instead of Athens, then it wouldn't have made much of a difference. The Spartans were many things, but they weren't free men. They weren't born free. They didn't die free. They weren't goaded into battle by whips, but neither necessarily were the men they killed. The Spartans were goaded into battle by tradition, which is what killed most of the men they killed. The Spartans were no more participants of a free society than the slaves that they fought.
And for that matter, Greece was no beacon of light either. It was more like a smoldering lump of coal that would need a few more centuries of fine ideas put to before it would burst into real flame. Democracy died in Greece. The Athenians abandoned it after little more than a single generation. The rationality of Greece would be buried under backwards looking nostalgia, and Aristotles arrogant untested classification mascarading as science.
But, for all that, I'm happy that at the Hot Gates in 480 BC, 300 warriors and a few thousand brave free Greeks stopped an invincible army led by a god king to the everlasting glory of Sparta, may it rest in peices.
There's only one thing said by the esteemed historian that I would disagree with. The Greeks romanticized Sparta at least as much as we do, and maybe more so. Most greek city states believed Sparta to have nearly an ideal ethical code. It was heroic. It was austere. It was martial. When Sparta and Athens contended for prominence, it was Sparta that attracted most easily allies from the other Greek city states. Athens was hated. Athens was rich. Athens was smug. Athens was merchantile and cosmopolitan. Athens was - in the eyes of its Greek critics - decadent, soft, corrupt, and selfish. Athens was dangerous. It was Athens, and not Sparta, which most Greek city states feared and despised and ultimately which they most turned on, and I very much think that many men of Greece would have imagined life in Sparta to be a better life than life in Athens. This shouldn't surprise anyone. There are plenty of people in Toronto that will say how life is better in Havannah, Pyongyang, Tehran, or Caracas than it is in Chicago or New York.
ya just gotta go with the flow...
