300 and 300 2: (Yet) Another Problem I Have with These Films

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300 2, Ancient Greece, Athenians, Military Stuff, Movies I Hate, Spartans

Ancient Greece poleis (city-states) developed a style of fighting called the hoplite phalanx (which I’ve explained in some detail here). The phalanx reinforced the principle of community identity because it required all the members of the phalanx to stand close together (basically, shoulder-to-shoulder) and advance in unison. Each man’s shield covered half his body and half the body of the man to his left, so to survive required each man to stay close to his neighbors and to fight to keep him alive. Indeed, a phalanx typically lost its battle if a hole opened in its formation.

Additionally, the citizens of a polis were its soldiers. Rather than fielding professional armies of full-time soldiers, most poleis required all their adult citizens to fight when necessary. So these armies were more like the US National Guard than the US Army; the soldiers had other occupations (typically, farming) and were part-time warriors when necessary; they were called up for a battle or a campaign, served without pay, and then demobilized and returned to their normal occupations. To ensure readiness, citizens were generally required to own their own weapons and armor and to meet occasionally to drill the fighting techniques of the phalanx.

The Spartan system was much the same, except that all citizen men were required to be full-time soldiers (with serfs doing the farm-work that other Greeks did themselves). Their culture required them to drill regularly in preparation for war. So while Spartan soldiers were essentially professional soldiers (though not paid professionals), their military system still emphasized communal identity. In neither system was there much room for the individual to act on his own, because doing so would have disrupted the phalanx.

Trireme warfare extended this principle to the seas. Greek Triremes (which I explain here) required hundreds of men rowing in perfect unison; failure to maintain unison would result in tangled oars and the ship being motionless in the water. This required sailors to practice unison rowing. In Athens, the only major difference between serving in a phalanx and serving in trireme (from an organizational standpoint, that is) is that rowers were paid a daily wage for their service, thus guaranteeing that the rowers would not be financially ruined by their service. For the Athenians, their naval system was an expression of their democratic principles, one they were quite proud of.

But in 300 and 300 2: Rise on an Empire, the heroes do not fight in unison or formation, even when the result is complete nonsense (in the case of the battle of Thermopylae). Instead, the various characters (mostly the heroic Greeks) fight as individuals. They rarely make any effort at remaining in formation, assisting each other, or in any way depending on each other (although Leonidas’ suicidal attempt to kill Xerxes does require someone for him to use as a trampoline, something I suspect the Spartans would have found deeply insulting).

The result is warriors who win their fights out of sheer heroic bravery and the fact that they are the good guys. They win because they try hard and really care about their cause, rather than because they are actually skilled at what they’re doing. Their skill is to a considerable extent an expression of their moral character, and the lack of skill (the simple killability) of the bad guys is a reflection of their essentially immoral nature. In both movies, there’s only one bad guy who actually exhibits any true combat ability, and that’s Artemisia, who not coincidentally is also the only bad guy we’re encouraged to empathize with to any degree at all.

This, of course, is an example of the American tradition of Heroic Individualism that is so powerful in modern cinema; 300’s Spartans have a great deal in common with the cowboys of many Westerns. This is not entirely anachronistic, since the heroes of classical Greek literature are also Heroic Individuals; Achilles in the Iliad fights much the way that Zack Snyder’s Leonidas does, and with the same ultimate consequence (although Achilles proves more capable of learning from his mistakes than Leonidas does).

But while the Greeks might have loved the Homeric heroes, they recognized that they could not (or perhaps could no longer) fight that way. They developed a system of fighting that required reliance on community and mutual support and which actively had to rein in the individual (in fact, Roman soldiers could actually be punished for trying to be too heroic, because it usually led to them being separated from their phalanx and having to be rescued).

The result of all this is that 300 and 300 2 are unable to tell their stories coherently. Neither film makes much sense because they are unable to reconcile the events they are trying to depict with the need to make their characters Heroic Individuals. As I’ve said, Snyder’s depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae doesn’t even make sense on its own terms, and Murro’s depiction of the naval side of the 3^rd Persian War is pure fantasy with incongruous details like cliffs that appear out of nowhere and a general who rides his horse across the sea. In a way, it’s an indictment of the entire ethos of Heroic Individuality that its conventions can’t be merged with historical events in a way that fully makes sense. But then, no one went to see either of these movies hoping to see sensible depictions of anything, did they?

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300 and 300 2: Are These Movies Supposed to be History?

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300 2, Ancient Greece, Artemisia, Lena Headey, Leonidas, Movies I Hate, Xerxes

Thus far in my analysis of 300 (2007, dir. Zach Snyder) and 300 2: Rise of an Empire (2014, dir. Noam Murro), I’ve talked about them as if they’re supposed to be viewed as films about history. However, I’m not entirely sure that they are intended to be seen that way.

On the surface, it seems obvious they are meant to be history. 300 follows the events of Thermopylae at least in outline, even though it gets pretty much all the details wrong. It has Spartans fighting Persians, it has Leonidas and Gorgo and Ephialtes and Xerxes.

300 2 makes less of an effort to follow the actual events, since it offers four battles in place of two, and situates all the battles in the open sea, except when Themistocles magically conjures up some rocks. But here too we have Athenians and Spartans and Persians. We have Darius, Xerxes, Artemisia, Themistocles, and Gorgo. Surely these are historical films that just making up lots of details to make the stories more engaging to modern audiences?

However, I would argue that in their inventions, they violate one of the basic requirements of historical film, namely that their fabrications all be historically plausible even if they are not accurate. Since there’s no such thing as a historically accurate film, we can’t make strict accuracy our measuring rod; rather we must use plausibility. As film goers, we have a right to expect that the places where the film fudges the facts be at least minimally believable, because otherwise the film breaks our suspension of disbelief. For example, if Braveheart had shown William Wallace using an Ak-47 rather than a great sword, we would immediately recognize that the film was historically false.

And unfortunately that’s what both these films do. They present details that are not only implausible, but so far removed from historical fact that their falsity becomes painfully obvious.

Artemisia is a historical person, but the cinematic Artemisia is not even remotely plausible as a character. She is a deadly assassin, highly skilled warrior, and great marksman. For those of us raised on the cinema of the 70s and 80s, it’s nice to see a strong female character who can take care of herself, but Artemisia is simply impossible as an ancient woman. There were no ‘warrior queens’ in ancient Greece or Persia. The cultures simply wouldn’t have allowed it. In doing this, the film is fitting into the modern cinematic trend of having women who can fight, which is in many ways a nice development and a move away from misogynistic depictions of women who always need to be rescued by men, but in a historical film it is implausibly false.

A nice example of the Fantasy Babe with a Bow trope

Yet, while Artemisia is so implausible as to be false, she is at least theoretically possible, unlike some of the other details of these films. One of the ships in Artemisia’s fleet is a 19^th century ironclad, driven apparently by slave-powered screws. This is technologically impossible for the ancient period, and probably technologically impossible today as well. The movie seems to suggest that the Industrial Revolution was beginning to get underway by 500 BC, more than 2,000 years too early. Such a plot element breaks the historicity of the film in a significant way.

In other ways, it’s clear that these films cross over from an historical Earth to a fantasy Earth. Early on in 300, the boy Leonidas winds up fighting a wolf that is impossibly large, more like a sabretooth tiger, really, with glowing eyes (amusingly, the narration says its eyes are red when in fact its eyes are yellow). No animal like that existed in ancient Greece, or anywhere else in history.

Leonidas and the giant wolf

But the biggest violation of historicity in these films is Xerxes. In 300 he is presented as being impossibly tall. He’s not a giant, because his body is perfectly proportioned. He is simply 7-8 feet tall in a way that human beings pretty much can’t achieve. In 300 2, the film takes things a significant step further. Prior to the death of Darius, Xerxes is a normal man, but afterward, according to the narrative, Xerxes “gives himself over to dark powers” (I’m paraphrasing here, since I don’t have the movie in front of me); he goes to a cavern where unspecified dark gods are worshipped, swims in a pool, and emerges 7-8 feet tall and much darker-skinned than before. In other words, he’s magically transformed into a different person by swimming in this pool. At this point, which is fairly early in the film, it’s clear that the film-makers are signaling their departure from any meaningful historical reality and making a fantasy film that pretends to be historical.

300 2 also demonstrates its fantastical nature at the end of the film (and here again, I’m going from my memory of the film in the theater). During the final battle between the Athenian and Persian fleets, the narrator starts telling us what is happening in the fighting between Themistokles and Artemisia. Then the camera pans over to the Spartan fleet, which is just arriving, and we realize that the narrator is Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), who somehow knows what is happening on another boat quite a distance away. In other words, Gorgo is apparently demonstrating clairvoyant powers. We might simply attribute this to the screenwriter having entirely lost control of the story he’s telling and forgetting that Gorgo can’t possibly know the things she knows, but I think it’s just as likely that the film simply doesn’t care about this massive gaffe because the film knows it’s a fantasy and not historical.

This is something that I’ve already criticized Boudica for. In the past decade, fantasy has emerged as a successful film genre in its own right, and film makers have typically situated fantasy stories in cultures analogous to ancient or medieval cultures. So it’s understandable that film makers telling stories set in the ancient or medieval human past would want to work in a little magic to spice up the story. But it’s important to remember that magic isn’t real and therefore has no place in an historical film. That’s not to say that ancient and medieval characters couldn’t have believed in magic or engaged in what we might today classify as stage magic, but there’s a big difference between that and Xerxes being physically transformed by a dip in a swimming pool.

Is it really too much to ask that an historical movie actually contain only elements that are historically plausible?

Want to Know More?

300and 300: Rise of an Empireare available on Amazon.

300 2: Let’s Talk about Artemisia

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300 2, Ancient Greece, Artemisia, Bad Clothing, Eva Green, Sullivan Stapleton, Themistokles

A couple weeks ago, I took a look at 300 2: Rise of an Empire (2014, dir. Noam Murro). That post was mainly focused on the overall plot and the military details of the film, so I didn’t get much chance to talk about the main bad guy, Artemisia (Eva Green). So today, I’m going to look at this intriguing historical figure and consider how the film portrays her.

Spoiler Alert and Trigger Warning: If you plan on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to do so before you read this post, since I talk about major plot points, including the film’s conclusion. Also, this post discusses rape.

Oh, and let me get one issue out of the way right at the start. The cinematic Artemisia gets to wear lots of awesome sexy clothes that cling to her body and look absolutely nothing like anything any ancient Greek woman ever wore. During the Greek Archaic period, Greek women, even queens, were expected to cover most of their body in a tubular dress known as a peplos. It rose up from the ankles, was pinned at the shoulders, and then folded back down to just past the waist, where it was usually belted. It was a loose dress that covered the body but left the face and the arms bare. Alternately, she could wear a chiton, a dress that was sewn more than pinned. This usually had half-sleeves. Over this garment was often worn a type of cloak called a himation.

Women, or at least elite women, generally wore their hair up in a hairnet. Braids, pins, tiaras, and veils or other wraps were also common. Lacking straight-irons, they rarely just let their hair hang down.

So in public, Artemisia probably looked like this:

Greek women in chitons; the two on the right are wearing himations as well

and not like this:

In fact, when a relative died, Greek women enacted mourning by pulling the decorations out of their hair and ripping their clothes. So, to the extent that the outfit in the above shot of Artemisia would have signified anything to the ancient Greeks, they probably would have read it as mourning garb. So maybe Artemisia is an early version of a Goth chick.

As a rule of thumb, remember that Hollywood generally dresses women in clothing and hairstyles that reflect contemporary fashions rather than historical ones. In movies that are more interested in historical accuracy, the clothing might make an attempt at accuracy, but the hairstyles almost never do (although The Advocate is something of an exception to this principle.)

The Historical Artemisia

Artemisia ruled Caria, in the southwestern corner of modern Turkey, from its capital of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum). In 545, a couple generations before, Caria was incorporated into the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, as one of its satrapies (essentially a province with semi-independent government). So in keeping with Achaemenid practices, Caria was a kingdom administered by a monarch on behalf of the Persian shahanshan (literally, ‘the king of kings’, or emperor).

Halicarnassus

As is often the case with ancient history, a lot of Artemesia’s life is lost to us. Her father was king of Caria, and so she seems to have inherited the office for him, although her husband was the actual ruler down until his death. When he died, he left behind a young son, so Artemisia acted as the regent for her son. We don’t have clear dates for these events; we only know that she was ruling by 480 BC.

When Xerxes went to war against the Greek city-states, Artemisia contributed five ships and acted as their commander. Most of what we know about her participation in this war derives from the pages of Herodotus, who is known for including a lot of wild stories in his History. Thus, we have to take what he tells us with a grain of salt.

According to Herodotus, before the battle of Salamis, Xerxes gathered all his generals, including Artemisia, and asked if he should commit to a naval battle (since his navy’s main purpose was to provide supplies for his massive army, which was too large to live off the land). All his generals, apparently being yes-men, agreed that he should, but Artemisia pointed out that the Greeks were better seamen than the Persians. She also argued that Xerxes had already conquered Athens and that the other city-states could not hold out very long individually. In other words, Xerxes was already winning on land and didn’t need a naval victory. Xerxes reportedly praised her advice, but then ignored it and decided to engage the Athenian navy at what became the battle of Salamis.

Salamis, of course, turned out to be a trap, and Themistokles crushed Xerxes’ navy. When Artemisia realized that the Persians were losing, she tried to retreat, but was unable to do so because there were other Persian ships in the way, and a Greek trireme was bearing down on her. To fool the Greek ship, she ordered her ship to ram another Persian ship. This made an opening for her, and it tricked the Greek trireme into assuming she was on their side. As a result, she was able to get away in good order. This story of Artemisia ramming the Persian ship was rather famous; it’s reported in several other sources. Two sources claim that when Xerxes saw the ramming, without realize that she was hitting a Persian ship, he remarked that his men had become women and his women had become men.

After the defeat at Salamis, Herodotus tells us that Xerxes again asked her for advice. He wanted to know if he should lead his army into the Peloponnesus personally, or withdraw to Persia and allow his general Mardonus to handle the campaign. She advised him to withdraw, because if Mardonus won, the glory would still go to Xerxes, while if he lost, Xerxes would not be at risk. Xerxes listened to her and withdrew to Persia.

Herodotus bookends his description of Salamis with these two scenes of Xerxes getting advice from Artemisia. The first time Xerxes ignores the advice and regrets it, while the second time he listens and benefits (since Mardonus was disastrously defeated later in the campaign). This symmetry makes Herodotus’ story a little suspect, and that calls attention to some of the inconsistencies in the account. If Xerxes liked Artemisia’s advice well enough to praise it, why did he ignore it? If he really didn’t know his navy well enough to know that Artemisia had attacked his ship, how did he know it well enough to know that she was commanding the ship? Also, since Greeks generally considered women inferior to men, this story has the unstated point that Xerxes is a fool, because he needs a woman to tell him how to make good choices. So this story, while famous, is a little suspect.

These stories all emphasize that Artemisia survived the battle of Salamis, but that’s pretty much the last solid information we have about her. Presumably she returned home at some point, but we do not know what became of her, how long she ruled, or when she died. Her grandson was king of Halicarnassus when Herodotus spent time there, so perhaps his stories are essentially family legends about Artemisia.

The Cinematic Artemisia

The movie’s version of Artemisia is quite a different creature than the historical Artemisia; in fact, about the only similarities are her name and the fact that she’s associated with ships. She’s not a queen; rather she’s the daughter of an average family whose city is sacked. Her family is killed and she is enslaved and raped repeatedly before being discarded as a teenager (a rather odd point, since teenagers were ideal slaves in many regards, with years of service ahead of them and breeding potential if the master wanted it). One of Xerxes’ men (Peter Mensah) finds her and trains her to become a ruthless warrior who murders her way to the top of the Persian political and military hierarchy; she becomes the most trusted general of first Darius and then Xerxes. In fact, in contrast to Xerxes’ depiction in the first film, in this film, Artemisia is virtually his puppet-master, pulling his strings and at one point flat-out insulting him and defying him.

There are a couple of notable things about this version of her story. First, it falls into a trend in contemporary film of having strong female characters. In contrast, for example, to most female leads of, say, 80s or 90s action films, Artemisia is not a defenseless maiden who needs rescuing by the hero, nor is she a femme fatale who needs to manipulate men to get her way. She has a great deal of agency, is a forceful personality, and is fully capable of both leading troops and fighting in person. In that sense, she’s fun to watch, even if the idea of female warriors in ancient Greece is complete fiction.

However, she’s also an example of another trend in recent film and television, the trend to equate strong women with women who have been raped. In the past year or two, the ‘raped strong woman’ trope has become so common in film and tv that it’s attracted a fair amount of commentary, and may be in danger of becoming just another cliché. Rape is certainly an important issue, and it can be argued that it is healthy for entertainment to expose viewers to this ugly problem. But it’s unfortunate that Hollywood seems to have become fixated on the idea that rape can somehow explain why a woman is strong, as if a woman cannot be strong without having been raped. Putting a rape in a woman’s back story can serve to make her a more complex character, but it can also become a lazy and brutal crutch for scriptwriters who can’t imagine more nuanced ways to develop a female character; surely there are more stories to tell about women than just this one. There’s a fine line between acknowledging an all-too-common problem for women (especially for women who are victims of war) and using rape as a cheap way to add some ‘grittiness’ to a story while suggesting that rape is simply a universal fact of life and therefore nothing to be shocked by.

Another problem with the film is that it completely ignores the one probably genuine story we have about Artemisia. Her escape from Salamis demonstrates that Artemisia was a cunning and ruthless woman, and it would have fit perfectly well into her character as the film presented it. But instead, the screenwriters dropped the real story and just made up nonsense about an iron oil-tanker and guards sent on suicide missions with exploding backpacks (which is how this film got its obligatory Stuff Blows Up scene). It demonstrates that the screenwriters weren’t in the least bit interested in the actual history, and really just wanted to make up cool stuff for the fan-boys, even when that cool stuff makes no sense whatsoever. At least the first 300 tried to get the basic narrative facts right even as it was getting everything else wrong.

Nothing says ‘strong’ like some spine ridges

A third problem with her character is the way her sexuality is handled. This mostly gets explored in the two encounters Artemisia has with Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton). The first real meeting happens about half way through the film, when Themistokles is taken by boat to meet with Artemisia. Historically, Themistokles sent Xerxes’s fleet a message that he wished to defect, and this was how he lured the Persians into the trap at Salamis. When Themistokles went to meet Artemisia, I initially thought that this would be the film’s way of handling this detail; certainly replacing a message with a face-to-face meeting would be a reasonable bit of dramatic liberty.

We hate each other, but let’s have sex!

Unfortunately, the scene’s actual purpose is just to give our two main characters a chance to have some sexytime. We get to see the actors mostly naked having rough sex. The whole scene is essentially pointless, except from the standpoint of satisfying the audience’s voyeuristic urges. (And, as an aside, why doesn’t Artemisia try to kill Themistokles in this scene? Why does she let him sail back to his fleet? She’s evil, and not even remotely honorable, so logically she wouldn’t scruple to not kill him if she has the chance. Crappy plotting, if you ask me.) The scene doesn’t advance the plot at all, nor is Themistokles’ offer to betray the Greek fleet even mentioned in the film. The scene does mean that when the two of them meet up again at the end of the film, the whole scene feels very Freudian, so that when Themistokles stabs her with his sword, he’s essentially killing her with his penis.

If we put all of these made-up details together, the whole narrative arc takes on a rather ugly overtone. Artemisia’s ‘strength’ is basically driven by the fact of her rape, which provides literally the only motive she seems to have in the film, namely to punish all men for what has happened to her. Her murders of various Persian leaders and her manipulation and defiance of Xerxes demonstrate that she is a destructive force that turns the world upside-down, overturning male authority and destabilizing her society (she’s actually the one who kills Darius). Her enjoyment of rough sex becomes a symptom of her rape. And her death at the end of Themistokles’ penis-sword becomes a symbolic re-assertion of the proper order of society, an order grounded on male sexual domination of women. While Artemisia has agency, she has no clear motives or desires; her villainy is not due to personal ambition or some twisted moral cause, but simply a clichéd hatred of men, and her defeat at the end is not due to a specific mistake or character flaw, but rather to the fact that she is incapable of dominating Themistokles for the simple reason that he refuses to live as a slave.

If the first 300 is a story about how straight white men overcome the ugly, sexually deviant non-whites of the world, 300 2 is a story about how straight men overcome the threat posed by an uncontrollable woman. In both cases the enemy represents servitude and the heterosexual male hero represents liberty.

While rape can, in the right hands, be a powerful device for telling a story about women’s experiences, in this case, the rape is just cheap, lazy storytelling that serves to demonize its female character. This script victimizes Artemisia twice, once when it makes her the victim of rape, and once when it replaces what was apparently a strong, clever real historical women with a cheap male fantasy of a dangerous woman who needs to be defeated to preserve male sexual authority.

Want to Know More?

300: Rise of an Empireis available on Amazon.

Our best source for the Persian Wars and for Artemisia is Herodotus’ The Histories, Revised (Penguin Classics).There’s also a version, Herodotus: The Persian War (Translations from Greek and Roman Authors), that’s only the sections about the Persian Wars with scholarly explanations added.

300 2: 301? 300-er? Persian Bugaloo?

Tags

300 2, Ancient Greece, Athenians, Battle of Marathon, Military Stuff, Spartans, Sullivan Stapleton, Themistocles

I realized after I started this blog that I was going to have to go see 300 2: Rise of an Empire (2014, dir. Noam Murro)(and here I just have to briefly note what a stupid title this is. There’s only one empire in the film, Xerxes’ Persian Empire, which has already ‘risen’ before the start of the movie, and given that he’s defeated in the film, it’s hardly appropriate to say that this film is about the rise of an empire). So this Saturday I bit the bullet and went and saw it. The film didn’t disappoint, because I had extremely low expectations for it. I actually liked it better than 300, mostly because it didn’t give me a screaming headache. There is some actual acting in the film, which is a new development in this franchise, and Sullivan Stapleton, who plays Themistokles, makes the interesting choice to not shout all of his lines at the top of his voice, which I found a refreshing change of pace. Eva Green plays Artemisia sort of like Emily Blunt’s character from The Devil Wears Prada after not getting a dress she really wants (which come to think of it would make an awesome film–The Devil Wears More Prada: The Wrath of Emily). But let’s take a look at the history behind the film, shall we?

Warning: Spoilers ahead! If you intend to see the movie, you may want to do so before reading this. I’m going to discuss the plot in detail, all the way up to the ending.

What Actually Happened

In 499, several Greek city-states in Ionia (the modern west coast of Turkey) revolted against Persian domination. The Athenians, who just established the world’s first democracy, decided to support the rebellion, and when the Persian king Darius defeated the rebellion, he decided to invade Greece to punish Athens for having gotten involved. Darius sent his general, Mardonus, at the head of fleet, while remained behind in Persia. Ultimately, Mardonus decided to land his fleet at Marathon, about 25 miles from Athens. Athens and Plataea sent troops to Marathon; the Athenians requested that the Spartans send troops, but the Spartans begged off, claiming that they had a religious ritual that would prevent them for fighting for 10 days. The Athenians blocked the exit routes from the beach at Marathon, and effectively pinned the massive Persian army down so that it could not properly organize itself in the small space available to it. Eventually, after waiting several days, the Greeks, under the command of the general Miltiades (although Themistokles might have been one of the other generals) decided to charge the Persians. Unable to maneuver, the much large Persian army was routed and forced back to the ships. Herodotus claims that the Athenians lost 192 men while the Persians lost about 6,400. Although ancient historians routinely exaggerate numbers, the Persian casualties seem plausible.

The Athenian victory at Marathon essentially ended Darius’ invasion plan. The Greek tragedian Aeschylus fought at Marathon and would later write a play, The Persians, about the Persian defeat at the battle of Salamis.

Xerxes succeeded his father in 486 and decided to launch another invasion of Greece in 481. He sent an army overland through Thrace and Macedonia, while simultaneously sending a large fleet to shadow it along the coast. Xerxes’ army was too large to support itself off the land, so an important function of the fleet was to carry supplies for the army. In response, about 30 Greek city-states decided to combine their forces to fight the Persians. The Spartans took command of the land forces while Themistokles took charge of the naval forces, although nominally a Spartan Euryblades was in command because the other city-states objected to the Athenians being in charge of it. There were about 400 ships, including a small contingent of 16 ships from Sparta. The decision was made for the land forces to occupy the pass at Thermopylae to block Xerxes’ army, while the Greek naval forces would confront the Persian fleet at Artemesium. Under Themistokles, the Greek navy effectively held off the much larger Persian navy, but this was undermined by the Persian defeat of the Spartans on land.

The Persians marched south, conquering Boeotia, and pressing into Attica. The Athenians, after an intense debate, voted to evacuate their entire population to the nearby island of Salamis. A small group of Athenians chose to remain behind and fortify the Acropolis, but were easily overcome and Xerxes sacked the city. The Greek naval forces took up a position in the narrow straits between Salamis and the Attic mainland. As the Persian navy advanced, Themistokles sent Xerxes a message that the Greek allies were quarrelling and that he was willing to defect to the Persians. When the Persians sailed into the straits, however, they encountered a unified Greek fleet. Although the Persian ships outnumbered the Greek ships, they were slower and unable to effectively maneuver within the cramps space of the straits, and the Persian fleet was smashed. Unable to supply his army, Xerxes had little choice but to turn back toward Persia before the Greeks could occupy the Hellespont. On the way back, a combined force of Spartans, Plataeans and others smashed his forces at the battle of Plataea.

How Greek Naval Combat Worked

Greek naval combat was very different from modern ideas about naval combat. It relied on a type of galley called a trireme, which had three banks of 54 oarsmen each, which allowed it to move extremely quickly and with considerable force. It also had sails, which were used for transit but had to be lowered for combat because the sails would have caught the air and slowed the ships down. Instead of trying to directly attack the sailors on the opposing ship, Greek ships were fitted out with a large battering ram on the prow and the main tactic in battle was to attempt to ram an oppose ship in the side, thus staving in the ship’s hull and causing it to drop below the waterline; while triremes were light enough that they didn’t actually sink, once the ship dropped below the waterline, the bottom two banks of oarsmen were likely to drown, thus essentially knocking the ship out of the fight. Then the attacking ship would back up and maneuver to find another target. These were not large ships, and most of their space, both on deck and below, was given over to rowing benches. They often carried a few archers to defend the top bank of oarsmen from missile attacks, but they were not troop transports.

A modern recreation of a trireme

Triremes required the rowers to be exceptionally well trained. The oars had to lifted out of the water, swung forward, lowered into the water and pulled back in complete unison, because if the rowers got out of sync, the oars would quickly get tangled and leave the ship incapable of moving. The Athenians very quickly came to specialize in trireme combat, and for them the co-ordinated rowing served as a symbol of democracy and social equality, with all the citizens rowing as one.

Alright Already! Get to the Movie!

Yeah, I know. That was a lot to read through. But history is, well, complicated. And 300 2 has a lot of problems to it. To be kind, I’m just going to talk in this post about the military stuff. I’ll save my other thoughts for another post. So this movie sort of bookends 300. It opens before it, and then the events of 300 happen, and then the second half of the movie takes place. Amusingly, at one point, the film seems to have forgotten that in the first movie, Leonidas pushed the Persian ambassador (Peter Mensah) into a bottomless pit, because this time the Spartans just beat the crap out of the ambassador, who is played by a different actor (even though Mensah also appears in this film, as Artemesia’s trainer).

The film opens with the battle of Marathon. Instead of engaging in hoplite warfare, the Greeks just charge the Persians and fight one on one, more or less the way the Spartans fight for most of 300. The film shows Themistokles leading the Greeks, and it shows him critically wounding Darius with an arrow, despite his son Xerxes’ desperate attempt to save him. The Persians sail home (which takes a month, according to the film), and a week later, Artemesia comes to visit Darius, and finds him with the arrow still in his chest. She pulls it out and he dies. This is so utterly, inexplicably silly that I laughed out loud in the theater. Surely in the month that it took the Persians to sail home, one of the medics would have noticed that their king still had an arrow in his chest. Standard medical practice would have been, at bare minimum, to snap the arrow off close to the skin, so as to avoid aggravating the injury by jarring the arrow. They probably would have tried to cut the arrow out, but I suppose, given that the patient is the king, they might have been reluctant to try that because it stands a good chance of killing him. Curiously, after five weeks with an arrow in his chest, Darius doesn’t have any signs of infection in the wound. And all of this ignores the fact that Darius wasn’t anywhere near Marathon and didn’t die til several years later.

Then the movie jumps forward to 480, and the lead-up to Thermopylae. The Athenians and some allies have put together a tiny fleet of about 30 ships and are frantically trying to get the Spartans to commit their ships. Keep in mind, the historical Sparta is located in the center of the Peloponnesus and didn’t actually have a navy of any real size, but this film isn’t about to let a little problem like geography get in its way. If the Jamaicans can have a bobsled team, the Spartans can have a huge navy.

The pre-Thermopylae portion of the film shows two naval engagements, which I suppose might be the film’s version of the battle of Artemesium, although it’s never explained where the battles are happening or how this action relates strategically to Thermopylae. The Greek ships are not triremes, which ought to have three banks of oars; instead they’re just regular galleys with a single bank of oars. This is sort of like a film about the Iraq War showing soldiers using WWI tanks.

In the first battle, Themistokles employs a standard tactic of having his ships form up into a circle facing outward, a formation known as a kyklos. A kyklos made it difficult to ram the defending ships, because there was no way to come at them from the side. But the Persian ships aren’t built to ram, so this shouldn’t have been the deterrent in the film that it would have been in conventional trireme warfare. But we do need to give the film some credit for showing an actual historical tactic. Despite the kyklos, a couple of Greek ships do manage to engage the Persian fleet and they do in fact ram them, (from both sides as once, even) because, as Themistokles explains, the Persian ships are weak in the middle.

But the ramming seems to be just a tactic to get the Greek ships close enough that the foot soldiers on the deck can climb onto the Persian ship and start killing people. This was a tactic that wasn’t used until the Romans invented it during the First Punic War more than 200 years later. But Themistokles is a pretty clever guy, so I guess he thought up the idea first.

In the second battle, Themistokles is even more cunning. When Artemesia, who happens to be in complete command of the Persian navy (instead of the five ships she actually commanded), sends some ships to engage the Greeks, Themistokles somehow calls up a bank of fog (seriously, it just happens, unless I missed something), and then, even more cunningly, he calls up an extremely narrow strait of rocks. Up until the rocks appear, the scene seems to be set on the open sea; there’s no warning that the ships are near land until the Persian commander realizes he’s literally sailing into a strait barely wider than his ship. Then he discovers that the Greeks have somehow crammed a galley into the strait sideways. The Persian commander’s ship runs into the galley, and then Themistokles and his troops jump down from above onto the Persian ship and engage in one of those really killer ab workouts they clearly do in their spare time.

Themistokles wears a blue cloak, because red means you’re a Spartan

The idea of luring a squadron of Persian ships onto the rocks during a heavy fog is not, in itself implausible. In fact, I’d venture to say that the scene was inspired by the actual battle of Salamis. But because the film makes absolutely no set-up whatsoever that there is coastline nearby or that fog is setting in, the audience is left to conclude that Themistokles has magically conjured them out of thin air.

Then the battle of Thermopylae happens off-screen, and Xerxes sacks Athens (so horribly, the film has to show it twice), and Themistokles goes to Sparta and asks Queen Gorgo for those ships they don’t actually have, and she refuses, and asks him bitterly whether he wants her to arm her sons (which is sort of an odd accusation for a Spartan mother to make because the actually answer would be “yes, please, may I send my sons to die for Sparta?”, but maybe the death of her husband has gotten her down momentarily). Oh, and as a friend pointed out to me, Themistokles essentially just pops off to Sparta for a few minutes, when in fact the journey would have taken a fairly substantial amount of time, given that Greece is a very rocky region.

In the second half of the film, obviously things have to turn against Themistokles, because it won’t do to have the hero actually just keep winning. So in the third naval battle, the Greeks sail into a trap of sorts. The Persians have an ironclad, driven apparently by a bunch of guys turning enormous capstans. I’m serious–it’s an enormous iron-hulled screw-driven ship. Oh, and it sprays a thick black liquid which might be crude oil, but which I think is actually supposed to be Greek fire. You know, that proto-napalm stuff that the Greeks invented about a thousand years later. I guess they got the idea from the Persians. So the Greek ships get all oily, and Artemesia sends her personal bodyguard to swim up to the Greek ships wearing backpacks filled with explosives that require Persian fire-arrows to detonate. I swear I am not making this shit up–the screenwriters are. I’m just the poor sucker who has to try and make sense of it, along with everyone else sitting in the audience. Oh, and during the battle, Aeschylus gets fatally wounded and dies soon after the battle. Apparently someone ghost-wrote The Persians for him.

Finally we get to the battle of Salamis, or at least what ought to be Salamis in this story. Xerxes is reluctant to fight, but Artemesia wants to punish Themistokles, so she calls Xerxes a pussy and the battle gets to happen. The Greeks are down to something like six ships, while the Persians have thousands left. The plucky Greeks stand and fight in the open sea, because, you know, actually fighting near Salamis would be unsporting or something. The Greeks do their whole ‘ram and board’ thing again (which is pretty homoerotic-sounding, probably unintentionally), but this time they generally get chopped up. Perhaps they should have worn some armor instead of just those spiffy blue cloaks.

Themistokles then unleashes his hidden weapon, which turns out to be a horse that he’s brought along. He rides between ships, which is a really impressive trick when you’re at sea, and runs into Artemesia and they have a knife-fight that turns into a Mexican stand-off, and then Queen Gorgo and her massive Spartan fleet shows up, rowing way harder than they need to because they forgot to take their sails down, and Gorgo saves the day and Themistokles gets all Freudian on Artemesia with his sword and she dies, and the end.

The Spartans, sail-rowing their hearts out to get to the battle

So if you compare my summary of the actual events with my summary of the film, you’ll notice that the film pretty quickly takes a left turn into fantasy-land sometime about two minutes into the first fight scene and never really manages to find its way home. Apart from the ramming of ships, almost everything about the fight scenes is wrong. The ships are wrong, the tactics are mostly wrong, the terrain is wrong, the number of battles is wrong, at least two famous people die who survived, and the ultimate victory is attributed to people who weren’t there and didn’t have a real navy. They exclude all the interesting stuff about Salamis (like how Themistokles suckered Xerxes into fighting, and how Artemesia got away, which is something I’ll talk about in a later post) and replace it with just clichéd cinematic blather. It takes a lot to make a movie about naval combat and get the terrain wrong.

On the up side, though, there’s a lot less shouty people in it, and less horrible narration. I got out of the theater without a headache. And all that puts this film miles ahead of 300.

Want to Know More? 

300: Rise of an Empireis available for your dubious viewing pleasure.

The actual story of Salamis is fascinating, far more than this film is. Barry Strauss’ The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece — and Western Civilizationwould be a good place to start.

A good introduction to Greek warfare in general is Victor Davis Hanson’s A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. Although specifically about the later Peloponnesian War, it has good chapters on all the major forms of Greek warfare: infantry, cavalry, navy, and sieges.