300: Beautiful Straight White Guys vs. Everyone Else

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300, Ancient Greece, Fascism, Frank MIller, Leonidas, Movies I Hate, Racial Issues, Spartans, Xerxes, Zack Snyder

So in previous posts about 300 I’ve discussed the problems with the way that 300 (2007, dir. Zack Snyder) depicts the battle of Thermopylae and Spartan society. In this post, I want to examine another, more disturbing, problem with the film, namely the way it treats everyone who’s not a hot straight white guy. While I have a lot of issues with this film, in many ways, this is the most problematic element of the film for me.

At its height, the Achaemenid Empire (the Persian Empire of this film) covered a very large portion of what we today call the Middle East: Egypt, Asia Minor, the Fertile Crescent, Iran, and modern Afghanistan and Pakistan. In that sense, it included a wide range of ethnic groups. Ethnically, its dominant group were the Persians, an Indo-European people who today are often called Iranians. Persians are Caucasians; they have ‘European’ features, but with dark brown to black hair, and somewhat swarthier skin tone, ranging from olive to light brown. Northern Persians often have skin as fair as Europeans, and reddish-blond hair, while uncommon, is not unheard of. (If you don’t believe me, google ‘red-haired Persian’ and see the results.) Persians are more closely related to Western Europeans than to, for example, Arabs, Jews, or Turks. Linguistically, Persian is closely related to Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and modern English, and entirely unrelated to Semitic languages such as Arabic or Hebrew or to the Turkic language family, although it does naturally have loan-words from those languages. But while the Achaemenid Empire covered a lot of territory, one area it didn’t occupy was Sub-Saharan Africa. While there may have been a few Negros in the Persian Empire, they would have been a minuscule proportion of the population.

The Achaemenid Empire

Greeks and Persians in 300

The good guys in this movie are pretty easy to spot. They’re the buff white guys in jockstraps. They are shown to be motivated by patriotism, by a love of liberty (despite the fact that most of them just do whatever Leonidas tells them, even when it gets them all killed senselessly), and, at least in the case of Leonidas, by a tender love of his wife. They’re white, they’re male, they’re straight, and they’re physically perfect. The only exception to this is Gorgo (Lena Headey), who is white, female, straight, and physically perfect. The actors playing the Greeks are all fair-skinned, and Dilios (David Wenham) has somewhere between blond and light brown hair, depending on the lighting. Contemporary Greeks are generally olive-complexioned, with dark brown or black hair, and thick eyelashes. While I don’t know for sure, my guess is that ancient Greeks probably were closer to modern Greeks than they are to the fair-skinned actors who play them in this movie. Normally, that would be a very minor point for me, but in this film, I think it’s important to point out that the actors playing the Greeks really don’t look very Greek (apart from Gerard Butler perhaps).

Notice any non-whites in this pic? Me neither.

In contrast to these fair-skinned, gorgeous men (and woman) is pretty much everyone else. It is notable that very few of the Persian characters appear to be Caucasian. The first Persian we meet in this film is the Persian messenger, played by the extremely dark-skinned Ghanan actor Peter Mensah. Mostly the Persian soldiers are very dark-skinned, Negro, or perhaps Semitic.  However, many of the soldiers, the Immortals, wear black clothing and gold face-masks, thus obscuring their race. Some of the women in Xerxes’ harem seem to be Caucasian, but none of them have given names, much less speaking roles. Xerxes is played by a Brazilian actor, Rodridgo Santoro, in very swarthy make-up; let’s just say he’s extremely tan. He’s bald, so we can’t really get a sense of what his hair is like, but aside from that, he’s passably Persian. (To judge from Santoro’s publicity stills, he’s got reasonably fair skin, so his swarthiness seems to be a conscious choice for his make-up). The only real exceptions to the pattern that evil characters are non-whites are Theron (Dominic West), the villainous Spartan; the disfigured Spartan Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan); and the creepy ephors, who only appear in one scene.

If I had that body, I’d demand to be worshipped too.

The bad guys are, by and large, physically mis-shapen. Ephialtes is a grotesque hunchback with terrible teeth. The pervy ephors are covered with boils. Xerxes’ court is populated by freaks, including characters identified in the credits as “Long neck woman”, “armless concubine”, and “transsexual 1, 2, and 3”. Xerxes himself is physically perfect, but roughly 8 feet tall, and therefore an oddity in a different way. The only significant bad guy who is doesn’t fall into this pattern is Theron, who just looks sort of average, which is pretty sad compared to all those strapping Spartans.

Ephialtes, setting back the cause of disabled rights 2000 years.

Finally, the bad guys appear to be sexual deviants. The ephors have a thing about licking sexy semi-conscious priestesses. Xerxes is vaguely effeminate; he wears eye liner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, and has long gold-painted nails. He sports multiple piercings, and in one scene he touches Leonidas’ shoulders in a rather suggestive fashion, as if he’s trying to seduce the Spartan (but given how hot Butler is, I suppose that’s understandable).

Leonidas, you must tell me who does your hair!

This stands in contrast to Leonidas’ demonstrable heterosexuality. He is shown lying in bed after sex with his wife, he thinks of her body in another scene, and he derides the Athenians as “boy-lovers”. The other Spartans in his army don’t have any explicit sexuality (unless you count cavorting in jockstraps with 300 of their closest friends and neighbors), but the film makes no suggestion that they are anything other than straight men. Theron is also clearly heterosexual; he forces Gorgo to have sex with him. But the film suggests that he’s a sadist, since he points out to Gorgo that their tryst is going to take a while and will not be very pleasant for her (a comment she throws back at him later when she stabs him to death).

So in the world of 300, physically perfect, heterosexual white men are good; just about everyone else is bad. In this film, the Persians function as the opposite of the Greeks, like a distorted mirror. Everything that is good about the Spartans and their society is absent from the Persians. The Spartans are associated with freedom and individuality, while the Persians are associated with submission, slavery, and loss of individual identity; Persian characters are either dominating (like Xerxes and some of this commanders), or servile (like his harem and most of the soldiers). White people are seen as  the embodiment of liberty (although it’s mostly a liberty to do as they’re told, since they all implicitly trust Leonidas), while non-whites are presented as enemies of liberty and the embodiment of absolute monarchy.

And, since the Spartans are the characters the audience is intended to identify with, this says something about the audience’s presumed cultural values. It’s assumed that the fanboys, fratboys, and military types who will want to go see this film will find non-whites, homosexuals, and the handicapped to be acceptable bad guys. In this, Snyder is largely following Frank Miller’s graphic novel; Miller has occasionally been accused of having fascist leanings, and I think Snyder’s version of 300 channels that in significant ways.

The film celebrates whites and villainizes non-whites. It celebrates perfect physical bodies and demonizes imperfect bodies. It celebrates heterosexuality and denigrates sexual deviancy. It celebrates social unity and obedience to the leader, even when his choices are suicidal. The enemy is a nameless, faceless, submissive and yet predatory Negro and Semitic Other led by a totalitarian leader. The enemy threatens from without and corrupts from within (by bribing Theron to betray Leonidas). The quasi-democratic deliberative element in Spartan society (the council of elders) is shown to be ineffectual and worthless. All that’s missing from this film is a lot of Nazi swastikas on Spartan armbands.

That’s right. The Spartans in this film are ancient Nazis. And they’re the good guys.

In a previous post, I argued that historical accuracy in film matters because film shapes our understanding of the world we live in, where we come from, and who we are. If we accept 300’s claim that whiteness is, and always has been, good, that it has always been indelibly linked to freedom, and that it is also harnessed to physical perfection and heterosexuality, we are teaching ourselves that American society can only have room for white people, heterosexuals, and those with ideal bodies. 300’s skewed depiction of the past is, in many ways, appalling un-American, and deeply offensive to those of us who aren’t white, heterosexual, and physically ideal. 300‘s other historical errors make it a bad movie; but on this score, I’m inclined to see it as actually dangerous. It celebrates a sort of crypto-fascism that really isn’t even that crypto.

One might object that Snyder was simply being faithful to his source material. But it’s important to realize that everything that goes onto a movie screen is the result of conscious choices made at various steps in the film-making process. Snyder and his crew had ample opportunities to step away from the ugliness in Miller’s graphic novel, and instead he chose to embrace it and magnify its reach. He could have chosen actors who more closely resemble the historical Greeks. He could have chosen to explore the extent to which many Greeks and Persians look quite similar. He could have depicted Xerxes as looking like a normal human man with conventional sexual tastes. None of these would have required any real divergence with the plot of Miller’s graphic novel. Instead, Snyder chose to follow Miller’s lead. But as the world learned at Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” isn’t a legitimate defense.

Want to Know More?

300 is available in multiple formats from Amazon.

Correction: In a previous version of this post, I mis-spelled Lena Headey’s last name. I regret the error.

Why Historical Accuracy in Film Matters

Tags

300, JFK, The Battle of Kosovo, The Lion in Winter, The Wolf of Wall Street

Recently, Sam Adams wrote an essay for Criticwire titled “Please Kill the Expert Review: A Modest Proposal”. Gabriel Valdez of Wednesday Collective called the article to my attention by kindly offering me as an example of an expert review done right (thanks for the compliment, Gabriel!). The article made me think about what I do on this blog and why, so I thought that instead of discussing a specific film for today’s post, I’d share a few of my reactions to Adam’s piece. If you haven’t read it, hop over to Criticwire and read it; it’s not very long.

In the essay, Adams takes issue with what he calls Expert Reviews, such as “What ‘Noah’ Gets Wrong About the Bible” and “What ‘House of Cards’ Gets Wrong about Money in Politics”. He objects to the Expert Review because it is often “a half-step up from the goof-squad niggling of cinematic and televisual trainspotters who derive a puny sense of superiority by pointing out that a license plate has the wrong prefix or that particular style of telephone wasn’t available until the following year.” In other words, these reviews aren’t much better than the ‘Goofs’ notes in an IMBD entry. (Did you know that in Captain American: The Winter Soldier you can see highway signs for Cleveland on highways that are supposed to be in Washington DC?)

Wait–Captain America didn’t help us win World War 2?

Adams then discusses Silicon Valley in specific, and argues that as a work of satire it is not meant to be realistic. By this, he seems to mean that any factual errors or misrepresentations of how tech start-ups actually operate aren’t important because the series is not really about Silicon Valley. What it’s really about he doesn’t tell us. He argues that while details can enrich the world of a fictional movie or tv show, what matters most is the story and that when the story and the facts conflict, the story ought to win out. Small errors in shows like “The Good Wife” or films like The Wolf of Wall Street are unimportant because, as Adams puts it, “drama is life with the distractions pared away.”

To some extent, I think Adams is right. The scriptwriters of tv shows and movies need to have the creative freedom to tell the story they want to tell, and sometimes historical facts get in the way. If James Goldman had scrupulously adhered to historical facts, he probably couldn’t have written The Lion in Winter because several of the events depicted in the film had already happened before the start of the film. I’m not so much of an historical purist that I will get upset if small details are wrong, such as when Shakespeare has one of the characters in Julius Caesar says that “the clock hath stricken three”, even though clocks won’t be invented for about a thousand years. He’s frickin’ Shakespeare! Who am I to tell him how to write his plays? And a small error like that doesn’t affect the story he’s telling in any significant way.

Adams’ essay also points out that one problem with the Expert Review is that the reviewer often isn’t an expert. He or she is just some person doing a few minutes’ worth of internet research before writing an article that might be little better than click-bait.

But there are a few problems with Adams’ argument. Sometimes a lack of historical accuracy renders a film’s plot problematic. 300’s depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae is so wildly wrong, it renders the entire story incoherent and transforms Leonidas from a brave general to a raging moron. Zach Snyder apparently didn’t bother reflecting on how the historical inaccuracies rendered his version of the story nonsensical.

What? I got my men killed for nothing?

But historical train-wrecks of the magnitude of 300 aren’t that common (although I have a decent supply of them for this blog). More seriously, Adams’ argument fails to take into consideration the effect that movies and tv shows have on a viewer’s perception of the facts. Television and film are not just momentary distractions any more than a bottle of Coke is just a momentary distraction; both have lasting effects on the person who consumes them, often in ways the consumer isn’t fully aware of. Movies and tv shows shape the viewer’s notion of what the world around them is like and how they think history played out. I have a good friend who is an assistant district attorney, and she has mentioned a number of times how juries increasingly view a lack of DNA evidence as evidence that the government’s case is weak largely because shows like CSI place such a heavy emphasis on DNA evidence as proof of guilt or innocent. In reality, DNA evidence is often unnecessary to prove someone’s guilt, and running DNA tests is expensive and time-consuming. In the American legal system, the standard of guilt is reasonable doubt, but shows like CSI are changing what reasonable doubt means to average citizens, which raises the government’s burden of proof.

Similarly, I’ve long thought that the various crime and legal dramas on current American television are tending to lead viewers to think that over-zealous prosecution is a good thing, since on these shows, the government characters are always acting from good motives and the people they are pursuing are always the criminals.  So the message of these shows is that we should allow law enforcement and prosecutors to bend or break laws, because in the end, their motives are good and it only hurts the bad guys. The legal system is often presented as an obstacle to justice, not a tool to achieve it. In all the years of Law and Order that I watched, I only once saw the show address the possibility of an innocent man being convicted and sent to prison. Usually Jack McCoy unravels the truth before the sentence is handed down.

Moving to the realm of historical film, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, often identified as the most historically inaccurate film Hollywood has ever made (although 300 gives it good competition, I think), has been credited with having a very substantial impact on Scottish politics in the mid-1990s. It was released in 1995, and two years later Scotland overwhelmingly voted in favor of a proposal to establish a Scottish Parliament. It has been credited with significantly encouraging Scottish nationalism and has been accused to encouraging Anglophobia in Scotland. The film’s relentlessly negative depiction of the English as vicious rapists is wildly wrong, but very effective.

So the Scots didn’t wear make-up like modern sports fans? D’oh!

Here in the US, Oliver Stone’s JFK presents a version of the facts intended to persuade the audience that Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy. Stone carefully blended actual historical footage with invented footage in ways that make it appear that there is actual film footage proving that a conspiracy happened. Stone felt that although the footage proving a conspiracy didn’t exist, it should have, and so he manufactured it. That approach has more than a little in common with Jack McCoy’s notion of how to achieve justice

A number of polls and small studies have found that JFK has tended to persuade viewers that the Kennedy assassination was the result of a CIA conspiracy. If that’s true, this is a case of a historical film helping to shape the historical consciousness of the general population. (One specific study polled viewers before and after watching JFK and found a very marked increase in the number of people who believed in the conspiracy only after watching the film. Unfortunately, I’m relying on memory for this; I read about the study back in 1992, and I wasn’t able to track it down for this post, so take that with a grain of salt.)

Perhaps the best example of how historical films can influence people’s perceptions, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic reported used showings of the 1989 film The Battle of Kosovo as way to whip up Serbian support for his brutal treatment of the Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s. I don’t know enough about Serbian history to know if the film was particularly inaccurate, but Milosevic was able to use the film to remind Serbians of a particular historical grievance as a way to drum up political support for his policies.

For a different take on the problem, consider Christina McDowell, the daughter of Tom Prousalis, the so-called Wolf of Wall Street. In an opinion piece about the film, she accuses Martin Scorsese and Leonardo diCaprio of distorting the events around her father by glorifying him and making his crimes seem trivial when, in fact, they are part of a widespread problem at the heart of the American economy. As she says, “Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers’ fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees.”

I haven’t seen the Wolf of Wall Street yet, so I can’t speak to how it presents its narrative, but McDowell’s essay is an important reminder that historical events happen to real people. Tom Prousalis’ victims were and are real people; they deserve to have a say in how society remembers the events of their lives. McDowell, at least, feels that facts critical to her life have been badly misrepresented, to her detriment and to the detriment of the American public and its understanding of the Wall Street banking scandals.

Historical films matter, because for most people, such films are where they get much of their knowledge of history from. After 300 came out, I noticed an increase in the number of my students who thought that Thermopylae was the reason the Persians lost that war, and Braveheart has certainly given people the idea that medieval Scots wore great kilts, when in reality the Scottish kilt is a late 16^th century development. Small historical inaccuracies probably aren’t too serious, and I doubt that it really matters that many Americans think that the kilt was a medieval garment, but how a film presents history can have very powerful affects on how people understand the past and their people’s place in it.

300: This is Sparta! (Funny, it looks a lot like modern America)

Tags

300, Ancient Greece, David Wenham, Dilios, Freedom!, Gerard Butler, Gorgo, Lena Headey, Leonidas, Movies I Hate, Spartans

In a previous post, I discussed the problem of how 300 (2007, dir. Zack Snyder) depicts the battle of Thermopylae. But the battle isn’t the only problem with the film. We also need to talk about the film’s depiction of Spartan society. (You didn’t think that the only problems with this film were in the battle scenes, did you?)

Spartan society was famously austere by Greek standards. In the middle of the Archaic Period, c. 750 BC or so, Spartan society chose to focus itself on warfare to the exclusion of most of the other things that Greeks typically did, such as farming and craft work. Whereas most Greek soldiers were essentially part-time warriors like the American National Guard, Spartan soldiers were full-time professionals. Everything in Spartan society was subjugated to the goal of producing great soldiers.

Spartan boys were raised in a matter that modern Americans would find shockingly harsh, if not downright cruel. Plutarch tells us that Spartan officials examined new-born infants to determine if they were health enough to be raised. Babies that did not meet the state’s standards were thrown off a cliff.

The movie mostly ignores this; although an early scene does seem to show such an examination, the film does not explain the significance of the scene.  When Leonidas (Gerard Butler) encounters the horribly-deformed Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan), he treats Ephialtes with dignity and compassion, and tries to let him down easy, offering him work tending the wounded. The historical Leonidas would almost certainly not have done that. Spartans considered the physically deformed unworthy of survival. This is a society that entertained itself by making their subject helot neighbors get drunk and dance and then laugh and throw things at them for not dancing well; they were hardly champions of the notion that all life has dignity. But disdain for the handicapped does not play well in modern society, and so despite hinting at the actual way Spartans treated such people, the movie instead projects modern values back onto the Spartans to keep our sympathies.

At seven, Spartan boys were taken from their family’s household and were thereafter raised in communal barracks with other boys of their age group; they would not live in private again until they were 30; even married men were expected to live in the barracks rather than with their wives. Various practices were designed to produce boys who were tough, disinterested in luxury, ambitious, and clever. They were beaten for minor infractions. They were allowed only minimal clothing and had to sleep on piles of river-rushes. They were not provided with sufficient food, so that they would become skilled at hunting and stealing food, but were beaten if they were caught with food they had not been given, so they would learn to be clever. Boys were encouraged to fight each other, and part of their coming of age ritual involved being beaten so brutally at the altar of Artemis that some of them died. Exactly how accurate these details are is unsure, since Plutarch was writing centuries after the decline of Classical Sparta, but he is one of our primary sources for life in ancient Sparta.

300 certainly depicts this aspect of Spartan society. Young Leonidas is trained to fight starting at 5, and is forced to fight a wolf in the middle of a snow-storm (which, of course, Greece is known for) while wearing only a loin-cloth. We see him being beaten while tied to a post. The general austerity of Sparta is also depicted. When the villainous Theron (Dominic West) is killed by Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), his corruption is proven to the Gerousia (the Spartan council) when the gold coins that Xerxes has bribed him with fall out of his tunic. Spartans famously scorned gold currency as corrupting, and instead used iron cooking-spits, so this detail rings true, even if Theron is an invented character.

What this quote fails to understand is that in the Greek underworld, there was no dining, food, or pleasure.

But the film takes this austerity to absurd levels by showing the Spartan soldiers consistently wearing nothing but sandals, a jockstrap, a cloak, and occasionally a helmet. This certainly allows for immense amounts of eye-candy (and I’m all in favor of generous servings of beefcake in film), but this is both silly as domestic clothing and downright absurd as battle gear. Like other hoplites, Spartans wore a full panoply of armor, which typically included shin greaves, a breast-plate, and helmet, as well as spear and sword. This was extremely heavy; modern experiments have tended to produce a panoply that weighs about 70 pounds. Men fighting under the hot Mediterranean sun would probably have been exhausted after about half an hour. During the Classical period, the Greeks slowly lightened the panoply, discarding the greaves and finding ways to lighten the breast-plate and helmet, but this was in the period after Thermopylae. So the armor that we see Leonidas and the other Spartans wearing simply cannot be justified. I suppose it bears echoes of the nudity we see in much of the male statuary from ancient Greek, but if that was the point, why are the men wearing jockstraps? Probably because male genitals are still largely taboo in America cinema, or perhaps because it would create too much homoeroticism for the fan-boy audience to be comfortable with.

Spartan government was three-sided. They had two royal families, each of which provided one king at a time. Leonidas came from the Agiad dynasty, and is correctly depicted essentially as a general rather than a political leader, but his co-king Archidamus I, of the Eurypontid dynasty, makes no appearance in the film. The Gerousia, the Spartan council, is shown as apparently running Sparta, when in reality it was more of a legislative steering committee and law court. The actual running of Sparta was in the hands of the ephors, officials elected by a popular assembly. In 300, however, the ephors are not the leaders of Sparta but rather hideously deformed or diseased “priests of the old gods” who stymie Leonidas in his efforts to get Sparta to declare war.

Ok, I get that action films traditionally don’t provide nuanced depictions of ancient political systems, and some simplification of what was a complex system is understandable, but turning the city’s elected government officials into creepy priests suffering from terminal acne is just weird.

Spartan Women

Spartan women occupied a place of considerable prominence in Spartan society. Because men did not live at home, even after marriage, until they were 30, Spartan households wear largely run by the wives and mothers, who possessed considerably greater legal rights than other Greek women did, and were allowed to own and control their own property. Whereas most Greek women were expected to remain at home, Spartan women seem to have been considerably more visible. Because they had so much influence over property and households, they apparently exercised some degree of political influence within Sparta, a truly remarkable arrangement in a Greek world that generally saw public society as the province of men. They were expected to be physically active and engage in vigorous dancing and calisthenics so that they would bear healthy children.

But you wouldn’t know any of that from the film. Leonidas’ queen, Gorgo (Lena Headey), is the only woman in the whole film with an actual speaking role, and the impression the film gives is of an essentially male-dominated and male-populated society, when in reality, Sparta was the least male-dominated of all Greek communities. The near-complete marginalization of women is not so much a reflection of historical Sparta as it is a reflection of modern male-dominated action film conventions, in which women exist primarily to be love interests or kidnap victims in need of rescue. The film does, I suppose, deserve some props for giving Gorgo something to do that doesn’t involve being rescued, but her entire story arc is one of failure; her scenes could be deleted entirely without having a dramatic impact on the overall plot of the film.

Lena Headey as Gorgo

And Gorgo’s story-line contains one of the most egregious inaccuracies in the film. After the Spartans depart, Gorgo works unsuccessfully to persuade the Gerousia to send reinforcements to Leonidas. The villainous Theron coerces her into having sex with him as the price of his agreement to support her efforts. However, when the Gerousia meets, Theron seeks to discredit her by accusing her of adultery. In the actual Sparta, this would have been absurd. Spartan society required women to give birth to as many children as possible, so as to maintain the number of Spartan soldiers. Xenophon tells us that Spartan men routinely shared wives under a variety of circumstances, such as when an older man shared his wife with a younger man, for the purposes of keeping the wife pregnant. Men away from Sparta for a prolonged period were expected to arrange a lover for their wives. In other words, far from being shamed for committing adultery, Gorgo would have been expected to take a lover while Leonidas was out of town.

Sparta and Homosexuality

The movie also omits another element of Spartan society, named the important role that homosexuality played in it. Spartan boys were, like other Greek boys, expected to form homosexual relationships with older men, and Xenophon says that Spartan soldiers took male lovers, although they disliked the practice of some communities, such as Thebes, who structured their elite military around pairs of lovers. For Greeks, encouraging sexual relationships between soldiers meant that they would fight harder to impress and protect their lovers.

But Zack Snyder probably figured that featuring a band of macho beefcake warriors groping each other during breaks in the fighting would not play so well to the fan-boys and teenagers his film was aimed at, so instead he overlooks that and offers instead mostly chaste and presumably heterosexual men. Leonidas is clearly straight; he gets some gentle pillow-talk with Gorgo and thinks of her body when he contemplates submitting to Xerxes (who clearly got his freak on a long time ago and never looked back). He also derides the Athenians as ‘boy-lovers’, conveniently forgetting that most of his soldiers would have fallen into that same category.

Dilios and Aristodemus

Another way that the film substantially betrays the Spartan spirit is in its treatment of Dilios (David Wenham), who loses an eye fighting and is sent back to Sparta before the final battle. He is the only survivor (of a battle famous precisely for its lack of survivors) and the narrator of the film. In the film’s terms, his dismissal from the army enables him to convey Leonidas’ love to Gorgo and, a year later, to lead an enormous army of Greeks to victory over the Persians at the battle of Plataea.

But this ignores the fact that Spartan society considered leaving a battle or surviving in defeat a sign of total cowardice and moral worthlessness. The poetry of Tyrtaeus of Sparta dwells at length on the importance of dying in battle, going so far as to describe it as “beautiful” (such, at least, is one way to translate the Greek agathos); a man who flees battle will suffer social humiliation and poverty and be forgotten after death. Plutarch reports famous anecdotes in which Spartan mothers reject sons who survive battles in which Sparta is defeated; in several cases the mothers go so far as to kill cowardly sons. According to him, Spartan mothers tell their departing sons to return with their shields (that is, victorious) or on them (that is, being carried on the shield as a stretcher); returning without the shield is a sign that the man threw away his shield so he could flee faster.

Instead of being given command so as to avenge the Spartan dead, Dilios would have been ridiculed, and his own mother would have tried to kill him. And the movie knows about this; Gorgo tells Leonidas to return with his shield or on it. So once again, the movie makes a show of saying one thing and then doing something very different when following the rules would disrupt the story.

In fact, Dilios was a real person. His actual name was Aristodemus, and he and another man, Eurytus, suffered eye problems at Thermopylae (Herodotus calls it a disease of the eye, but perhaps he means a wound). Leonidas ordered them to return home, but Eurytus refused and fought even though blind. Aristodemus, however, obeyed Leonidas; as a result, Herodotus tells us he was branded a coward, and men refused to speak to him or give him a light for his fire. A third Spartan, Pantites, also survived because he had been sent somewhere as a messenger and failed to get back to Thermopylae in time. He hanged himself.

However, these details don’t fit with modern notions of how soldiers behave. Perhaps humiliating a wounded veteran is too much like what happened to some Vietnam veterans. So the movie simply ignores this element of Spartan society.

The cinematic Spartans are fighting for “freedom”, and the Spartans are consistently presented as making free choices to fight, in contrast to the Persian soldiers, who in some scenes are shown being forced to fight. So the movie offers a contrast between the freedom-loving Spartans and the essentially enslaved Persians. This may well have been how contemporary Greeks viewed the conflict, so on that level, the film may have gotten something right.

But the film grossly oversimplifies this dichotomy by ignoring other major features of Spartan society. Like all Greeks, the Spartans owned slaves, and thought nothing wrong with it. Also, uniquely among Greeks, the Spartans had also virtually enslaved their immediate neighbors, forcibly reducing them to the level of helots (roughly, serfs). Every Spartan citizen (such as all the Spartan warriors in the film) was assigned the labor of a set number of helots, who were expected to do things like farm work so that the Spartans could devote themselves full-time to military matters. So while the Spartans might have been fighting for some notion of freedom, it wasn’t freedom in the sense of equality of choice, so much as it was freedom of Spartan citizens to own slaves and control helots. And once again, we can see the film rightly recognizing that modern audiences would be uncomfortable with such details and instead substituting ideas that are more in line with what their audience is likely to think appropriate.

(Also, and here I confess I’m going out on a limb, I don’t think Sparta had a bottomless pit in the center of town into which they could conveniently throw people. But perhaps I’m wrong about that.)

So instead of giving us an accurate historical treatment, the film chooses to project modern values back onto the past, asserting that past peoples are just like us, only they look better in jockstraps.

Want to Know More?

300is available in multiple formats on Amazon.

Paul Cartledge is arguably the world’s foremost authority on Sparta, and has written a number of important works on it. His Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300-362 BCis probably the best look at Spartan history (down to the late Classical period) generally available. It combines archaeological evidence with the sparse literary sources.

The best work on Spartan women is Sarah Pomeroy’s aptly-named Spartan Women, which examines everything the sources can tell us about Sparta’s treatment of women and families, which was vastly different from women elsewhere in ancient Greece.

Correction: In a previous version of this post, I mis-spelled Lena Headey’s last name. I regret the error.

300: The First Movie Named after the Number of Historical Errors in It

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300, Ancient Greece, Freedom!, Gerard Butler, Leonidas, Military Stuff, Movies I Hate, Spartans, Thermopylae

My goal with this blog is to explore the relationship between film and history, to look at film the way a historian does and not the way a member of the general audience or a fan does. In doing so, I hope to illuminate some of the concerns historians have about the way that cinema, one of the most important art forms of our society produces, treats the human past. Whenever I get into a discussion about a historical film with someone, perhaps one of my students, a friend, or a casual acquaintance, usually the first question I get asked is “is the film historically accurate?” I have a lot of thoughts about the issue of historically accurate films, but I’ll leave most of them for another day. Instead, since this is the first question I’m usually asked, I’m going to start this blog by picking a film and just asking, does the film get the basic facts right?

The film I’m going to tackle is 300 (2006, dir. Zack Snyder). First off, let me say that I hated this film with a passion. I thought it was badly written, badly directed, badly acted, and just generally badly done. I loathed the voice-over narration with a passion and kept waiting for the narrator to get killed, only to be deeply disappointed to learn that he was the only one of the 300 to survive. But just because I hate this movie doesn’t mean there might not be some merit in it. And yes, before you ask, I do know that the movie is based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel. But my purpose is to evaluate the movie as history, not as an adaption of a literary work.  While the movie owes a great deal to its source material, it must rise or fall on its own merits. And m. any of those who have seen the movie have not read the graphic novel. Because of this, they will tend to assume that the movie is based directed on the historical event.

The Historical Battle of Thermopylae Let’s start with a brief recap of the known facts about the battle of Thermopylae. In 480, during the 3^rd Persian War, the Persians under the direction of King Xerxes invaded Greece. To avoid a repeat of earlier Persian mistakes in the 1^st and 2^nd Persian Wars, Xerxes sent an army overland through Thrace and Macedon into Thessaly, while sending a fleet to follow along the coastline. Xerxes’ army may have numbered between 300,00 and 500,000 soldiers (although many modern historians put the number rather lower), and given the poor farmland of much of Greece, the fleet played a vital role of carrying provisions for the army.

At Thermopylae, a force of 5-7,000 men drawn from various Greek communities encountered Xerxes’ army. Under the leadership of the Spartan king Leonidas, who reportedly had heard a prophecy that either he would die or Sparta would be conquered, the Greeks took up a position between the shore of the Gulf of Malia and a high cliff, a spot known as Thermopylae, “the Hot Gates”, due to some hot springs in the area.

Classical Greeks fought in a formation known as a phalanx, in which the soldiers were, by the standards of the day, heavily armored. In particular each man carried a large heavy shield that covered the left half of his body and the right half of the man to his left. This necessitated a very tight formation, because if the men allowed any space between themselves, they would find the right half of their body vulnerable. These hoplite warriors were armed with a long spear that gave them considerable reach.  While extremely effective, the hoplite phalanx was vulnerable to attack from behind, because it could not quickly re-orient itself. (But see Update.)

In contrast, the Persian troops typically used lighter shields and shorter spears. Because of the mis-match between the Greek and Persian troops, the Persians were unable to make serious headway and suffered significant casualties, because the geographical factors effectively neutralized the enormous Persian advantage of numbers.

For the first two days, the Greeks effectively held off the Spartans, but on the second day, the Persians received a report from a local man named Ephialtes that there was a mountain path around the cliffs. Ephialtes was reportedly motivated by a desire for a reward, although in subsequent years, his name became synonymous with traitors. With Ephialtes’ assistance, Persian forces made their way around Thermopylae on the third day, overcoming the Phocian troops who guarded that route.

Leonidas received advance warning of this and ordered the non-Spartan troops with withdraw. He seems to have decided that the Spartans would act as a rearguard to allow the other troops time to retreat in safety. However, not all the Greek troops chose to depart. At the end, Leonidas’ forces numbered about 300 Spartan elite troops, between 7-900 other Spartan troops, 400 Thebans, and 400 Thespians. In the battle that followed, Leonidas was killed by arrows, and the Greek troops defended his body, eventually withdrawing to a nearby hill. The Theban troops chose to surrender, while the rest of the Greeks were slaughtered, because now they were being attacked from both sides.

Xerxes’ march down into Greece continued. Athens was sacked, but the Athenian admiral Themistocles was able to lure the Persian navy into an ambush and destroyed much of it. Having lost the ability to resupply his troops, and fearing that the Greeks would blockade the Hellespont and thereby trap his army, Xerxes chose to retreat back toward Thrace. Much of his army died on the way, due to starvation and illness, and the next year, a coalition of Greek forces defeated the last of the Persian army at the battle of Plataea, and a Greek naval force destroyed the remnants of Xerxes’ navy, thus ending Persian efforts to conquer Greece.

Thermopylae in 300 Ok, if you’ve stayed with me so far (I know, historical explanations can get a little long-winded, but the background is necessary to explain what the movie gets wrong), then you may have noticed that the summary I’ve just offered doesn’t really match with the movie on a few points, like the fact that the Spartans weren’t the only Greeks fighting at Thermopylae. Presumably depicting close to 2,000 Greeks defying the Persians is less dramatic than 300 Spartans doing so. (And it would render the movie title a little inappropriate.) But in some ways that’s a small sin (unless you’re a Theban or a Thespian, I suppose); it allows the action to focus on the Spartans who are the center of the story without distracting the viewer with little things like all the other people who contributed to the battle. And the movie does have a line acknowledging the Phocian defeat and a brief scene with the other Greeks leaving, although it treats them more as cowards than as engaging in a strategic withdrawal.

I can overlook the exclusive focus on the Spartans during the fight scenes. What I can’t overlook is the fact that the movie’s depiction of warfare doesn’t make sense on its own terms. Part way through the film, Leonidas (Gerard Butler) encounters Ephialtes (who in a bit of creative liberty is a horribly deformed Spartan). Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan) wants to fight with his brother Spartans, but Leonidas explains to him that his deformities mean that he cannot fight in a phalanx; he cannot hold his shield up the way hoplite warfare requires. “We fight as a single, impenetrable unit; that is the source of our strength.” So the movie emphasizes the historical fact of the hoplite system as the basis of the warfare it will supposedly show us. This is a crucial scene, because Leonidas’ rejection of Ephialtes provides the motive for Ephialtes to show the Persians the way around Thermopylae. However, when the movie actually gets to the fighting, something different happens.

The first fight begins with something resembling a hoplite phalanx, but partway through, the Spartans abandon their phalanx formation and begin to fight as individuals with what appear to be yards of space between the individual soldiers. They briefly reform into a phalanx to push some Persian soldiers off a cliff, but after that, it’s essentially solo fights for the rest of the film. In other words, having told us that hoplite warfare is critical what the Spartans do, the film almost immediately abandons hoplite warfare for a series of showy solo fights, because apparently that’s more macho than having unit cohesion. And Lord knows fan-boys like pretending they’re macho.

Also, as a side note, ignoring the phalanx means that Leonidas has been a complete dick to Ephialtes. He’s lied to the man about how Spartans fight for no apparent reason. Serves him right that Ephialtes betrays him. Having a glaring contradiction at the heart of the movie is bad enough, but it’s actually much worse than it looks. Remember that the reason the Spartans couldn’t hold off the Persians when they attacked from the rear is that a phalanx can’t defend its rear because it can’t re-orient itself quickly. So once the Persians got behind the Spartan position, the historical Leonidas realized that the cause was lost.

But these cinematic Spartans don’t need to fight in a phalanx because they’re super-warriors who are essentially immune to harm. So there’s no logical reason why they can’t just keep fighting when they get encircled. But once the Persians encircle them, apparently Xerxes finds the Magic Spartan Off Switch and the Spartans just become incapable of resisting any longer, considerately abandoning all pretense at tactics so the Persians can decapitate them. Instead of valiantly fighting to delay the Persians, Leonidas intentionally gets his men slaughtered for nothing more than a literal long-shot chance at killing Xerxes. He’s not a great leader; he’s an idiot who gets his men killed for nothing.

Also, the hoplite weapon system relied on spears as the primary weapon. Swords were generally resorted to only after spears broke. Spartans were, however, well-known for using swords as the battle wore on. In the movie however, the Spartans mostly fight with their swords, which I suppose makes more sense if they’re fighting out of formation, but it’s still essentially wrong. The film’s fight choreographers chose to base their depiction of the Spartan fighting style on eskrima, a Filipino martial arts style, which might look cool on-screen, but is utterly inappropriate historically.

I can forgive a lot of small historical errors, but being internally inconsistent is another things completely. A movie that can’t make sense on its own terms and follow its own rules is a bad movie. Having departed significantly from the historical facts of the battle, 300 resorts to making up its own battle, and in the process produces a battle that looks cool but is completely incoherent and irrational, even by its own rules. This isn’t the historical battle of Thermopylae; it’s an incoherent fantasy fight cloaked in a thin veneer of historical detail.

Update 5/5/14

Last week, I had a chance to hear part of a lecture by a scholar who knows a great deal more about classical Greek warfare than I do. According to him, there is evidence that a hoplite phalanx could reverse its facing fairly quickly. It was a difficult maneuver to pull off, since it required the rear ranks of the phalanx to essentially march through the forward ranks and turn about. The Spartans were the only Greeks who were particularly adept at it, because it required more practice than most city-states gave their citizen armies. However, at Thermopylae, this still wouldn’t have helped very much, since the Persians were able to attack from both sides of the phalanx, which could not easily have fought facing in both directions.

He also dropped a few other interesting tidbits. Evidently, there is debate about whether phalanxes fought with their spears over-handed or underhanded. Greek art, such as painting on pottery, is fairly consistent about showing hoplites using spears overhanded, but experiments with reconstructing hoplite warfare have tended to suggest that fighting underhanded, with the spear about hip level, makes more sense ergonomically. If that’s true, then the question becomes why the paintings are all wrong. There is also a discussion of whether hoplites may occasionally have fought with more space between them; it makes it easier to drag those who have fallen back to safety and makes it easier to use a sword after the spears are broken.

Want to Learn More?

300is available in multiple formats through Amazon.

Our best source for the Persian Wars 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.

Philip Souza’s book on the The Greek and Persian Wars 499-386 BCis a good introduction to the subject.