The 300 Spartans: Cold War at the Hot Gates

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Ancient Greece, Classic Hollywood, Leonidas, Spartans, The 300 Spartans, The Cold War, Themistocles, Xerxes

As I have said before, movies about the past are very often movies about the present. Screenwriters and directors often shape their stories about the past to reflect the concerns and interests of the present, either consciously or unconsciously. The 300 Spartans (1962, dir. Rudolph Maté) is a good example of this principle.

Maté made his film at the height of the Cold War. In October of that year, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world pretty much literally to the brink of nuclear war. The United States and Western Europe were deeply at odds with the Soviet Union and the states of Communist Eastern Europe, and many in the West saw the Communists as being hell-bent on conquering the West and exporting Communism around the planet. There was a sense that the Soviets possessed a nameless vast throng of troops willing to do anything for their ruthless masters.

That made the Persians an ideal stand-in for the Soviets. Xerxes (David Farrar), with his army that Herodotus claims was 2.5 million men (and which modern historians have estimated to be a more plausible 200,000) suggested the immense Soviet army. And Xerxes was launching an unprovoked invasion of Greece, exactly as Americans expected the Soviets would do to Europe.

In contrast, the Greeks are disunited at the start of the movie, with the Spartans, Athenians, Corinthians and others arguing and refusing to acknowledge the threat Xerxes poses. Leonidas (Richard Egan) and Themistocles (Ralph Richardson) are capable of seeing the situation and rising above their traditional rivalries. But back in Sparta, the ephors resist his effort to raise the Spartan army. This would seem to parallel the political debates  in Europe about following the American lead, and the debates within America about being “strong on defense”. Indeed, less than a year after the film was released, France took its initial steps at withdrawing from NATO.

The McCarthite Red Scare imagined a fifth column of Communists within the United States betraying the country, just the way that the villainous Ephialtes (Kieron Moore) betrays the Spartans by showing Xerxes how to get his troops around the Spartan position.

There is constant talk in the film about how Greece needs to unify and become one people in order to deal with the threat. Themistocles dreams of a united Greece, and Leonidas seems to think it is a reasonable idea as well. While their city-states are opposed to each other, the two men show no sign of hostility. The film assumes that the unification of Greece was an obvious, almost foregone, conclusion, if only the various city-states could see it.

Greeks debating what to do about Persia

In reality, however, unification was far from obvious to the ancient Greeks. Ancient Greek culture was built around shared cultural identity, not political unity. The topography of Greece made political unification from within almost impossible; no Greek city-state could build up a large enough territory to truly subjugate its neighbors, because travel by land was difficult and Greece was resource-poor compared to the great territorial states of the Ancient world, such as Egypt or Persia.

Instead, the Greeks found their unity in a shared language, the worship of common gods, the celebration of the Olympic Games, and other similar cultural features. It would be as if all English-speaking, Christian countries were one people, regardless of what government they had. So the idea of all Greek city-states achieving some sort of political union was simply alien to the way Greeks understood their society. The film makes little sense within an historical Greek context.

But as a coded plea to American society (or perhaps Western society more broadly) to unify against the Soviet threat, the film makes a good deal of sense. It highlights the need for the Republicans and Democrats to work together to oppose the Communist threat, and for the various Western countries to work more closely together. The epilogue describes Thermopylae as “a stirring example to free people throughout the world about what a few brave men can accomplish once they refuse to submit to tyranny.” Given that non-Communist society was frequently referred to as “the Free World” in this period, the message is obvious. We can end Communism’s threat if we just stay together. It will require bravery and sacrifice, but it will work.

The opulent Persian camp

Unlike 300, The 300 Spartans at least acknowledges that Thermopylae didn’t stop the Persians. Themistocles discusses his plans for winning the naval battle at Salamis, although the film doesn’t show Salamis at all (perhaps because of the challenges of depicting Greek naval combat with the film technology of the time).

The 300 Spartans offers a nice object lesson that historical movies are frequently coded messages about the period in which they were made. It was as much about the Soviet threat as science fiction films of the period such as Invaders from Mars were.

Want to Know More?

The 300 Spartans is available at 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.

The 300 Spartans: 300 vs 300

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Ancient Greece, Artemisia, Classic Hollywood, David Farrar, Leonidas, Richard Egan, Spartans, The 300 Spartans, Themistocles, Thermopylae, Xerxes

Most people assume that 300 (2007, dir. Zach Snyder) was the first movie made about the battle of Thermopylae. But in fact there is an earlier version of the story, The 300 Spartans (1962, dir. Rudolph Maté). Frank Miller was deeply impressed by the latter film when he saw it while growing up, so in some sense his 300 is an homage to Maté’s film. And from a standpoint of basic accuracy, it’s a better film.

Rather than going into the basic facts about Thermopylae, I’ll just direct you to my first blog post ever, where I discuss both the 3^rd Persian War and Greek hoplite warfare.

The 300 Spartans does a fairly good job of following the facts of Thermopylae as we know it. The film opens with the Persians marching into Thrace. Xerxes (David Farrar) has a chat with the exiled Spartan king Demaratus (Ivan Triesault) in which some of the dialog is draw straight out of Herodotus. In fact, the film repeatedly uses famous Spartan comments reported by the Greek historian, which right there puts it a whole level above Snyder’s work in terms of basic accuracy. And there’s a good deal more concern to depict the Persians wearing things actual Persians wore (although there are a lot of generic Hollywood belly-dancers too).

David Farrar’s Xerxes

The various Greek city-states debate what to do about the invasion. Themistocles (Ralph Richardson) and Leonidas (Richard Egan) are both forward-looking enough to realize their two states, traditionally rivals, must work together to find a solution, and they are repeatedly thwarted by small-minded men who simply don’t want to acknowledge the scale of the problem facing them. In particular, Leonidas is opposed back home in Sparta by a group of unspecified “elders”, who seem to be the ephors, a council of five elected men who shared political authority with the two Spartan kings. (Although the film generally has only a vague sense of what life in Sparta was like, it does understand that Sparta had a dual monarchy and a governing council, which again puts it a step above 300.) The ephors insist that Sparta cannot respond to the Persian invasion until the Carnea festival is over. Leonidas, however, feels that the matter cannot wait, and departs with his bodyguard of 300 men, who are not subject to the ephors’ authority on this. Again, this is loosely following Herodotus’s account, although modern scholars are a little skeptical about this.

Richard Egan as Leonidas

Where the film digresses is with the insertion of a invented Hollywood romance. Whereas in 300, the love relationship is between Leonidas and his queen, Gorgo, in this film, it’s between Gorgo’s niece, Ellas (Diane Baker) and Demaratus’ son Phyllon (Barry Coe). They want to be married, but because Demaratus has been accused of helping the Persians, Leonidas refuses to allow Phyllon to marry or fight with the other Spartans. This sets off a tedious sub-plot in which the two lovers chase after Leonidas’ army, and then stumble across an elderly couple whose lecherous son Ephialtes falls in love with Ellas, thus providing him with a motive to betray the Spartans to the Persians by showing them how to get around the pass at Thermopylae.

Meanwhile, Xerxes is consorting with Queen Artemisia (Anne Wakefield). In contrast to Eva Green’s man-hating fury, Wakefield’s Artemisia is a fairly traditional evil woman for the period. She uses her feminine wiles to get what she wants, and Xerxes’ libidinous dalliance with her is used to demonstrate that he’s a lousy ruler who ignores the good advice of his generals. But this Artemisia isn’t that important to the plot; once the fighting starts she is almost completely forgotten.

Apparently old shower curtains are the latest thing in women’s fashion at Thermopylae

One thing The 300 Spartans shares with 300 is a general disinterest in recreating actual hoplite warfare. Both the Spartans and the Persians are dressed more accurately in The 300 Spartans (for example, the Persian Immortals are correctly shown carrying wicker shields), but when it comes to combat the film either doesn’t know how to depict a hoplite phalanx in action or it simply doesn’t care. The Spartans just stand in long lines, single file, with the next line standing 30-40 feet behind them doing nothing. Instead of showing how the Spartans successfully employed the hoplite system to maximum effect for the terrain available (and chose Thermopylae because it would maximize the power of the phalanx by negating the Persian advantage of numbers), the Spartans in this film are just better fighters.

They repeatedly repulse waves of Persians who employ ludicrous tactics. In the first attack, Xerxes orders his cavalry to advance behind the concealment of his infantry. The plan is that at the last minute the cavalry will ride through the infantry, catch the Spartans by surprise and capture them all so Xerxes can publicly execute them. None of that makes much sense, and it doesn’t fool the Spartans at all. When the cavalry charges, the Spartans just fall down and let the cavalry ride over them, and then stand up and turn around to trap them between two groups of Spartans. The fact that the front row of Spartans are now standing with their backs to the Persian infantry is just ignored. Here, see for yourself:

Then Xerxes sends in chariots, which the Spartans defeat with arrows and javelins. When the Spartans use their spears, it’s mostly to throw them, and they prefer to fight with what look to be Roman short swords instead. Then the Immortals get sent in and the Spartans trick them into advancing past a flammable pile of hay which they then light on fire, trapping the Immortals. The film exhibits absolutely no idea about how phalanxes actually worked.

But there is one nice detail I have to commend, because I complain about it in other war scenes. When the Spartans are finally outflanked and surrounded at the end of the film, refusing to surrender Leonidas’ body, Xerxes does the smart thing. He doesn’t send in his infantry to fight them. He lets his archers pick them all off, because a unit of infantry in stationary formation is vulnerable to missile fire. It’s refreshing to see a movie that actually understands this.

The 300 Spartans has not aged particularly well. The acting is the usual turgid 50s style, the female characters are good for nothing except being love objects, the soundtrack is obnoxious, and the stunt-work is thoroughly unconvincing. But in terms of its ability to recount what actually happened, it’s hands down better than 300.

Want to Know More?

The 300 Spartans is available at 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.

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

Tags

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?

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.

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.

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

Tags

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.