Movie Monday - 300

It was suggested that I follow up last week's piece on Clash of the Titans with a bit on Frank Millers 300. Who am I to say no to that?

You should know ahead of time, though - I absolutely love this movie. Unreasonably so.

No, it isn't culturally or historically accurate. Yes, it appears to be indefensibly racist at times. No, I really don't care that much - it's spear porn. Relax.

The basic plot is dead on, that much is true. According to Herodotus, the so-called father of history, a crew of 300 Spartans marched up the coast of Greece and held off a massive horde of invading Persian & allied forces by holding a narrow stretch of coastline at Thermopylae. They were eventually betrayed by some schmuck called Ephialtes who showed the Persians a path through the cliffs. They were surrounded and killed, to a man.

It's an extremely famous story, told in a ton of different sources and I think a lot of classicists were surprised to find people taken unawares by the ending. I think it's one of the first things we read about in beginning Latin, once we've got the appropriate vocabulary for fighting in the shade and dining in hell.

I'm not kidding. Those lines were taken straight from Cicero. Here's the full quotation:

quid ille dux Leonidas dicit? 'pergite animo forti, Lacedaemonii, hodie apud inferos fortasse cenabimus.' fuit haec gens fortis, dum Lycurgi leges vigebant. e quibus unus, cum Perses hostis in conloquio dixisset glorians: 'solem prae iaculorum multitudine et sagittarum non videbitis', 'in umbra igitur' inquit 'pugnabimus.'

And what did the famous general Leonidas say? "Go bravely, Spartans! Perhaps tonight we'll dine with the dead!" They were a powerful race when the laws of Lycurgus still held sway. When some arrogant Persian said to them "You won't be able to see the sun for all of our arrows and javelins," one Spartan replied, "Then we'll fight in the shade."

-Tusculan Disputations (1.101)

That said, there are inaccuracies. Scads of them.

There are no crazy, deformed and lecherous priests of Sparta called ephors. They certainly didn't get to drool on hot, half-naked hallucinating women as they uttered prophecy. There are some high ranking Spartan officials called ephors, but the resemblance really ends with the name.

The Spartan system of training their citizens from a very young age to endure extreme weather, hunger and thirst is legendary. Obviously some liberty was taken in the film for dramatic effect, but the Spartans were universally admired for their bad-ass civic education.

Pretty much everything involving Queen Gorgo and life back in Sparta was all made up.

Also, Sparta wasn't so much of a bastion of democracy and freedom. Their society was built on the backs of an enslaved indigenous people known as helots.

Despite deriding Athens for being a bunch of "boy lovers," Sparta - like much of the Mediterranean world - was rather keen on pederasty itself.

To my knowledge, the Persians did not have a tent of disfigured people that traveled around with the army. There were also no:

• Pipe-playing goat men
• Claw-handed giants
• Ninja
• Rhinos
• Firework-wielding magicians

The Persian ruler Xerxes probably did not boast multiple facial piercings. He probably also never came face-to-face with Leonidas, let alone took a javelin to the cheek.

However, the same actor (Rodrigo Santoro) who played Xerxes:

(Wait, don't go... We can talk about it!)

Also played Karl, from Love, Actually:

(I just have something on my chin...)

So chew on that for a while.

But while you're chewing, you need to watch this. Like someone said last week, it's spear porn. Relax.