Once Again, Hollywood Morphs History

In response to seeing 300 last night, Hollywood has chosen to distort history for it's own purposes, leaving the audience as ignorant as ever. Although 300 is visually impressive in places, the distortion of the Spartan society is drastic. I feel obliged to put forth this brief, and probably unwanted, history lesson. While some in the modern audience may be bothered by the exaggeration of the godlike persona adopted by the Persian God-King Xerxes, including negative racial and sexual characterizations of the fusion of eastern societies ruled by the Persians, these characterizations were at least thematically consistent with the extreme xenophobia prevalent in most of the Greek historical sources. The bigger thematic distortion actually occurred regarding the issue of slavery as a moral dynamic. The Spartan 300 are represented as the last bastion of democracy and freedom against the enslavement of Greece by the Persian hordes. While it is true that this battle was critical in preserving emerging western traditions involving democracy from being subjugated by a highly stratified Persian social structure, the Spartans only allowed the 300 to be sent because of concerns they had involving the potential revolt of their massive slave population of helots. The majority of the army remained behind to maintain control over the slave population. It was this massive slave population that allowed the Spartans to create their totalitarian society of professional soldiers (taken from their mothers by the state at the age of 7, and brutally trained for 11-12 years before entering the military). So while Spartan society did not live in opulent splendor, and upper class Spartan women had the highest level of female agency in the ancient world at this time, it was not a bastion of freedom. This battle was a conflict between two different forms of highly stratified societies. Eventually, Greek intellectual freedom would continue to develop in ways that would allow a greater degree of philosophical dissension in the western world, and Alexander the Great would spread these values throughout much of Asia when he conquered the Persian Empire. The Spartan training regimen did allow them to become the best soldiers of this period, but they would not have fought individually, or barely covered, as the movie depicts. They had an extreme armor advantage (very covered) and fought in highly organized, tightly compacted phalanxes. The Greek formations could not be penetrated by the cavalry dominated, lightly armored, and poorly equipped Persians. The 300 Spartans, at a very narrow pass (along with 8000-10000 other Greeks in reserve), held Xerxes army of probably 300,000 (Herodotus reports in the millions) long enough to galvanize Greek solidarity and expose the potential weakness of Xerxes supply lines. An army of that size needed enormous supplies by sea, which the Athenian navy, led by Themistocles, kept bottled up on a narrow strait of the sea. Even after all of this success, it only delayed Xerxes; Athens was evacuated, and Xerxes burned it to the ground. However, despite the destruction of Athens, weaknesses of the Persian army were exposed at Thermopylae. In later land and sea battles, Xerxes was defeated and chased back to Asia. Please forgive the historical digression, or I will be forced to strap you to the "wheel of pain".