The meaning of 300: in the hands of filmmakers, the legendary Spartan stand at Thermopylae becomes pro-war political propaganda in the new film 300.

In a blood-spattered, gore-filled, nudity-laced, and unnecessarily eroticized grotesquerie, the Spartans as envisioned by master illustrator Frank Miller have now leapt onto movie screens around the country in the form of the film 300, the cinematic version of Miller's graphical novel of the same name. The movie tells the story of the epic Spartan defiance of the colossal Persian army at the "hot gates" of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., a battle of unparalleled heroism on the part of the Greek defenders, led by the Spartans, and one which has never ceased to resonate within subsequent Western culture.

Though long pregnant with meaning for all of Western civilization--Thermopylae was "the battle that changed the world" in the words of the subtitle to Greek scholar Paul Cartledge's recent book on the battle --never in American history have the epoch-making events at Thermopylae weighed so heavily as they do today. For Americans, with troops on the ground in the heart of the ancient Persian Empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with speculation that the war will spill over into the Persian homeland of Iran, history seems finally, in some way, to have come full circle after almost 2,500 years. Instead of Sparta, now it is America that faces the threat from Persia. In its retelling of the story of Thermopylae, 300 embraces the mythos of the battle rather than the historical truth of the era, and in doing so becomes an elaborate bit of present-day pro-war propaganda.

A Little History

300 makes the point, as well it should, that the Greeks faced overwhelming odds in defying the Persians. "The thousand nations of the Persian Empire descend upon you," one of the Persians warns the Spartans. That statement about the magnitude of Persian power points to a larger question that was left unanswered by the movie: why did the Persians, masters of the largest empire the world had yet known, care about distant and tiny Greece? Simply put, the Greeks had meddled in Persian affairs in Anatolia, prompting Darius, the emperor at the time, to send a punitive expedition against them that was bloodily repulsed by the Athenians at the famous Battle of Marathon (see page 34).

Darius died before he could organize a larger Persian response to Marathon. That fell to Xerxes, his son and successor to the throne, who spent four years accumulating the world's largest army and building a similarly potent navy with which to bring Greece, and the Athenians in particular, to heel. *

It is obvious why the Athenians fought the Persian invader. After all, Athens was the primary target of Persian ire and the primary object of the campaign. But what brought the Spartans to the battle? Athenian diplomacy had something to do with bringing the Spartans into the conflict, but almost certainly the Spartans could see for themselves the threat posed by the Persian horde once it had secured Attica. Once Athens fell, Lacedaemon, the Spartan homeland, would be next. The Spartans would have to fight, or they would lose their country's independence.

300 proposes another motivation for the Spartans. According to the film, the Spartans were fighting for individual freedom. Early on Leonidas (played by Gerard Butler) is seen worrying over his duty as king. How, exactly, should he face the threat to Greece posed by the overwhelming military superiority of the mighty Persian Empire? "What must a king do to save his world," a despondent Leonidas asks of his wife, the beautiful Gorgo played by British actress Lena Headley. She responds with the certain and poise that was supposedly characteristic of all Spartan women. "Instead," she says gravely, "ask yourself, what should a free man do? Its an incongruous moment given that the film's narrator had spent much of the beginning of the movie detailing the many ways in which, in Sparta, no one was free.

The Total State

The Spartans, in fact, were themselves conquerors. When they arrived on the banks of the Eurotas River around 1100 B .C. they subjugated the Achaeans already living there, though this subjugation was mild at first. But then came the "reforms" attributed to the great and probably mythical lawmaker Lycurgus. The subjugated peoples were divided into the perioeci and the helots. The former were allowed to own poor plots of land while the latter were fully enslaved. Not even the Spartan citizens were free. They were held in thrall by a state that practiced an early form of eugenics, that removed children from families at a young age to rear them in the ancient Spartan equivalent of military training academies, and that initiated many other tyrannies. Its practices made Sparta a pariah. "Sparta," said the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, "was abominably hated."

The degree of control the state exercised over the individual in ancient Sparta would be the envy of any modern dictator. "The child," said Burckhardt,

   was to belong to the caste rather than
   to a particular couple. The communal
   education ... began early and accompanied
   the Spartiate throughout his
   whole life. Each age level controlled
   and watched over the next one below
   it; at no time were the people without
   anyone ruling over them. Exercising
   and hardening their bodies, engaging
   in calisthenics and athletic contests,
   and stealing crops filled the period of
   youth. It would scarcely be possible
   not to see that all this was deliberately
   brutalizing. Before the altar of
   Artemis Orthia, a divinity inspiring
   madness and murder ... bloody floggings
   were carried out, an exception
   in all Greece and a veritable school
   in ferocity.

That ferocity paid dividends in the form of the crypteia, a practice in which Spartan youths were turned loose on the unfortunate helots at night, going out and killing as many as was necessary to keep their population under control. It was therefore not surprising that Sparta was a pariah state in the eyes of many ancient Greeks. "It was not hard to keep foreigners away," Burckhardt noted, "none went there unless forced to, and then left as soon as they could."

Propaganda

At Thermopylae, then, the Spartans were fighting for independence, but they were not fighting for freedom. So why the insistence in 300 that freedom was the motivation? One answer could be that in embracing the Spartan mythos of Thermopylae, the film serves to buttress the American mythos that our present-day warriors are likewise fighting for freedom in Iraq. Nowhere does this seem more evident in the film than when Gorgo addresses the Gerousia, the Spartan Senate. Her husband and the 300 fighting with him are fighting for your freedom, she tells the gathered assembly. It's only right, she demands, that the rest of the Spartan army should be sent immediately to help in the battle. It is impossible to watch her impassioned plea in the movie without thinking that it could have been delivered with equal fervor to the U.S. Senate on behalf of the Bush administration's plan for a troop "surge" in Iraq.

With this in mind, there is really only one reason to see 300, and that is to commemorate the stand made by Leonidas and the Spartans at Thermopylae. The movie gets many things wrong--not the least of which is that Xerxes thought himself a god. The movie's message is dubious, and it is definitely not a family-friendly film. But it does properly depict the courage of the 300 Spartans--and their heroism is worth remembering.

* For more on the Persian Empire and the war with Greece, see "When Iran Conquered the World" at: http://www.jbs.org/node/1768.