Depicting real events in a motion picture is always a rather sticky wicket. Actual historical truth can be compelling to learn about and read about, but sometimes the way events shake out in real life don’t really gel into a coherent story that can be easily filmed and edited into 2 hours of entertainment. Sometimes, albeit rarely, they do, as with In Cold Blood (1967), and all the filmmaker must do is depict events as they happened. Sometimes the events themselves are compelling but a filmmaker might need to use their storytelling skills in order to properly pace the beats onscreen to render it a compelling film rather than a dry documentary, as with Spotlight (2015). Sometimes the events and emotional beats are compelling, but in order to turn them into entertainment a filmmaker needs to massage some facts, for example turning months of dry written correspondence into a single more eloquent and lively in-person discussion, as with The Social Network (2010). Sometimes accuracy is in no way the goal of the film, and it wears its fictional bonafides on its sleeve, as in Gladiator (2000). 1 Sometimes though the events of reality and the events of a film are tied together just enough to make it feel true, but also have so many distortions, omissions, and out-and-out lies that a viewer can come out of it and reach patently incorrect assumptions about the past and what kinds of lessons it has for the present, and folks 300 is that film.
300 is the story of the battle of Thermopylae, a crucial turning point in the Greco-Persian wars of 499 – 449 BCE. As depicted in the film, the Persian empire under the rule of Xerxes I (Rodrigo Santoro) has turned its territorial expansion efforts to the west, with the aim of conquering the city-states of the southern Balkan peninsula today known as Greece. Leonidas, the king of Sparta (Gerard Butler) refuses the demand of subjugation, preferring to fight to keep Sparta independent despite the overwhelming odds. To keep with Spartan law, he must consult the Oracle to raise Sparta’s armies to go to war, but the Oracle tells Sparta’s priests that it is against the will of the Gods that Sparta should fight. Leonidas — undeterred — takes his personal guard of 300 fighters to defend the narrow pass between the mountains and the sea at Thermopylae (referred to as “the hot gates” in the film) to stop Xerxes’s forces. Against incredible odds they succeed until they are betrayed by Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan), a Spartan who has been rejected from military service due to his physical deformities. Still, with all hope of victory lost, the Spartans fight to the last man, their sacrifice inspiring the leaders of all of Greece to band together to fight and stop the Persian horde.
In 2023 a TikTok trend of women asking the men in their lives a question seemingly revealed that an astonishing number of men think about The Roman Empire on a weekly or even daily basis. I am not one of those men. I think about the Golden Age of Athens on a weekly or even daily basis. My college education was especially focussed on the writings of ancient Greece and I’ve read extensively in both primary and secondary sources about the time period and the people, places, and events that shaped it. I’m the kind of person who not only knows who Alcibiades is, I am the kind of person who has takes on his legacy that extend to the modern world, and makes it a point to pronounce the “c” in his name with a hard “k” sound as it would have been pronounced 2400 years ago.
Naturally, I have feelings about art depicting this time period. The vast majority of the time I know that my “uh well actually…” statements while watching, say, Jason and the Argonauts (1963) are at best fun facts irrelevant to the enjoyment of the art in question and at worst detrimental nerd shit. I’m fully aware of the fact that at some point during the runtime of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey when it’s released in the next couple years someone will use the word “blue” and I’ll point out “did you know that the word ‘blue’ never appears in the Homeric lexicon, likely because dye makers hadn’t figured out how to replicate that color yet?” and someone will give me a swirly and I will rightfully deserve it. My gripes with 300 are not this, though. My gripes with 300 are that it explicitly takes the wrong lesson from the story of Leonidas’s defense of the Thermopylae and explicitly valorizes things that didn’t happen. It’s exactly the kind of ahistorical take that valorizes a certain kind of “great man” of the classical period who never actually existed to prop up a militaristic, nationalistic, and fascistic take on the present.
Our first depiction of adult Spartan men shows all of them wearing beards, a red cloak, a pair of speedo style shorts, and nothing else. All of them are ripped to hell with perfect abs and zero body fat or body hair. 300 was an early work of director Zack Snyder, and is an adaptation of the graphic novel 300 by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. Snyder appears to be using the same playbook he would use when adapting Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons a couple years later: use the comic panels as storyboards and change as little as possible in its visual language or framing. It’s an understandable approach, if a bit uncreative, especially when one considers how much success Robert Rodriguez had adapting the exact visual language of Miller’s Sin City in his 2005 film adaptation. What works about the Sin City film is how purposefully artificial it looks, how hard the shadows are, and how purposefully offputting the sparse use of color is. When applied to the Spartans of 300 however, the identical outfits and CGI-applied abs don’t suggest the rugged and violent comic come to life but rather an “ancient warrior” skin applied to the aesthetic of gay erotic artist Tom Of Finland.
I wish to be crystal clear here: I am not criticizing Snyder in a “lol u gay” way. I love Tom of Finland. It’s just that Tom of Finland is kinda goofy and incredibly gay. If Snyder were leaning into this in a campy way I would be hooting and hollering and awarding it all the stars I have to offer. What he is instead doing is undercutting how goofy and gay everything looks by having its characters constantly express how deadly serious and super heterosexual it is, making the whole thing just feel stupid. Then again fascism feels stupid if you’re not a part of the fascist club.
After a brief intro describing Spartan childhood more or less as it’s depicted in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, the first seeds of the conflict between Persia and Sparta are shown as a Persian envoy comes to seek an audience with Leonidas and demand his kingdom’s fealty to Xerxes. The messenger is played by Peter Mensah who is one of the very few Black actors in the film, and every Black actor plays a Persian. There absolutely were Persians of Peter Mensah’s complexion in 480 BCE, and there are today, but it’s tough to see the first Black character in the film riding in as a menacing Persian as anything but an attempt to portray him as a menacing “other”. Also interestingly Snyder opted to depict the messenger as beardless, despite the fact that both the graphic novel and virtually all surviving art of the Achaemenid empire depicts Persians of his stature as wearing beards. Snyder instead seems to want to portray Persian leadership as hairless and with a startling array of facial piercings, and once again it’s tough not to read this as a statement about the kinds of people Snyder is deeming unworthy of trust or respect.
If you know one thing about 300, it’s that Leonidas kicks this messenger into a pit while screaming “This is Sparta!” It was in every bit of promotional material and got memed to death on an internet that was freshly discovering what memes were. It is also the moment where my historical-accuracy sense went from a slight tingle to a 5 alarm klaxon.
Across the entire Eastern Mediterranean and in Western Asia in the classical period there was an important cultural notion of the guest-host relationship. It was considered unthinkable in this region at this time to refuse hospitality to anyone coming from a far away land, much less an envoy of a ruler, and much much less to kill him for delivering a message and committing no crime. This conduct of guest-host hospitality was prevalent throughout the region, as can be seen by its codification in the Torah2 and reiterated in the New Testament.3 Likewise in ancient Greece, this was not merely considered a cultural obligation but a religious one. It was a belief that the Gods would regularly appear in human form as strangers, and to mistreat one was to potentially invite the Gods’ wrath. Zeus was regularly referred to as “Zeus Xenios” meaning “Zeus the stranger / guest / foreigner” to remind adherents of Olympian religious traditions that strangers were always to be met with hospitality lest you end up turning away Zeus himself. It would be understood to any Greek that to not feed, clothe, and house the envoy of Xerxes would be blasphemous, and to kill him within moments of his arrival would be unthinkably monstrous. In this 300 does not merely get a piddly detail wrong, it grossly misunderstands its subject material on a level not unlike having an Orthodox Jewish character work on shabbos and eat a BLT on his lunch break.
After killing the Persian messenger, Leonidas and his personal guard depart Sparta for the Thermopylae, a narrow pass between the cliffs and the sea on the Aegean coast that Xerxes’s armies would need to march through to make it to Sparta. While it’s true that if Xerxes is exclusively marching along the Aegean coast and had no naval power to speak of that he would need to pass the Thermopylae to get to Sparta, it only takes glancing at a map to realize that if Sparta stands alone against Xerxes that Thermopylae is a terrible place to defend the city from.
If Sparta stands alone, why wouldn’t they defend themselves at the Corinthian isthmus that separates mainland Greece from the Peloponnesian Peninsula? Or any other number of places closer to Sparta itself? If Persia has a navy (which 300 does depict) why does Sparta not fear a naval invasion from literally anywhere along the massive Peloponnesian coastline? Even with superior terrain and a magically superpowered Spartan fighting force, why would Leonidas even remotely think a victory of 300 soldiers against tens of thousands of Persians would be possible? The answer is simple, it didn’t remotely go down like this.
While the primary sources for the timeline and activities of the Greco Persian wars are… medium accurate at best, they still paint a vastly different picture of the importance of the battle of Thermopylae. Instead of depicting a small contingent of Spartans artificially crippled from sending their entire armies due to religious superstitions and standing alone among the dozens of Greek city-states with its tiny 300 man army, Sparta at this point in the wars was part of an organized defensive league called The Hellenic League. The Hellenic League was dozens of years old by this point when were freshly called to action by a new invasion by Xerxes.
Sparta was only able to amass 300 men from Leonidas’s personal guard for logistical reasons. The point where forces needed to be raised to fight at Thermopylae coincided with the Carneian festival, one of the more important holidays in the Spartan calendar. Imagine in an era prior to telephones, telegraphs, or even an organized postal service attempting to raise an army in a matter of days in New Orleans at the height of Mardi Gras season and you’ll start to get the idea. Leonidas’s personal guard was set to head the expedition due to his strength as a commander, but he was also joined by thousands of soldiers from across Greece. Crucially, when all hope was lost of winning the battle, Leonidas and his guard stayed behind not out of some sense of honor or duty, but because having them hold the line while the remainder of the forces retreated allowed for time for the residents of Athens to evacuate ahead of the inevitable Persian sacking of the city.
Athens was a crucial military ally of Sparta and the entire Hellenic League at this point, primarily because of the fact that they had a very powerful naval force that was currently out sailing the Aegean to prevent a Persian invasion by sea. The story of Thermopylae is one of Sparta sacrificing its king and his personal guard to save not Sparta itself, but its ally. It is an act of heroic selflessness and friendship. In laying down his life Leonidas was prepared to die to save those who were out sailing the seas and fighting and dying to protect his own people. The story of a Sparta that is isolated and unique and exceptional whose king sacrificed himself for the sake of honor is ahistorical to the point of farce.
There’s of course more wicked elements to this movie. The character designs are about as subtle as a Spartan spear to the forehead. Beyond the beefcake Spartans, there are the elite Persian “Immortal” soldiers, who are presented with steel masks they fight behind. When these masks are removed, we see that their faces reveal a monstrous visage, not unlike a Tolkien style orc or goblin, literally dehumanizing the enemy as the plot moves along.
Ephialtes —the man who is blamed by Herodotus for alerting Xerxes of the existence of a back pathway that allowed the Persians to outflank the Spartans and turn the tide of the battle— is not portrayed as a local Malian looking to make a quick buck as Herodotus describes him, but as a Spartan exile with severe scoliosis who was rejected by Spartan society for his disability. Xerxes himself is not depicted with the regal bearing and long beard as he is depicted in surviving Achaemenid sculpture, but as a sinewy hairless man full of mismatched jewelry and piercings with painted-on eyebrows. He’s also digitally color-corrected to be a good deal more bronze in color than actor Rodrigo Santoro is in person. In short, the sublime and powerful Spartans fight the evil and literally monstrous horde led by the evil wily gay man in brownface until a horrible deformed man stabs them in the back. It’s gross.
The movie isn’t all wretched, I will admit. There are a handful of fun moments of battle and ultraviolence and a few images where the supremely stoic imagery manages to cross over into campy glee, but they are few and far between. The single historical aspect Miller and Snyder manage to retain to the movie’s advantage is the Spartan dry sense of humor. When at one point they are told that the Persians have so many archers that their volleys will block out the sun, a Spartan replies “very well, it will be nice to fight in the shade” which is ripped directly from the history books.4 But these moments of actual enjoyment were few and far between.
Beyond its wicked and ahistorical messaging the film is broadly just dull. To better match the static images of the comic many of the fight scenes rely on slow-motion so that the camera can linger on a perfectly framed moment of stabbing or slicing or throwing-of-dudes-off-cliffs, and it gets so old so fast. Some of the hoplite warfare is depicted accurately as a giant wall of shields pressing against each other at the front of the line, but the sad reality is that actual historically accurate hoplite warfare is kind of dull to watch. To better recreate the feel of the comic much of the backgrounds have been added in via CGI, but again where this worked in Sin City —a movie that takes place largely indoors and with hyper-stylized and purposefully unrealistic backgrounds— it just makes 300 look like they were too cheap to go find a location to shoot at. Lastly, I'm fully aware of the fact that Snyder is purposefully trying to mimic the look of Miller’s comic, but in doing so he renders everything in dull monochrome. The landscape is a uniform dingy brown, and the sky and seas are a dull matte grey, which is goddamn insane because this movie takes place in Greece: a place so awash in lush verdant landscapes and clear skies reflected in the stunning Aegean sea that 30 million people travel there yearly on vacation.
There’s a take that has some validity that what we now know as “Greece” started at this time period. Greece prior to the Persian Wars was a group of independent city-states who were often at war with each other who happened to share a linguistic and religious commonality. The take is that during the Persian Wars they began to think of each other as a single common people. The story of Frank Miller’s and Zach Snyder’s 300 isn’t that story. They are uninterested in cooperation or unity or collaboration. Their story is that only a certain kind of real manly men can save the world from an invasion of inhuman hordes led by a fabulous looking queer-coded emperor from the middle-east. These men are cruel and hard but it’s implied that cruelty is necessary for strength, and that being caring will make you weak. There is no room for virtue that isn’t martial virtue in this story, and anyone who isn’t a soldier is a weak willed priest holding the real men back, or worse, a lily-livered politician who hides behind “the law” to sell his people out while lining his pockets. There is no room for multiple voices in a room working together, only for the strong to give orders to the weak. It’s this kind of story that justifies forever jails, police states, and fascism. It’s crucially important, now more than ever, to point out that this story is a bald faced lie.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ If you wanna see some solid Greek action, skip this trash and watch Mama Mia! (2008)
Economics: The people of the second Bush administration ate this shit up. 300 opened to #1 at the box office on March 9, 2007 ahead of Wild Hogs in its second week of release. It would go on to make $454 million at the global box office plus $276 million in home video sales against a $65 million budget. This level of success gave Zack Snyder the necessary clout to make an absolute dogshit adaptation of Watchmen a couple years later and pilot a multi-billion dollar mega franchise based on DC comics that he would ultimately fly directly into a cliff.
Next Week: The Wind That Shakes the Barley
If this is how you found out that Emperor Commodus was strangled in his bathtub and not killed in gladiatorial combat I’m very sorry. Clearly you like movies, but have you considered augmenting your information-gathering regimen with books?
Leviticus 19:33-34 reads “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
see: Matthew 25:31-40
My personal favorite example of Spartan wit comes not from this conflict but from the conquest of Greece by Philip of Macedon. Philip sent a message to Sparta declaring “If I invade Laconia you will be destroyed, never to rise again” to which the Spartans replied with a single word: “if”