In Triumph Of The Vile, “war nerd” Gary Brecher describes 300 as the “Hoo-ah” version of Thermopylae:
Fact: Sparta was about as romantic as North Korea. Give or take a little egalitarianism, Sparta WAS North Korea. Spartan laws did everything they could to break down the family. Sparta was more anti-nuclear family than any Hollywood liberal could ever be.Wanna know what a Spartan wedding night was really like? It’s pretty hilarious, in an insane way. As soon as a Spartan girl got her first period, they grabbed her, shaved her head, dressed her as a boy, threw her down on her new husband’s bed, and then, well, he had his way with her. What way was that? Since hubby had been in an all-male dorm since age seven, I’m betting that that night of lovin’ was more like a skinny white boy’s introduction to San Quentin after lights-out than it was like a chick flick. So when this movie shows the Spartan hero saying to his wife, “Goodbye, my love,” I just had to laugh.
No Spartan ever told his wife he loved her. That would’ve been like treason, because the Spartan rulers wanted family ties snapped, so the only bond left was to the state. They left room for folks’ natural urges by letting the women drink, which they did non-stop, and the men form what you might call close comradely bonds with their fellow soldiers.
In the ancient world, gay was a matter of who was on top. If you were a topper, that was fine; if you were the one getting in the ass, not so cool. In other words, prison rules. Sparta’s leather-bar ways were a running joke to the ancient Greeks. The Spartans were stone killers — but they also preened like teenage girls before a battle. They grew their hair long, and before a fight they’d comb it, oil it, try out fetching new styles, put little baubles in their ears, anything to die young and leave a beautiful corpse.
None of that in this movie. Just the opposite.
He notes that the true heroes of the war against Persia were the Athenians, who understood combined-arms operations involving both army and navy:
Sparta understood only one kind of fighting: land battle, the hoplite shield-wall — a Big Ten offense from the old school, “three yards and a cloud of dust.” In any shield-wall vs. shield wall battle, the bigger offensive line will break the opposing team’s wall, leaving them open to massed spear thrusts. Once the opposition’s wall was broken, the citizen-soldiers would scatter to fight another day — a totally sensible reaction, since the alternative was annihilation. In battles like that, psycho varsity offensive-line types like the ones Sparta bred did just fine. But vary the conditions of battle in any way, and they were as helpless as Woody Hayes’ Ohio State teams were against a team that could stop the run.
From the first time I saw a trailer where a Spartan (Leonidas) kicks an envoy down an apparently bottomless pit, I was bothered:
Every time someone wants to argue with the war party in this movie, he’s evil. Everybody who talks in a normal tone of voice is evil. Miller shows two scenes where the Spartans murder Persian envoys arriving under a flag of truce. And both times, you’re supposed to cheer.Since when do Americans cheer when truce parties are murdered? Well, that’s pretty easy to answer, actually: since Iraq.