THE BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAE is one of the signal symbolic events in the history of Western civilization. Athens and Jerusalem are the standard shorthands for the West’s cultural headwaters, but at Thermopylae, Sparta, that historical mystery of a superpower, played a role for which perhaps she, and only she, was suited.
The story is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge in military or classical history. Xerxes the Great of Persia set about incorporating Greece into his empire with an army Herodotus estimated at 5 million, half under arms. Leonidas of Sparta, hampered by obscure religious and political considerations, was able to take only 300 hand-picked soldiers as the spearhead of an allied force to meet the Persians at Thermopylae–“the Hot Gates,” a narrow pass where the Persian superiority in maneuver and numbers would be negated. The Spartans and their allies held off the Persians until a traitor named Ephialtes of Trachis revealed a secret path around their rear which allowed the Spartans to be encircled and defeated. When Leonidas got word of this, he released his allies, but he and his 300 men, joined by 700 brave Thespians, fought to the death, in willing submission to the Spartan law of no retreat, no surrender.
Their martial prowess, professionalism, sangfroid (see Housman’s famous line, “The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.”), and absolute sense of honor unto death, were shocking to the Persians and became more than an epic war story: Historians from Herodotus, through Plutarch, and stretching all the way to Victor Davis Hanson some 25 centuries later, have seen in this instance of a tiny force composed of free men dealing horrible destruction to a larger, slave military, the very essence of the conflict between East and West.
Greece was the only location in the classical world in which the flame of liberty burned. A Persian victory would have snuffed out the Greek concept of freedom under the law, imposing a highly centralized god-king system known to past generations as Oriental Despotism. The free Spartans, in this telling, not only fought better as free men fighting for their liberty, but their sacrifice helped preserve the notions and institutions which blossomed into the glorious civilization eventually built on Greek foundations.
FOR THE HEIRS OF THIS SACRIFICE some two millennia on, this story does not sit entirely well. The Spartans, in their way, are as alien to us as the Ancient Egyptians, and due to the fact that they considered it forbidden to transcribe any of their laws, we know considerably less about them than the charmingly literal-minded folk on the Nile, who managed to combine magical thinking and the some of the greatest feats of practical engineering the world has ever seen.
Much of what we do know about the Spartans isn’t attractive to modern eyes. Their entire society was geared toward producing and maintaining a professional, standing army, and it did so principally by killing infant boys who seemed weak and brutalizing the surviving children until they were fearless, skillful dealers of death.
Herodotus mentions almost in passing that Leonidas chose his Three Hundred from the ranks of men who already had sons. Left unmentioned is that he did so because he knew none of them would return, himself included–himself especially, given than an oracle had told him that the sacrifice of a king would be needed to preserve Sparta.
Meanwhile, Persia looks a little more reasonable. They were a well-run, tolerant empire. Cyrus had even returned the Jews from exile. What were the Greeks so determined to resist? In fact, there were plenty of Greeks who were ready to sign up with Xerxes, sending symbolic tributes of earth and water. But the democrats of Athens and the militarists of Sparta not only refused, they broke with all diplomatic custom and executed Xerxes’ messengers, tossing them into a pit and a well, respectively, with the taunts that they might find their earth and water down below.
SO WHAT were the Greeks fighting for? Power, certainly. Athens and Sparta were Great Powers of the day. (Indeed, it was the not the Three Hundred at Thermopylae but the Athenian navy at Salamis that crucially broke the momentum of the Persian invasion, before the Spartans got their revenge at Plataea.) But in the end, one gets the sense that Herodotus and Hanson are on to something. Leonidas and company might well have recognized the battle cry of Mel Gibson’s ludicrously anachronistic, semi-Pictish William Wallace: “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!”
WHICH BRINGS US to Frank Miller, the comic-book artist best known for his Sin City graphic novels, which Robert Rodriguez made into a well-received 2005 movie. In 1998, Miller penned a comic-book telling of Thermopylae, called 300, which has now also been translated onto film. On the basis of Sin City, Miller’s affinity for Thermopylae is not obvious, save for the rivers of blood. Sin City‘s world was all but devoid of the qualities one sees in the Spartans–self-sacrifice, valor, bravery, honor.
Unlike Sin City, however, 300 can be cleared of the charge of aestheticized nihilism. As his acknowledgments show, Miller was clearly influenced by Victor Davis Hanson’s Western Way of War and he puts into the mouths of the Spartans explicit assertions that they fight for their freedom under their law, even if it means death. Miller has also expressed admiration for the Rudolph Maté’s 1962 film, The 300 Spartans, which depicted Thermopylae as an adumbration of the Cold War.
Miller’s comics present an imaginative, stylized, and somewhat ahistorical version of the great battle. The Spartans are generally running around in loin cloths, heroic classical-nude action figures rather than men at arms in armor; other than Leonidas, they seem to have left their helmets’ distinctive crests home in Lacedaemon. The Persians are a bizarre cast of characters, led by a heavily-pierced, African-looking Xerxes with a predilection for self-aggrandizing mystagogy, and employing elephants in battle, à la Hannibal at Lake Trasimene.
That said, Miller’s 300 is reasonably faithful to the general outlines of history, although he omits almost the entire broader context and occasionally oversteps the bounds of credibility with his additions. Take, for example, Miller’s depiction of Ephialtes of Trachis, the traitor who betrays Greece, as a suicidal, hunchbacked, would-be hoplite rejected for service by Leonidas. Entertaining? Sure, but it sticks out a mile as an invention.
Ultimately, what made 300 work on paper was the combination of Miller’s dynamic art (brilliantly colored by Lynn Varley), which alternated between the mimetic and the abstract, and the terse–though often clunky–text which frequently used the Spartans’ own Laconic words to tell a hard story of hard men going to the hard task of dying at the hands of their enemies.
AND NOW THERE’S THE MOVIE. Taking the comic as a set of storyboards, director Zack Snyder has crafted a continuum around Miller’s still images, using some of the digital-background techniques that made Sin City so visually stunning. The film’s advance buzz was very good, with approving (caveated) comments from Hanson and other historians, and even talks of a sequel–however unlikely that might seem given that all the Spartans in 300 end up dead. (And that the Battle of Plataea, at which Greece took its vengeance on the Persian remnant, was included as a too-brief coda.) The film’s record-breaking opening weekend, however, would seem to make a sequel of some sort almost a corporate necessity.
Cinematically, the movie and its climactic battles don’t approach the standard set by the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers, arguably the greatest pre-modern (if entirely fictional) battle-narrative sequence ever put on film. Nor does it show the bloody, filthy, squalid reality of hand-to-hand warfare, as Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V did with far fewer special effects.
Nor can 300 be said to overcome comic-book movies’ usual limitations: over-reliance on superficial, if striking, imagery and insufficient attention to dialogue and characterization. Snyder overuses slow-motion and freeze-frame shots, perhaps genuflecting too reverently towards Miller’s drawings. He piles a rhinoceros Pelion atop the already unnecessary elephantine Ossa. Moreover, he adds an entire political-intrigue backstory in Sparta where, among other unlikelihoods, a villain sneeringly dismisses a line of Thomas Jefferson’s and Spartan marital mores are held out as similar to our own (they were not). This addition isn’t altogether unwelcome, as it provides a bit of counterpoint from the alternating frenzy and slo-mo of Thermopylae, and it allows Lena Headey to turn in the movie’s best performance as Queen Gorgo. Gerard Butler’s work as Leonidas is also solid, despite the thin script, with the actor’s Scottish orneriness well informing the Spartan king’s determined resistance to domination.
An unfortunate addition to the film is the literal dehumanization of the Persians. The elite Immortals look as if Mr. Roboto had been sent to ninja camp and cloned–at least until one of them gets his mask ripped off, revealing that he hails not from Persia, but from Mordor or Mos Eisley. A couple of giants are added to the Persian ranks, presumably to provide level bosses for the inevitable video game. On the other hand, Rodrigo Santoro’s performance as Xerxes adds weirdness and verve to the comic book’s character–and he has the added bonus of actually appearing somewhat Persian, unlike Miller’s quasi-Zulu original.
Nevertheless, with its digital scenery, its monstrous villains, its muscular, superheroic Spartans, and its Matrixesque high-speed camerawork, 300 is a genuine spectacle, for good and ill. It creates a lurid phantasmagoria of Thermopylae, a fascinating, bizarre hallucination which concentrates the mind on the Three Hundred’s brutal fate–as well as the drama of free men choosing to fight and die to oppose a tyrant’s army.
Deficient in narrative and history though it is, this approach captures today’s viewers used to visual extravaganzas as well as the worldwide audiences for whom it will be translated. Indeed, in style, 300 strongly resembles the recent Chinese hits The Curse of the Golden Flower and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which combined historical settings with mythic, fairy-tale style effects and action.
Unlike those films, however, 300 describes an actual historical event, which invites interpretation and analogy. Predictably, many in Europe and on the Left have tried to make 300 into an allegory for today’s Iraq, seeing President Bush as the imperial would-be conqueror thwarted by a smaller foe. Others, particularly in the critics’ caste, have cringed at seeing Western warriors portrayed heroically against an alien Other with whom they’d rather sympathize.
These projections are almost entirely inapt. Snyder’s film is faithful to Miller’s book which was written in 1998 and conceived earlier. If 300 may be called pro-Western, it’s ultimately because Herodotus and Plutarch were pro-Western. If the valiant, doomed Spartans seem heroic, it’s because, much as it pains us in our anti-heroic age to admit it, heroes have at times walked the earth performing deeds we now find incomprehensible.
IN ITS GLIMPSE INTO THE SOUL of our civilization, Miller & Snyder’s 300 resembles Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. In that film of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fable, another outnumbered band of free warriors faces another oceanic host of enemies from the east, bent on slaughter and slaving. Their general rallies their courage with the defiant cry, “Men of the West, I bid you stand!” And stand they do. Tolkien’s tale, Herodotus’s Histories, and their cinematic adaptations remind us that the West’s preeminence, however commonplace and inevitable it appears, is anything but. It is, in fact, staggeringly improbable and breathtakingly contingent on a confluence of incidents and individuals from what are some of the world’s most obscure places–from the forests of northern Europe to the Mediterranean’s peninsulae to two hills called Sinai and Golgotha.
If 300 has something to say to us, it is not a facile analogy to our own times, but an occasion, however sensational and simple, for considering the meaning of values such as sacrifice, liberty, honor, and valor. These continue to resonate in us, even if they have fallen somewhat out of favor. They have been central to our past, and our acceptance or rejection of them will shape our future.
Either way, we shall likely never see a poet compose a verse as elegiac and haunting as Simonides’ epitaph upon the Spartans’ burial mound at Thermopylae:
That we here lie, obedient to her law.
Bill Walsh is a writer in Wisconsin. He prefers “lay-o-nee-das” to “lee-o-nigh-duss,” but grudgingly accepts the utility of “Xerxes” over “Khshayârsha.”
