Ok, friends, let's talk about movies and about reality.

So did you see Frank Miller's professional-wrestling-meets-Herodotus epicical epic "300?" I sure did. It was very fun, and just what I expected.

What did I expect?
Did I expect a jingoistic, paternalistic, orientalist, ham-fisted ahistorical warmongering diatribe?
Why, yes! Yes I did!

It was also a gorgeous, sumptuous, delightful piece of testosterone-cinema. As a popcorn movie, I can't fault it. As a thought-provoking piece of art, it is pretty laughable.

I'm never really concerned with historical accuracy in movies, even movies that claim to be historical epics. Let's be honest, modern Hollywood cinema is not the domain of the sincere historian. It is usally banal, always commercial, and at its best inspired illusion. Regardless of this, let's start with the history of the Persian Wars and mix in some Spartan Civ.

(I'm not going to delve into the archaeology of Sparta because there isn't much to speak of. All those nice marble buildings in Miller's Sparta never existed. If you're interested, Thucydides has a nice bit about Bronze Age Mycenae and the effects of the architectural differences between Athens and Sparta on history.)

The Persian Wars: what were they fought over? Well, firstly, the mainland Greeks (including Athens and Eretria) had foemented rebellion among the Ionian Greek city-states -- the same ones that the Lydians had conquered and then came under the sway of the Persians when Cyrus and Croesus had their little tiff. The Greeks got a little out of hand with their rebellion and went and burnt the regional capital, a little place called Sardis. That's where money was invented, if you're wondering. Also, the population was massacred too. The Greeks -- including the Spartans -- when they weren't busy fighting as mercenaries for the Persians (or other foreign powers), were most often engaged in massacring some-city some-where. That's what the ancient Greeks did. See, the Spartans weren't so much the greatest warriors descended from Hercules in order to protect Greece and freedom and reason and all that stuff. They were the world's best soldiers because they were so busy murdering and enslaving and burning everyone, including their fellow free, rational, pious Greeks.

Now we get to the orientalist part of the movie. Oh, Frank Miller's Persians are just a bunch of freaky-sex-loving idol-worshipping gold-wearing effeminate shit-heads, aren't they? Hate to break it to you, but these are the same folks that invented things like "law." They aren't mindless savages bent on stamping out the light of civilization. Compared to the Greeks, the Persians were civilization. They were so far advanced in terms of technology, the arts, diplomacy, and trade that the Greeks had been borrowing things from the East for a long time. The Persians had their faults too, that's for sure. Worshiping their king as a god was a habit [EDIT: No it wasn't. I'm wrong here. See comments section.], as was slavery and invasion of their neighbors, but they were invaded by their neighbors too, so maybe that works out in the end. Or maybe not. What I'm saying is that the Persians were no better or worse than the Greeks, and really, it is both stupid and impossible to try to place those sorts of judgments on cultures. You can judge their individual acts, but trying to pass judgment on entire century-spanning civilizations just smacks of intellectual laziness and pent-up ethnocentricism. (That's a fancy word for "racism.") Check out why Jews like Cyrus the Great so much. It's cool.

Speaking of this sort of thing, you know our alphabet? Yeah, the one that I'm using right now? They one that you can read? That's the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenicians were big pals with the Persians. They were doing great right up until Alexander the Great (a Macedonian Greek) slaughtered and burned their main city, Tyre, in 332 BCE. They were trading all the way out into the Atlantic coast of Africa and Iberia. Crazy, huh?

Anyway, back to our story. The Greeks have just started a rebellion against Darius I, king of Persia, and burned down Sardis. Then the Persians get one of their armies together, rough up the Greek rebels, and the Athenians think "oh gee, gotta go!" And out goes Greek liberty with the bathwater!

But wait, there's more! The Ionians are defeated, but Darius decides that the reason they revolted was that their aristocrats were too hungry for power. Instead, Darius sets up democracies in every Ionian city-state. How do you like those apples, freedom? Freedom isn't free, unless a foreign ruler decides that your leaders are corrupt, invades, and starts building liberal democracies.

That reminds me of something but I just can't put my finger on it... Hmmm... Something about nation building... Hmmm... Well, I don't want to spoil anything with the Ionians, but I'll just say this: it doesn't work out so well.

After that, Darius' religion and his predecessors' accomplishments and a desire for revenge and oh, let's just say vice president Hippias did it, sent Darius on a mission to crush Athens and Eretria for their role in the rebellion. Also, he was in the area conquering all the good natural resources anyway, so why not?

The Persians burned Eretria and then landed on the beaches of Marathon, intending to attack Athens -- but probably not burn it, since the Persians apparently thought it was the only semi-decent place in the entire region. Well, that didn't work out so well. The Athenians didn't get any real help from the Spartans -- because even though they just love freedom and hate slavery and oppression so much, they hate their Greek rivals a little bit more. Also it was a religious feast day, and the Spartans are just so very serious about those. (This event was conflated with Thermopylae for "300.") The Spartans did take captive some Aeginans, long-time rivals of the Athenians, in order to keep the city-state of Aegina from helping the Persians. I guess that counts as a blow for freedom against tyranny?

Why were the Spartans so concerned about freedom and liberty and not being dominated by Persians and all that? Could it be because they saw themselves as the only hold-out of Truth and Beauty and Justice in the whole entire world?

No, not really. The Spartans were a highly militarized, brutally hierarchal, and ferociously violent civilization. And that's the opinion of a Greek who is very friendly to the Spartans. They often refused to fight in foreign wars -- like the Ionian Revolt -- because they were afraid of their own slaves revolting.

"WHAT," you say, "THE SUPER FREEDOM LOVING SPARTANS OWNED SLAVES?!?!?! THIS CANNOT BE FRANK MILLER SAID THEY WERE REPUBLICANS."

Yes, they were called helots. They were Messenians, fellow Greeks, that the Spartans enslaved in the 7th century BCE (or so) and then terrorized, murdered, and oppressed for centuries. The helots revolted often, mainly because treatment from the Spartans was so utterly terrible that death at the end of a Spartiate's lance was preferable to watching your children murdered for fun.

Did I not mention that? Oh, right. The Spartan Ephors (who were not at all as they were presented in the film) declared war on the helots every year. They declared war on their own slaves. They had a special group of young Spartans called the "Krypteia" -- the "Hidden Ones" or "Secret Police" -- who spied on the helots and killed any of them they wanted at any time for no reason besides terrifying them into submission. Utterly random, horrific killings, all in the name of keeping their agricultural slaves in line.

Freedom isn't free, I guess. It costs the systematic brutalization of your underclass.

After the Persians' disaster at Marathon, Darius decided it was better just to forget about the lunatics to the West. The Ionians were happy with their democracies and he had secured lots of nice gold and farmland to the north of Greece. An insurrection broke out in Egypt (his predecessor had conquered Egypt with a little help from the Greeks), but that was over in a few years. Darius died in 485 BCE while contemplating another campaign in Europe.

Xerxes, Darius' son, decided that the Greeks were just a little too dangerous to leave around. Also, places like Sparta weren't exactly democratic. Their aristocracies (in the case of Sparta, the Spartiates) were very unfriendly to their rival aristocracies, causing lots of regional strife. With the help of Ionian Greek troops, Xerxes sets off to Greece. This is where the 300 or so Spartans (and the Thespians, Arcadians, Corinthians, Thebans, and some helots that the Spartans brought along as cannon-fodder) met the Persian army.

The Spartans sent 300 because they were afraid that sending more might cause their helots to revolt. The Thebans came because the rest of the Greeks made them. See, like the Spartans at Marathon, the Thebans were more concerned about defeating their Greek rivals than defending Greece from the Persians. The Persians would come, leave, and the Thebans might get a nice democracy out of the deal. As you might expect, the Thebans turned on their Greek pals in the end. Ephialtes did pretty much what the movie depicts, but he wasn't a crazy-deformed Spartan-stalker.

What I've been trying to get across in this frantic little essay is that the Greeks, and the Spartans in particular, weren't these stalwart, hypernoble defenders of all things Western. They were an ancient people with a value system far different than our own. They were involved in terrible strife and desperate political gambles. Their defeat at Thermopylae did allow the rest of the Greeks to eventually defeat the Persians. But then, as any student of history should expect, they forgot their "cause" so quickly. Fighting against the newly ascendant Athenian-dominated Delian League with their own imperialist confederacy of city-states, the Spartans willingly handed Ionia back to the Persians in exchange for Persian assistance against Athens.

The Persian Wars are cited as one of the defining moments of Western Civilization, of the forces of liberty casting back the oppression of (Middle) Eastern religion and tyranny. That's not to say that the world wouldn't be far, far different without the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, but their motives were never the motives we ascribe to them. It makes good cinema, and it makes a certain, dangerously stupid kind of history.

These people were not us, they did not envisage themselves as us, and they certainly did not value "freedom" with the same meaning as Jefferson, Adams, and Madison (although somehow I suspect that the NeoConservative redefinition of "freedom" is a little closer to what Darius had in mind for the Ionians). If you want to see a conflict that defines and shapes the West for millenia, I suggest you consider the Peloponnesian Wars. That's when we see Western Culture's first loving caress of empire, and where democracy finds some of its most radical and sincere supporters.

SUMMARY: Go see Frank Miller's "300," but go with your eyes open.