Other Crap

From the "molon labe" department: So far, Frank Miller's 300 is rated 100% at Rotten Tomatoes

I read the reviews at Variety and Hollywood Reporter, and they were positive, but not that positive. They praised the spectacle, but both cautioned that the film is not much more than spectacle. The characters are 2D, the significance of the battle is not placed clearly in context, and there are no perspective shots to clarify the geographical parameters of the battle. According to those reviews, the film is cool, but that's all. If that is true (I have not seen it), it is a shame, because it could have been so much more.

The battle of Thermopylae is certainly a fascinating subject. You have learned in your schoolbooks that Herodotus was the father of history, but that is misleading. He wrote about Thermopylae four decades after the events happened. (Herodotus was about four years old when the battle took place.) If he was the first objective historian, then who did he get his accounts from? Well, either there were plenty of objective accounts before him, or he had to rely on non-objective people. He wrote the "history" by listening to old men tell war stories. You know how that goes. Worse yet, they were not even the right men. Remember that all the Spartans died that day, so where exactly did Herodotus get his ... er ... "facts"?

As for his role as the man who created objective history, well, even if he tried and succeeded partially, he didn't have much impact. Even two millennia after his day there was very little in the way of objective history being written! The "father of history" himself is properly classified somewhere between a historian, a cheerleader, and an epic poet. He incorporated fewer obvious myths into his yarns than can be found in the Iliad, so that made Herodotus a historian in comparison. But not a very good one. He estimated the size of the Persian attack force at 5.2 million people, including non-combatants, of which 3.4 million were soldiers. Modern military historians have a good laugh over that number. (In addition to the logistical problems with feeding a force that size with the resources available in the ancient world, mathematicians have estimated the entire population of the world to be about 100 million people at the time - all of whom seem to have gathered to battle the 300 Spartans that day!) Hans Delbrueck wrote in Stories of the Art of War (p. 106) that the correct number for the Persian attack force that day may have been as low as 15,000-20,000. That is the low end among historians, but you get an idea of the range involved, from fifteen thousand to more than three million.

Even the most ardent supporters of Herodotus can offer no more passionate defense than to say "Herodotus, by his day's standards, was fairly accurate in his accounts." (Quote from Wikipedia.) This faint praise is roughly tantamount to a future pop historian saying that Carrot Top was fairly funny by the standard of other prop comedians of his day.

According to Herodotus, the only reason the 300 Spartans (and their 7,000 allies) lost to the three million Persians at all is because they were betrayed by a traitor! Geez, if not for that guy, we'd have kicked their asses!

However large the Persian force really was in September of 480 BC, it was far larger than the number of defenders, and the defense by the Greeks was still a memorable demonstration of bravery which inspired the tales of glory which have come done to us.