DECONSTRUCTING 300
TORONTO STAR - 300's Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks.
Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly
made up, but not disfigured. No need - it is strongly implied Xerxes is
homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for
special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory
part of a Spartan's education. This was a frequent target of Athenian
comedy, wherein the verb "to Spartanize" meant "to bugger." In 300,
Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.
This touches on 300's most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are
turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too
human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000
Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx
stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion,
they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks
perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and
the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which
Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and
they make a hash of it. . .
No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly
outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the
straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all
of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck
300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their
only worthy champions, the Spartans.
This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as
it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes
in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my
apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.
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TORONTO STAR - 300's Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks.
Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly
made up, but not disfigured. No need - it is strongly implied Xerxes is
homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for
special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory
part of a Spartan's education. This was a frequent target of Athenian
comedy, wherein the verb "to Spartanize" meant "to bugger." In 300,
Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.
This touches on 300's most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are
turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too
human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000
Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx
stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion,
they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks
perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and
the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which
Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and
they make a hash of it. . .
No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly
outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the
straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all
of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck
300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their
only worthy champions, the Spartans.
This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as
it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes
in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my
apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.
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