Not in the Defense of 300…but…
Before we dive into this little intellectual jaunt, a quick note. This piece was inspired by reading Gianluca’s article from this issue and is not meant to be a critique but, rather, to join the conversation and crystalize some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head since I taught a course on Sparta in 2021. With that, onwards…
Talking about the many problematic aspects of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 and Zach Snyder’s subsequent popular film adaptation is somewhat de rigueur in the field of Classical studies and the broader “popular discourse.”[1] To see just how common, all you need is a quick Google search: articles abound with titles like “300 is a dangerous piece of fantasy,” “A racist gore-fest,” “Zack Snyder’s 300 Remains INTENSELY Problematic,” “Zach Snyder’s 300 presaged the howling fascism of the alt-right,” and “Inaccuracy in 300” (in this very Liber issue).[2] These critiques – while certainly tied to discomfort around the film’s white-savior narrative (being charitable) and thinly-veiled allusion to the contemporaneous Iraq War – can also be situated within a broader discourse on Sparta and the Spartans who form the core of 300’s narrative. This discourse (and the vociferous pushback – read at your own risk) increasingly centers on deconstructing the fallacy of Lacaedemonian superiority – Le Mirage Spartiate discussed by François Ollier (everything sounds better in French) – that underlines the presentation of the elite warriors in the film as well as more generally in the western imagination (for a broader discussion see Brett Devereaux’s excellent and thought-provoking “Spartans Were Losers” or Myke Cole’s The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy or Sarah E. Bond’s short piece “This Is Not Sparta” for Eidolon).[3] Snyder and Miller’s Spartans are easy to critique (and this critique is important as well) but here I want to pose a different question: what if the “problem” as it were with 300 is not that it is inaccurate but, instead, that it is a shockingly accurate mirror of Classical Greek propaganda, views, and ideas.
Important disclaimer: I am not here to argue that 300 is NOT RACIST or IS ACCURATE in an objective sense (in my opinion, it is, and it is not). As Cole puts it in his monograph, “Both the comic and the 2006 film portray this myth [of Thermopylae and the 300 Spartans] with clearly racist and anti-immigrant overtones. 300 makes no effort to beg off its message – an inspirational paean to 300 brave, muscular, beleaguered white men valiantly holding the entry into western Europe against an invading, brown-skinned horde.”[4] Spot on, in my opinion. Rather than simply restating these arguments, here I want to go down an intellectual rabbit hole – does the very fact that the film is racist and inaccurate accidentally make it an all too accurate mirror of the 5th century Greek world and the story of Thermopylae within that milieu. Perhaps, despite its inaccuracies, the story 300 tells resonates TOO well with some of the problematic aspects of the Classical Greek world, and this discomfort, in part, explains the strong push back by a large segment of the Classically inclined world.[5]
Major caveat to follow that important disclaimer: I am NOT telling you to go watch 300. Do that at your own risk. You just never know when the movie will jump out and force you to watch it with a scream of “THIS IS SPARTA.” Say you are at a family member's house or in a prospective significant other’s dorm room and they insist you watch their favorite movie, 300.[6] The purpose of this article is to supply a new viewing heuristic (look it up) to make the experience of watching 300 less grating and maybe even start your family/significant other on the path towards a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the Classical Greek past, racist/xenophobic bits and all.
Disclaimers and caveats aside, let’s get to the point. How could the inaccuracy and racism of 300 provide a mirror into 5th century Greece? Let’s start with the inaccuracy part. The tale spun in 300 – both the film and Miller’s graphic novel which Snyder faithfully adapts– is drawn primarily from the Histories of Herodotus. Just as 300 presents a propagandist tale of the three hundred Spartans' heroic defeat of an uncountable Persian army (until, well they lose catastrophically), Herodotus likewise is a mouthpiece for Spartan propaganda (although this propaganda is a bit more difficult to locate without a critical reading).[7] In my reading, Herodotus’s story is meant to cover up a major Spartan blunder. After all, from an objective historical perspective (if such a thing were possible) the battle of Thermopylae is at best a disaster, at worst irrelevant.[8] Peter Briant, in his account of Achaemenid Persian history, gives my favorite account of Thermopylae. In his words (emphasis my own), “On land, despite the resistance of the Greeks (to whose heroism Herodotus devotes a passage of disproportionate length: VII.201-39), the Persians took the pass at Thermopylae.”[9] It takes a number of logical leaps to move from a cataclysmic defeat in a border skirmish to a heroic delaying action, yet this is how the tale is told.[10] Herodotus is not completely to blame for this mythologizing – for example, we know that, in antiquity, another account even more blatantly propagandistic existed. In this version of events, Leonidas and his three-hundred died not defending the pass, but on a suicide mission attempting to assassinate Xerxes within his camp.[11] I am, frankly, shocked Miller and Snyder did not adapt this account. It has been argued, to my mind convincingly, that Herodotus was aware of this alternate version and, while eliding some of the more fantastical elements for the sake of his historical project, largely still presented a story that explicitly served a Spartan agenda.[12] The goal of the story is less to tell the tale of an important military event but to explain away a Spartan defeat. This mytho-history, in turn, gets wrapped up in another, broader, mytho-history within Herodotus - his story of how the Greek city-states “defeated” the Achaemenid Persian empire which forms the core of his narrative (this in itself is problematic because, little did our boy Herodotus note, the Greek’s really didn’t win in the long run, for more see this footnote).[13] Just like 300, accuracy is not at the center of the Thermopylae story in antiquity. The story serves a larger propagandistic purpose (or two).
With this little bit of background (and keeping in mind the heady dose of anti-western Asian orientalism present in the early 2000s conditioned by centuries of religious conflict, war, colonization, racism, and xenophobia), we can perhaps imagine how the Battle of Thermopylae is used as one part of a victory of an imagined “West” over a barbarian, dangerous Eastern other in the present day. A heroic, yet doomed, defense of “civilization” (scare quotes intended) over “barbarians.” The Herodotean account is not yet tied to a “western civilization” myth but is still meant to promote a “savior of the Greek world” argument involving a Greek city-state.[14] The film 300, emerging during the era of post-9/11 American intervention in western Asia, is clearly modulating this tale as a loosely veiled metaphor for American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.[15] Both pieces are peddling propaganda and aim to occlude military quagmires with heroic accounts of idealized men.
It is not only the propagandistic aspects of the tales that link ancient and modern, the overt racism and xenophobia are likewise a thread reflecting, rather than perverting, the ancient sources. To put it simply, Sparta at the time of the Persian Wars was a state whose values are mirrored in the xenophobia 300. The evidence for this is substantial, so I will share just a few examples. Take, for instance, Plutarch’s discussion of one of Lycurgus’s reforms (Lycurgus being a mythical lawgiver of Sparta):
This [attempt to replace vice with virtue] was the reason why he did not permit them to live abroad at their pleasure and wander in strange lands, assuming foreign habits and imitating the lives of peoples who were without training and lived under different forms of government. Nay more, he actually drove away from the city the multitudes which streamed in there for no useful purpose, not because he feared they might become imitators of his form of government and learn useful lessons in virtue, as Thucydides says,but rather that they might not become in any wise teachers of evil. For along with strange people, strange doctrines must come in; and novel doctrines bring novel decisions, from which there must arise many feelings and resolutions which destroy the harmony of the existing political order. Therefore he thought it more necessary to keep bad manners and customs from invading and filling the city than it was to keep out infectious diseases.[16]
This Spartan practice of ξενηλασία (xenelasia) – expelling foreigners – is attributed not just to Lycurgus but recurs as a feature of Spartan society. Pericles alludes to it as a precipitating factor in the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 1.144). Xenophon also discusses it in his Constitution of the Lacedaimonians, highlighting both the historicity of the practice and its accompanied prohibition on Spartans living outside of the city (Xen. Lac. 14.4). In Plutarch’s Life of Agis, xenelasia is further discussed in an imagined conversation between the Spartan kings Leonidas II and Agis IV, where Plutarch (who is clearly fascinated by the mytho-history of the Spartans) juxtaposes the “good Spartan” Agis, knowledgeable about Lycrugus’s practices of xenelasia, with the “bad Spartan” Leonidas – τεθραμμένος ἐν ξένῃ (raised in foreign lands) and πεπαιδοποιημένος ἐκ γάμων σατραπικῶν (having children with a with a wife “of a satrap,” so from the Persian world).[17] While Athenians, exemplified by Pericles in his Funeral Oration (Thuc. 2.35-46), highlight the open nature of Athens to contrast it with closed Sparta, Athens had its own issues with xenophobia – especially when it came to non-Greeks (one should not be surprised by a city-state whose foundation myth centered autochthony).[18] The Classical Greek world was constantly debating, and most often pushing back against, opening their spaces to others. This is visible in politics, literature, and art – where foreigners are often caricatured. The “othering” of the Persians in 300 – while it uses a repertoire of othering interpolable to a modern audience – is a variation on a theme abundantly familiar to the Classical Greeks.
If we only critique 300 based on the film’s (as well as the graphic novel’s) whitewashing, racism, and inaccuracy we are picking the low-hanging fruit. Yes, these works reflect a particular use of the classics in the 2000s; a fable of post-9/11 American fears and self-perpetuating exceptionalism tracing a “western civilization” lineage back to Classical Greece. Snyder and Miller are also, however, trodding a well-worn path replete with themes (ethnocentrism, xenophobia, misogyny, and I would argue a nascent, pre-racial white supremacy and racism) inherent in the so-called Classics; these are present in Herodotus and other Greek writers. To only focus on the modern simplifies an antiquity that needs to be problematized. Perhaps the discomfort that has prompted viewers of 300 to generate thousands of words is not, in fact, rooted in an outcry against inaccuracy but rather, a push against the realization (and thus, the need to reckon fully with many of the darker sides of antiquity) that 300 accidentally reflects fundamental truths of the Classical Greek outlook. Ugly, yes, but, but more intellectually honest. I wonder, once they got over the shock of the medium, if a Spartan from the 5th century watched 300 they would be nodding along, able to follow the metaphors that matched their own beliefs. I think the answer is yes. Do with that what you will.
Notes
[1] Well, at least within the progressive-liberal echo chamber that I am a card-carrying member of; if you look outside of that you will find a very different reaction. See, for example, its place on The National Review’s 2009 list of top conservative movies of the last 25 years. It comes in at 5, sandwiched between Forrest Gump and Groundhog Day, the reviewer (Michael Poliakoff, also Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Michigan) states: “During the Bush years, Hollywood neglected the heroism of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan — but it did release this action film about martial honor, unflinching courage, and the oft-ignored truth that freedom isn’t free. Beneath a layer of egregious non-history — including goblin-like creatures that belong in a fantasy epic — is a stylized story about the ancient battle of Thermopylae and the Spartan defense of the West’s fledgling institutions. It contrasts a small band of Spartans, motivated by their convictions and a commitment to the law, with a Persian horde that is driven forward by whips. In the words recorded by the real-life Herodotus: “Law is their master, which they fear more than your men[, Xerxes,] fear you.” Staff, NR. “The Best Conservative Movies.” National Review, October 25, 2023. https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2009/02/23/best-conservative-movies/.
[2] The language within the reviews is even more savage. Historians called the film, “Racist and insulting” and that it “should be rated… not just R (for racist) but X–for extremely stupid and vicious and dangerously ill-timed.” Reporters used lines like, “egregious drivel,” “shoddy,” “something Hitler would admire. See Burton, Paul. "Eugenics, Infant Exposure, and the Enemy Within: A Pessimistic Reading of Zack Snyder’s 300." International Journal of the Classical Tradition 24. 2017, 308.
[3] Ollier, François. Le Mirage Spartiate Étude Sur l'Idéalisation de Sparte Dans l'Antiquité Grecque du Début de l'École Cynique jusqu'à la Fin de la Cité. 1943; Cole, Myke. The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
[4] Cole 2021, 409.
[5] This might also explain its ready adoption and praise by others, who appreciate that it, in a sense, says the quiet part of Classical Studies out loud. That, however, is a different article.
[6] N.B. this is probably a big red flag, unless they have read this article and even then I would be concerned why they still want to watch the movie. Although maybe they are testing you to see how you will respond. Gotta keep your head on a swivel. I guess the lesson here is you can’t choose who you are related to and at least this way you can give love a chance.
[7] Herodotus, at least, includes the hundreds of other soldiers who fought alongside the Spartans at the “hot gates.”
[8] If you disagree, my email is listed on the Liber website; let’s chat. I look forward to your arguments proving as effective as the Spartans defense of the “Hot gates,” doomed to failure.
[9] Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander: a history of the Persian Empire. Penn State Press, 2002, 529.
[10] To be fair, one of the two Spartan kings does die, but aside from dying Leonidas’s career is singularly unremarkable to this author.
[11] Attributed to either a Simonides or Ephoros, this story is a wild ride that, it has been convincingly argued, was put out soon after the defeat by the Spartans by the Spartans themselves in an attempt to paper over the military debacle. Herodotus was aware of the story but opted to adopt certain elements which caused logical dissonance in his narrative. For an erudite discussion, see Van Wees, Hans. "Thermopylae: Herodotus versus the Legend." In Textual Strategies in Ancient War Narrative, pp. 19-53. Brill, 2018.
[12] For a longer discussion, see Van Wees, Hans. "Thermopylae: Herodotus versus the Legend." In Textual Strategies in Ancient War Narrative, pp. 19-53. Brill, 2018.
[13] N.B. - A war that the Greeks end up losing, as by the 4th century Persian gold has funded the destruction of both Athens and Sparta as meaningful powers. For an engaging discussion of just this point see a public facing discussion by Roel Konijnendijk https://twitter.com/Roelkonijn/status/1412107516016795649. Further, the Persian state (ruled by a Persian provincial by the name of Alexander of Macedon) was even expanded to cover a land mass stretching from Greece to India, but I digress.
[14] N.B. In Herodotus, however, that city-state is avowedly NOT Sparta. This, perhaps, is where later readers - and Miller and Snyder to be particular - have most misread Herodotus the worst. Herodotus makes it clear in 7.139 that he views Athens as his savior of Hellas (with some obvious shade towards Sparta by invoking the fact that Athen did not abandon Greece on account of an oracle - one explanation for the weak Spartan force present at Thermopylae). 300’s historical “creativity” comes to the fore, ignoring Herodotus’s argument for Athenian centrality and replacing them with the Spartan super-soldiers. Perhaps the muscular, militaristic Spartan seemed a better protagonist than the Athenian (although in the film’s dud of a sequel, 300: Rise of Empire, an attempt is made to center an Athenian story with less abs and box-office success).
[15] It was so effective/offensive that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banned the film from the country's film scenes. See Burton, Paul. "Eugenics, Infant Exposure, and the Enemy Within: A Pessimistic Reading of Zack Snyder’s 300." International Journal of the Classical Tradition 24. 2017, 308-330. Ahmedinejad accused the film of, “trying to tamper with history by making a film and by making Iran’s image look savage. By psychological war, propaganda and misuse of the organizations they themselves have created, and for which they have written the rules, and over which they have the monopoly, they are trying to prevent our nation’s development.” Jaafar, Ali. “Iran President Irked by ‘300.’” Variety, March 21, 2007. https://variety.com/2007/film/features/iran-president-irked-by-300-1117961560/.
[16] Plut. Vit. Lyc. 27.3-4 tr. Bernadotte Perrin. No, I did not do my own translation Rajiv and I am okay with that. Stop being a snob.
[17] Plut. Vit. Agis 10.2.
[18] See, for example, their constant fear that metics might gain access to the deme lists of citizens. For a broader discussion see, for example, relevant sections of Fisher, Nick. "Citizens, foreigners and slaves in Greek society." A companion to the classical Greek world. 2006, 327-349.