it’s deliberately fake and wrong and literally about nothing
speaking of dying on hills
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The entire extreme stratification of Spartan society was its downfall.
They got pasted by the Thebans, essentially democracy loving uncouth types who freed the Spartan slaves.
(Now there’s a guy who needs Hollywood treatment)
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Yes. But again, not my point about the movie at all, which was commentary on supposedly “superior” western culture and supposedly “inferior” Iranian culture…
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While it is unfortunate that the whole Spartan thing has caught on with the reich wing, at least we can enjoy the irony of them pasting the symbol of the best known Gay army to ever walk the earth on everything that they own. I mean, even above that is the fact that we know they were defeated by the Persians but also destroyed by the Thebians.
It’s like these losers keep picking losers to emulate… The Confederacy, Sparta, NAZIs, Donald Trump…
(To be absolutely clear: The humor comes from the homophobic attitudes from most of the dudes with the Sparta in helmets on their gear and the odd blind spot that they have to it. A lot of the Spartan battle spirit and individual heroics of the Spartans was men protecting and showing off to their boyfriends, which is honestly one of the most redeeming qualities of the Spartans…)
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the marriage rituals of sparta included the feature of the bride shaving or cutting short her hair and waiting in a darkened room wearing a man’s cloak for her husband to take her by surprise. whether this reflects homoeroticism embedded in the culture or in some way acts out the origins of marriage as rape and subjugation is something i can only speculate about.
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And even the “western culture” being portrayed was considered one of its worst even among contemporaries. The people who “invented drama”, created literature and kept historical records didn’t think much of the Spartans.
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In a very, very consistent way. They kept that the Spartans were brave fighters and practiced infanticide. They ignored that the Spartans fought in armor. They ignored that they were surrounded by thousands of troops from other Greek cities, some of whom like the Thespians fought completely to the death too.
They stole a quote from Agesilaus about being all professional soldiers, but ignored that Agesilaus was lame and implied that Spartans could not be. I don’t even know what the deal was with the ephors, who were really elected representatives, being inbred priests instead. And then they made the person who sold out the army a deformed Spartan who had failed to be properly euthanized, when in reality it was some guy from Thebes. That’s not a small or insignificant change to the story.
Every single choice of what to keep and what to ignore just happens to have been made to make the Spartans a society consisting entirely of physically perfect Europeans, succeeding by extermination of the weak. Ordinary Greeks are scoffed at for doing menial professions like making pots, as if they were lesser for it. And less physically perfect people are uniformly evil, even before you get to the fact that Asia is apparently populated by samurai orcs and crab-men.
The Greco-Persian wars are a great story, and our sources generally make the empire the bad guys. But this movie is not simply a loose adaptation of Herodotus. These choices don’t all line up to a supremacist vision by pure coincidence.
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Sorry to double post, but to bring things back to America! I thought this was worth comment…
Remember the Alamo! I’ve noticed and sort of wonder about the full significance.
Just to be clear: Sparta is an ancient power, and while I agree with @Mangochin that Epaminondas taking it down is worth a movie, there’s no surprise it eventually happens. A fan of militaristic oligarchies could point to a lot of cruel successes first. But I think it’s clear the Molon Labe crowd are specifically celebrating Thermopylae, where a small force ostensibly told the Persian army to come take their weapons, and while it took a few days the Persians did. They like the loser Spartans.
Part of this is of course that everyone likes an underdog, unless they’re really awful. When you hear stories of a little army facing a big army, all else equal, it’s easier to sympathize with the little one because you know they’re at least being brave. This whole movement would very much like to see themselves as brave underdogs. If you can find things that are somehow both underdogs and cast as superior, that’s perfect.
Related I think maybe part of it is that things as they are now are supposed to have fallen from greatness, and that means at some point winners screwed it up. If you want to believe the US took a wrong turn long ago, it’s no help to celebrate the Union army that fought capably and won. You praise the Confederacy that went down doing their best to keep America great (™ Trump campaign).
But I wonder if maybe part is that they aren’t really interested in winning. I think on some level they know winning is boring and unlikely to give much to the average Trump supporter – I mean, they got their president and it hasn’t yet. I think Orwell puts it well in his review of Mein Kampf:
Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings *don’t* only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
Winning is a problem, because then you have to define exactly what it is you want to make happen and then set in for the unglamorous work of doing that. Losing spares you all of that. You can keep up the fight forever, from generation to generation, and never have to mind about what the hell you are actually fighting for. You’re assured being part of something, and as much as I despise what these people have picked to be part of, that comes from an impulse I do understand.
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They also oddly framed movie and its sequel as some kind of fight for “freedom” even though the Greeks practiced slavery at the time and the encroaching Persian empire did not.
Then again we’re also still having that argument about the American Civil War.
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So this is a thing I’ve heard said but am not really sure about. I know Persian Empire did not rely on slavery on the same scale, but did it really not have it at all? I mean, if nothing else there were both Greek and Phoenician cities in the empire. Most of the explanation I’ve seen refers heavily to a few ambiguous things like Cyrus’s one decree to free the slaves, which it takes a lot to assume is an emancipation proclamation and not just a jubilee. I’d love to hear if anyone else knows more.
In any case, though, that one is from Herodotus rather than the movie. The Greeks talk a lot about freedom meaning city-states’ rights to settle their own affairs instead of obeying some distant monarch. Of course the Athenians abandon the principle after their war with Persia, and then the Spartans even more cynically after their wars with Athens, but it’s still their concept of it.
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You’re probably right that it wasn’t a clear-cut issue, but I had read that Xerxes’ grandfather Cyrus the Great had abolished slavery in all its forms. I welcome a historian’s clarification here though.
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Needs more work, according to the wikipedia, but the
Cyrus is noted in Jewish texts as freeing enslaved people.
Some info on the “Cyrus cylinder”, which some consider an important document in the history of articulating human rights:
In general, the Persian empire at this time seems more tolerant and free than their Greek neighbors.
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BTW one of the best books about Thermopylae is Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. The guy really did his homework on the subject and takes a very unromantic view of ancient warfare or the Spartans. Not sparing details about how the helots were terrorized by their masters .
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He did an interview where he talks about it. Apparently he couldn’t get into comics, telling his friend who was trying to get into them “there isn’t enough sex and violence” and Watchmen was the first comic he ever read with enough sex and violence for him.
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To be clear, I’m not questioning that, this is just a particular claim I would like to know about. I apologize if it’s too off topic.
I have a copy of History of the Persian Empire by Olmstead, and it says things like that slave sales are among our most prevalent records in some provinces. Unfortunately it is also a very, very old source. The wikipedia article is maybe current but seems really dedicated to downplaying the institution…the talk page doesn’t make me feel good about it. The encyclopedia article you link notes that the idea slavery was abolished was a patriotic myth promoted by the Shah, and I suspect a lot of this confusion comes from that. Patriotism twists a lot of history. I would love to know if there’s scholarly consensus.
But yes, there is no question about is the role of slavery among the Greeks, who I think it is openly known were god damn awful. Sparta maybe stands out in not relying on it so much, and that is because it had even more helots in basically the same status. I don’t know of too many places at any point that don’t look tolerant and free compared to it and its caste system.
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But supposedly the script writer, Anne Catherine Emmerich, was very much into torture porn.
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it is not! It was literally why this thread was spun off, after all! 
Ancient history isn’t my field, so I’m not sure. But knowing historians, I doubt they agree. We rarely do.
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OT: Are we outside the Boings?
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Wut???
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I’ve heard rumours of an outside, but I never really believed them.
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