How It Was

TOM HOLLAND

he past few months have been exciting ones for laconophiles. Surely not even the most enthusiastic historian of Sparta could have foreseen a time when blogs and radio phone-ins would be buzzing with furious arguments about the Battle of Thermopylae? Its just entertainment: so protested the makers of 300, the gore-steeped hoplite-fest that has been this years most unexpected box-office hit.* They protested too much, of course. Indeed, the current state of political divisions in America being what they are, it is hard to imagine a film more calculated to induce the vapors among sensitive liberals, or to provoke wild whoops of delight from among the ranks of the gung ho. Heroes fighting to defend freedom far from home? Tick. Sinister peaceniks with John Kerry hairstyles scheming to stab said heroes in the back? Tick. Even more sinister towel-heads plotting mayhem, general destruction, and the overthrow of the West? Triple tick. No wonder that the debate surrounding the film has inclined towards the ill-humored. Indeed, it may just be that 300 played its part in provoking a bona fide international crisis. Iranian conspiracy theorists of which, God knows, there is no lackwere predictably outraged by the representation of their countrymen in the film, and it did not take them long to decide that the timing of its release could hardly have been a coincidence. Everywhere they listened, after all, there seemed to come the sound of sabres being rattled by the Great Satan. At the un , Western
*300. Directed by Zack Snyder, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. Starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West, David Wenham, and Rodrigo Santoro.
arion 15.1 spring / summer 2007

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diplomats were determinedly ratcheting up the pressure over the Iranian nuclear program; in Iraq, coalition troops were increasing their patrols along the frontier; in the Persian Gulf, American battleships were looming menacingly on the horizon. What else, then, could 300 possibly be, if not a fiendish ploy to soften up Western public opinion, in preparation for a war against the Islamic Republic? And what better way to spike it, some among the Revolutionary Guard may well have concluded, than to demonstrate that their enemies were not in fact Spartans at all? Sure enough, on March 23, fifteen British sailors and marines out in Iraqi waters were suddenly ambushed, surrounded, and ordered to surrenderwhich they obediently did. They were then escorted to the mainland as prisoners. Next they had their iPods confiscated. Finally, one of the sailors was reduced to tears when his captors compared him to Mr. Bean. Not, in short, the making of a new Thermopylae. Which was surely just as well. Resistance against the overwhelming odds such as the British sailors had faced out on the Shatt al-Arab would clearly have been suicidal. Keeping themselves alive had been the only sane course of action. Events were to prove this judgment right. The crisis was duly resolved, the captives were all brought homeand not a single life had been lost. Diplomacy and level heads had prevailed. And yet, and yet . . . The return of the captives to Britain inspired, not rejoicing, but only a vague embarrassment. Attempts by the tabloids to hail them as heroes quickly fizzled out. The reasons for this were manifestly contradictory. On the one hand, the scale of British opposition to the Iraq war being what it is, there were many who found themselves actually agreeing with the Iranians that foreign troops had no business patrolling the Persian Gulf. On the other handirrationally, no doubt, and unjustlypeople also felt that the sailors and marines should not just have given up. A morally ambiguous cause, and a seeming lack of backbone: the business on the Shatt al-Arab had been the very opposite of glorious.

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But as the packed houses for 300 were simultaneously demonstrating, only give soldiers a cause truly worth dying for, and a stirring defiance of overwhelming odds, and they cannot help but appear heroiceven if they lose. Perhaps, indeed, especially if they lose. The script of 300 makes much knowing play with this paradox. Defeat at Thermopylae, Leonidas pronounces, will in fact be a victory. The truth of this is brought home in the films closing seconds, with a panning shot over the Greek forces arrayed at Plataea, who then promptly launch themselves into the charge that will see the Persians wiped out for good. But next comes a cut: the film is over and we are directly into the credits. Plataea may have been the greatest land battle ever fought by a Greek alliance, but clearly it lacks box-office appealwhile Salamis, the most decisive engagement, it might be argued, in the entire span of recorded history, gets not so much as a name-check. Unfair, perhapsbut hardly a novel take on the Persian Wars, even so. The victories won by the Greeks at Salamis and Plataea, wrote Montaigne back in the sixteenth century, were the fairest sister-victories which the sun has ever seen, yet they would never dare to compare their combined glory with the glorious defeat of King Leonidas and his men at the defile of Thermopylae. This in turn, as Montaigne well knew, was a perspective that went all the way back to classical timesindeed, which must have had its ultimate origins in the dark and terrible days that immediately followed the loss of the Hot Gates. Xerxes, in the wake of his victory, certainly made every effort to publicize it. As well he might have done: for although Herodotus portrays the imperial propaganda as being all smoke and mirrors, the Persians had good reason to feel triumphant. They were a people proficient in the art of fortifying mountain passes, and they knew that their achievement in dislodging a force of five thousand heavy infantry from a near impregnable position, in wiping out hundreds of the supposedly invincible Spartans, and in killing one of their kings, had been a thumping one. No wonder that Xerxes invited sailors from

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his fleet to tour the Hot Gates, so that they might see how the Great King deals with lunatics who presume to oppose him. No wonder either that the Peloponnesian land forces, brought the news of Thermopylae, immediately scurried back behind the line of the Isthmus, and refused to reemerge from their bolt-hole for almost a year. Clearly, then, for any Greek resolved to continue the fight, it was essential to transmute the defeat at the Hot Gates into a sacrifice sufficiently glorious to inspire the whole of Greece. As 300 accurately suggests, there do indeed seem to have been rival factions in Spartaand the one most committed to the war against Persia was indeed strongly associated with the name of Gorgo. The niece as well as the wife of Leonidas, she was the daughter of Cleomenes, a king whose mysterious death either in or shortly before 490 bc had almost certainly been what prevented the Spartans from ignoring the truce of the Carneia and marching immediately to the assistance of the Athenians at Marathonfor Cleomenes had been as solidly anti-Persian as he had been scornful of religious scruples. As such, the seemingly far-fetched scene in 300 which portrays Gorgo appealing to the Spartan assembly to support her husband may neatly illustrate what was indeed an actual struggle for Spartas soul. Naturally, the Spartans would fightbut the question was whether they would do so in their customarily crabbed and suspicious manner, not venturing beyond the margins of Laconia, or march to war in an authentically pan-Hellenic spirit, willing to stake all as Leonidas had done, in some corner of a foreign field. The Plataea campaign was what finally provided the answerand thereby, of course, served to save Athens as well as Sparta. Indeed, in the immediate wake of Thermopylae, the Athenians had had, if anything, an even greater stake than Leonidas own countrymen in glorifying the dead king as a martyr for libertyand if there was anyone ideally qualified to spin defeat as victory, then it was surely that master propagandist, Themistocles. Certainly, it would not have been the first time that a non-Spartan had

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contributed to the mystique of the warrior citynor, of course, would it be the last. In time, no doubt, as the Athenians sought to burnish the role that they had played in the great war against Persia, and to besmirch that of their Spartan rivals, they must have come to resent the glittering profile of Leonidas; but by then it was too late. Already, in Herodotus account of the battle, there are hints that Thermopylae was shading into epic. Even though written as history, it is replete with hints of the Homeric. Leonidas corpse, for instance, in an episode that 300 does not show, is described as being fought over furiously by the Spartans and the Persians, as though they were all of them on the plain of Troy. Inexorably, and for all time, Thermopylae was becoming a featureperhaps the featureof le mirage Spartiate. It is this that makes it, for any filmmaker, such a challenging story on which to get a handle. Hollywood, despite its reputation for riding roughshod over details of history, has always rather fetishized authenticity when it comes to recreating the look of the ancient world. The robes, the armor, the jewelry: they have invariably had to be just so. Perhaps the nadir of this approach was plumbed by Wolfgang Petersens movie Troy, which put enormous efforts into ensuring an accurate look for events that had never actually taken place. Intriguingly, Zak Snyder, the director of 300, has opted to go in precisely the opposite direction. Although the Spartans who fought at Thermopylae, unlike the heroes of the Trojan War, obviously did exist, they are portrayed in the film as though they were figures out of myth. Or ratheras though they were super-heroes. Which is entirely fittingfor that, in a sense, is exactly what they are. The plot of the film is derived only incidentally from Herodotus: rather, the primary source is a graphic novel by Frank Miller, whose most celebrated work featured Batman as a grim-faced avenger, the very apotheosis of urban noir. With their cloaks, their helmets and their tight black underpants, the Spartans have more than a hint of the Dark Knight about them; or rather, the Dark Knight has more than a hint about him of Sparta.

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His physique, like that of most superheroes, is clearly derived from classical idealsand while it is true that he is not represented as fighting naked, as Greek warriors so often were, his body-armor is sufficiently molded to the contours of his six-pack for it to make little difference. Even in 300, Miller does not go the whole hog with his gymnoi; and neither, of course, does Snyder. Nevertheless, the representation of the Spartan phalanx as a compound of glistening bronze shields and no less glistening naked flesh is a stunning one, and made all the more so by the visualization of ancient combat itself as a kind of balletic danse macabre. Untrue to the brutal realities of hoplite combat this may bebut it is eerily true to the portrayal of phalanxes on pottery or sculptural friezes. It shows us war, in short, as something beautiful. A Spartan would have found nothing shocking in that. To modern sensibilities, however, it verges on the heretical. Indeed, there are times when 300 can seem almost like a parody of Hollywoods war-is-hell pieties, a contemptuous skewering of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. In 300, it is the amateur, the kind of character who would normally be the hero of the movie, and be played by Tom Hanks, who is condescended to, permitted a brief bit part, and then dismissed. Elsewhere too, clichs are introduced, only to be hilariously subverted. I have filled my heart with hate, says a captain who has just seen his son suffer one of the numerous decapitations that are lovingly staged throughout the film. Back comes Leonidas answer, aptly laconic and to the point: Good. The viewer waits for the subsequent moment of redemption, for the reassurance that hate might not in fact be goodbut it never comes. In fact, as a dasher of liberal expectations, 300s only rival among recent blockbusters is Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoevens weirdly prescient 1997 film, which portrayed humanity as governed by a shiny shopping mall fascism, while engaged in an endless war on terroror to be more precise, a war on giant bugs. The climax of the action comes when the queen of the bugs is cap-

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tured, tortured, and shown to feel pain; her captors burst into cheers; the movie promptly ends. Yet Verhoevens tongue, it is clear enough, has been wedged firmly in his cheek throughout: the starship troopers may be fascist, but they are also irredeemably camp. What is really striking about the Spartans in 300indeed, bearing in mind their enthusiasm for Speedos and waxed chests, nothing less than miraculousis how consistently un-camp they are. The prophylactic of irony, of the knowing wink, is totally absent. What few jokes do intrude all derive from Herodotus, Xenophon, or Plutarch. Otherwise, the film is solemn to an almost musclebound degree. It really does seem to argue that militarism is a thing of glory. Which is precisely, of course, what makes it so convincing as a portrait of the Spartan mentalit. That we are in a moral universe governed by presumptions disturbingly distant from our own is signaled right from the opening shot. Up on the screen looms a tracery of tiny skulls and bones: the Apothetai, or dumping ground, into which Spartan babies considered too weak or deformed to grow up true warriors were flung by the citys elders. Along with their merciless exploitation of their enslaved neighborsa detail which in 300 is edited out completelythe Spartans enthusiasm for eugenics was the aspect of their culture which most appealed to Hitler, and which most revolts us today; and yet in the movie it is cited with total approval. In due course, it is true, we are introduced to a survivor of the Apothetai, a hideously deformed hunchback who has nevertheless kitted himself out as a Spartan hoplite, and who dreams of taking his place in the shield wall at Thermopylae. Naturally, since in Hollywood movies it is the unvarying destiny of the disabled to fulfill their dreams, viewers could be forgiven for presuming that he will duly die a hero, perhaps while performing some especially prodigious act of heroism; but not a bit of it. The hunchbacks name turns out to be Ephialtes and he it is, after his rejection by Leonidas, who will lead the Persians along the mountain track that leads to the rear of

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Thermopylae. Physically ugly, he is shown to be morally loathsome too. In 300, not only can you tell a hero by his six-pack, but you can tell a villain by his deformities. The notion that virtue and beauty hold mirrors up to one another is in truth, of course, not wholly absent from our own culture; but it is certain that a Spartan film board, if one had only existed, would been quite spectacularly un-PC. Villains would invariably have been portrayed as variants of Homers Thersites, lowbred and deformed, while foreigners would regularly have been shown as outlandish, effeminate, or both. 300, in keeping with the fiction that what we are watching on the screen is a story being told by Dilios, a Spartan, duly outdoes even Frank Miller in its portrayal of the Persians as grotesques. The ambassador to the Ephors is represented as a prototype for Mr. T; the Immortals as the bastard offspring of Darth Vader and an Uruk-hai; and Xerxes himself as a towering bondage queen. The Spartans may not be camp, but the King of Kings certainly is: divine only in the John Waters sense of the word. The fact that he bears absolutely zero resemblance to the handsome and dignified figure that we see portrayed on friezes from Persepolis may be infuriating to patriotic Iranians, but is, so far as the internal logic of the film is concerned, wholly irrelevant. As the stylized and often quite stunningly beautiful quality of the cinematography suggests, what we are being shown is something that, like the comic strip on which it is based, is determinedly the very opposite of realist. It certainly does not lack for authenticity; but the authenticity lies in its portrayal of its heroes stereotypes and dreams. It is a portrait of Thermopylae as the crowning glory of the Spartan mirage. A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like, William Golding famously declared. He contributed to set us free. True enough; and yet Snyder does not palliate what it took for those three hundred Spartans to stand as they did, in the right line of history. These are no Battle of Britain pilots we are being shown, no

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simulacra of the Greatest Generation. Other makers of sword-and-sandal epics have always sought to soften the serrated edges of the ancient world, to introduce Christians, or visionary slaves, or liberals avant la lettre, anyone who could serve as a spokesman for the audiences own presumptions. Snyders refusal to indulge in such an anachronism has resulted in a film that is profoundly unsettling, to be sure, but is also the most authentic rendering of an ancient cultures mores yet achieved by a Hollywood director. For anything to compare with it, one has to lookironically enougheastwards: not to Persia, it is true, but to the homeland of an ancient empire no less multinational and megalomaniacal. Zhang Yimous 2002 film Hero, about the legendary King of Qin who went on to become the first Emperor of a unified China, outraged critics quite as much as 300 has doneand for very similar reasons. By eulogizing the King of Qin as the only man capable of bringing peace to a bleeding world, the film provided audiences with a stirring glorification of monarchical authoritarianism and global conquest: ideals of which Xerxes, at any rate, would thoroughly have approved. People who want a bit of balance after watching 300 should certainly hunt out Hero. The Persians may not have been monsters; but no less than their enemies at Thermopylae, they had their demons too.