Read Online The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
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Snyder–directed movie 300 , starring Gerard Butler as Leonidas, king of Sparta. The prior October, I had watched an earlier uncut working version of the film at the request of screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, who drove a copy down to my farm. I liked much of what I saw, and then wrote an introduction to the book accompanying the film. So I am not a disinterested observer.
I thought from the outset that many critics would dislike the final version of the film, for a variety of reasons, even aside from its unabashed defense of the Spartan notion of martial excellence and the superiority of a free Hellas over a subservient Persian East. At earlier prescreenings, for example, some Europeans apparently bristled at such Western chauvinism, came to the strange conclusion that the movie was an allegory for George Bush and Iraq, and were appalled that the Persians appeared both bent on conquest and less valiant, man for man, than the free Spartans guarding the pass. Quite understandably, the autocratic, authoritarian contemporary Iranian government subsequently railed that the film depicted ancient Persia as an autocratic authoritarian government.
The movie is certainly violent, with beheadings and lopped limbs aplenty. The characters are one-dimensional, with little complexity and no self-doubt or evolution in their thinking. And, of course, 300 does not claim to be the true story of the battle at Thermopylae but rather an adaptation from a comic book that is itself an adaptation from secondary books and films about the battle. While there are plenty of direct quotations from the accounts of Plutarch and Herodotus, we are nevertheless a long way from the last stand of the Spartans, Thespians, and Thebans in the late summer of 480 B.C. If you wish to learn the story of what actually happened at Thermopylae, this movie won’t necessarily help you do it.
But the impressionism of 300 is oddly Hellenic in spirit; the buff bare chests of the Spartans holding the pass are reminiscent of the “heroic nudity” of stylized warriors on Attic black- and red-figure vase paintings. Even in its surrealism—an ahistorical rhinoceros, futuristic odd-shaped swords, and an effeminate, Mr. Clean–esque Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who gets his ear flicked by a Spartan spear cast—it is not all that different from some of Euripides’ wilder dramatic adaptations, like his tragedy Helen or Iphigeneia at Taurus , in their strange deviation from the mythological party line of the Homeric epics.
Like the highly formalist Attic tragedy—with its set length, three actors, music, iambic and choral meters, and so forth— 300 consciously abandons any claims of realist portrayal. The film’s actors may not seem believable, but remember that ancient Greek actors wore masks. Men played women’s roles. They chanted in lyric meters, broken up by choral hymns. The audience understood that dramatists reworked common myths to meet current tastes and to offer commentary on the human experience in stylized drama.
Again, 300 does not claim to follow exactly ancient accounts of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Instead, it is an impressionistic take on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, intended first to entertain and shock, and second to instruct. Indeed, at the real battle King Xerxes was bearded and sat on a throne high above the fighting; he wasn’t, as in the movie, bald and sexually ambiguous, and he didn’t prance around the killing field. And neither the traitor Ephialtes nor the Spartan overseers, the Ephors, were grotesquely deformed.
When the Greeks were surrounded on the battle’s last day, there were seven hundred Thespians and another four hundred Thebans who fought alongside the three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas. But these non-Spartans are scarcely prominent in the movie. All that said, the main story line mostly conveys the general truth of Thermopylae. A small contingent of Greeks at Thermopylae (which translates to “the hot
I thought from the outset that many critics would dislike the final version of the film, for a variety of reasons, even aside from its unabashed defense of the Spartan notion of martial excellence and the superiority of a free Hellas over a subservient Persian East. At earlier prescreenings, for example, some Europeans apparently bristled at such Western chauvinism, came to the strange conclusion that the movie was an allegory for George Bush and Iraq, and were appalled that the Persians appeared both bent on conquest and less valiant, man for man, than the free Spartans guarding the pass. Quite understandably, the autocratic, authoritarian contemporary Iranian government subsequently railed that the film depicted ancient Persia as an autocratic authoritarian government.
The movie is certainly violent, with beheadings and lopped limbs aplenty. The characters are one-dimensional, with little complexity and no self-doubt or evolution in their thinking. And, of course, 300 does not claim to be the true story of the battle at Thermopylae but rather an adaptation from a comic book that is itself an adaptation from secondary books and films about the battle. While there are plenty of direct quotations from the accounts of Plutarch and Herodotus, we are nevertheless a long way from the last stand of the Spartans, Thespians, and Thebans in the late summer of 480 B.C. If you wish to learn the story of what actually happened at Thermopylae, this movie won’t necessarily help you do it.
But the impressionism of 300 is oddly Hellenic in spirit; the buff bare chests of the Spartans holding the pass are reminiscent of the “heroic nudity” of stylized warriors on Attic black- and red-figure vase paintings. Even in its surrealism—an ahistorical rhinoceros, futuristic odd-shaped swords, and an effeminate, Mr. Clean–esque Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who gets his ear flicked by a Spartan spear cast—it is not all that different from some of Euripides’ wilder dramatic adaptations, like his tragedy Helen or Iphigeneia at Taurus , in their strange deviation from the mythological party line of the Homeric epics.
Like the highly formalist Attic tragedy—with its set length, three actors, music, iambic and choral meters, and so forth— 300 consciously abandons any claims of realist portrayal. The film’s actors may not seem believable, but remember that ancient Greek actors wore masks. Men played women’s roles. They chanted in lyric meters, broken up by choral hymns. The audience understood that dramatists reworked common myths to meet current tastes and to offer commentary on the human experience in stylized drama.
Again, 300 does not claim to follow exactly ancient accounts of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Instead, it is an impressionistic take on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, intended first to entertain and shock, and second to instruct. Indeed, at the real battle King Xerxes was bearded and sat on a throne high above the fighting; he wasn’t, as in the movie, bald and sexually ambiguous, and he didn’t prance around the killing field. And neither the traitor Ephialtes nor the Spartan overseers, the Ephors, were grotesquely deformed.
When the Greeks were surrounded on the battle’s last day, there were seven hundred Thespians and another four hundred Thebans who fought alongside the three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas. But these non-Spartans are scarcely prominent in the movie. All that said, the main story line mostly conveys the general truth of Thermopylae. A small contingent of Greeks at Thermopylae (which translates to “the hot
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