300

The potential film of the year 300 opens imminently.

An extremely loose interpretation of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, the film is based on the best selling comic book by one of the mediums great masters, Frank Miller.

The story is for me, one of the most fascinating of all time.

It tells of a small band of 300 Spartans who held off a Persian army of close to a million for 3 days, thus allowing the rest of the Greek army to mobilise and eventually defeat an invasion that would have completely changed civilisation as we know it.



Of course that’s not really how it all happened, and there are many valid points being raised about the portrayal of the “villains” of the piece, the Persian Empire led by Xerxes the first.

It is certainly true that a group of around 300 Spartans were part of a force that delayed vastly superior numbers but they were part of a combined Greek forced that numbered over 5,000.

Even in their fateful last stand, when most of the Greeks had left to regroup, the Spartans were joined by Thebans who were being forced to fight against their will and by around 700 Thespians.

While the Spartans were a military people who were honour bound to stay and fight, the Thespians had no such obligation and so appear to be the forgotten heroes of the tale in many respects.

The million man army of Xerxes the First has been a source of great dispute among scholars and it is generally accepted to be a gross overestimation of the forces massed by the Persians.

That said, most agree that Infantry, Cavalry and Naval forces combined could have numbered as many as 500, 000 and it is generally accepted that during the Persians initial frontal assault they lost 10,000 men to the Greeks 2 or 3, losing ten of thousands more in repeated assaults until they eventually encircled the Greek force.

Whether massaged or not, it remains one of the most incredible stories of courage and military genius of all time and if Frank Miller and the filmmakers took a bit of artistic licence to make the tale a bit more resonant, so what? Who doesn’t?

But factual inaccuracies of a strictly historical kind are only some of the issues a lot of people are raising about the film.

Most of those critical of the film (and comic book) are concerned that in light of our occupation of Iraq and America’s manoeuvring against Iran that 300 represents a racist parable wherein noble Westerners hold back the unthinkable prospect of being overrun by the invasion of a “savage” Persian culture.

It is certainly safe to say that the Persians are “othered” in wholesale fashion in this story, while the Spartans are imbued with a simplistic nobility they did not necessarily possess.

The truth is a fairly boring one – these were two vast empires vying for control of territory.

The Persians were would-be invaders certainly, but were not, as some say the story suggests, intent on imposing their culture on the fledgling civilisations of the West. They merely wished to conquer, for wealth, for glory and for power. Such was the philosophy of the time. Great empires conquered.

The Spartans, while a fascinating people, were a particularly cruel race; a people who literally threw the deformed, the weak and the disabled to the dogs. As a warrior race, male children from an extremely early age were subjected to a horrific gauntlet of violent training which forged the few it did not kill into the sinewy super soldier of legend. Yet again, they were not evil as such. They simply applied a philosophy that allowed them to survive as a people at the time.

Given that there were no real goodies or baddies in this story it has been noted as no coincidence by some that the Persian Empire have been forced to wear the black hats by Miller, a writer who has frequently been criticised for his hawkish, right-wing political attitudes.

Certainly Miller is a clever enough writer to have intended the parallel. And it’s not as if it’s unusual for Hollywood to make villains of non-white racial groups.

But of course, it depends entirely on how you want to look at the story.

As a masterpiece of unabashed, testosterone-filled action, the comic book has few peers and the movie promises to travel along similar lines.

But if you happen to be from the Gulf region you might quite rightly wonder why the facts of a historical event have been changed to make white guys look like supermen and you look like a savage intent on forcing your culture on others.

And of course, where Talking Pish leads, others follow.

Taking 300 as its cue, here's a BBC article touching on historical revisionism in the movies.