I've blogged so much about reactions inspired about 300, let's reverse the perspective and see what it was that inspired 300 in the first place.
Dorothea Cantero at Sequential Tart writes about the history of the Battle of Thermopylae, and Spartan culture.
Was this really the harsh reality that was Sparta? What of Xerxes' army? Could his archers really “blot out the sun”? What of Spartan women; how did they live?
That's the point of an article by Victor Davis Hanson, “History and the Movie 300”:
If critics think that 300 reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny, they should reread carefully ancient accounts and then blame Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus — who long ago boasted that Greek freedom was on trial against Persian autocracy, free men in superior fashion dying for their liberty, their enslaved enemies being whipped to enslave others.
Shawn Levasseur
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