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Go tell the
Spartans
How "300" misrepresents Persians in
history
March 14, 2007
iranian.com
Touraj
Daryaee
What do you get when you take all the
“misfits” that inhabit the collective psyche of the white
American establishment and put them together in the form of a
cartoonish invading army from the East coming to take your
freedom away? Then add a horde of Black people, deformed humans
who are the quintessential opposite of the fashion journal
images, a bunch of veiled towel-heads who remind us of Iraqi
insurgents, a group of black cloaked Ninja-esque warriors who
look like Taliban trainees, and men and women with body and
facial piercings who are either angry, irrational, or sexually
deviant. All this headed by a homosexual king (Xerxes) who leads
this motley but vast group of “slaves” known as the Persian army
against the 300 handsomely sculpted men of Sparta who appear to
have been going to LA (or Montreal) gyms devotedly, who fight
for freedom and their way of life, and who at times look like
the Marine Corps advertisements on TV? You get the movie “300.”
It is these insinuations in the film that are
more troublesome to me as a Persian immigrant to the U.S., than
as a historian of antiquity. After all, Hollywood tries to sell
movies and does not care if they are historically accurate, but
movies also carry a subtle message which has very effective and
current consequences. Some passages from the Classical authors
Aeschylus, Diodorus, Herodotus and Plutarch are spilt over the
movie to give it an authentic flavor. Aeschylus becomes a major
source when the battle with the “monstrous human herd” of the
Persians is narrated in the film. Diodorus’ statement about
Greek valor to preserve their liberty is inserted in the film,
but his mention of Persian valor is omitted. Herodotus’ fanciful
numbers are used to populate the Persian army, and Plutarch’s
discussion of Greek women, specifically Spartan women, is
inserted wrongly in the dialogue between the “misogynist”
Persian ambassador and the Spartan king. Classical sources are
certainly used, but exactly in all the wrong places, or quite
naively. However, my response is not so much to the inaccuracies
of the film, but rather to its ultimate motive and its possible
use in the current issue of war on terrorism.
The movie begins by showing an idyllic Sparta,
where women go about freely, children play in safety, and become
real men by going through the agoge system, as our
movie hero King Leonidas does. From the distance an
African-looking man with piercings all over his body appears
with the head of the king who had the audacity of resisting
Xerxes, the Persian ruler. There are some haphazard exchanges
between King Leonidas and the Persian ambassador, who looks like
a science fiction freak monster with his Al-Qaida entourage
behind him. The king’s wife dares to talk and invokes the
passage from Plutarch on women in Sparta “We are the mothers of
men…” to the freakish, body-pierced bully who is the Persian
ambassador, and a number of slogans about freedom, faith, etc.
which sound like they came from Fox News or the Bush
Administration, are spouted through King Leonidas. The sentence
“We are the mothers of men” was actually never said to the
Persians in history, but rather was part of a completely Greek
debate on the position of women, regarding the fact that
Athenian women were forced to stay in the andron (inner
sanctum of the house) so that their reputations would not be
tarnished. Spartan women were different than the Athenian women,
but Persian women of this period had more freedoms than either
the Spartans or Athenians and interceded not only in political
matters, but also joined with the army, owned property, and ran
businesses. The only time Persian women are shown in the film is
as the usual fanciful Odaliskic Oriental women who do nothing
but crawl on the ground, perform sexual acrobatics to fool the
Western man, or just swarm around the water-pipe, high and
happy.
So King Leonidas represents the fearless king
who wants to keep Sparta “free” and to preserve “their way of
life” and “democracy.” These mantras are repeated throughout the
film. Even though the Spartan Gerousia (Congress) does
not want to declare war, only King Leonidas knows what is needed
and he makes the unilateral decision that he and his 300 Spartan
men must go to battle for truth, justice and the Spartan way. I
don’t think I was the only one who by the end of the film had a
sense that Leonidas was a bit like President Bush and that the
Gerousia was a bit like our U.S. Congress. But I am
sure this is a coincidence since President Bush has himself
never fought a war and since he will retire soon to have an
airport or library named after him. But, on the other hand, King
Leonidas lays down his life for the mantras that slavishly
emanate from Bush’s official pulpit (Fox News) and other media
outlets since the tragedy of September 11, 2001. So perhaps it
is correct to equate the Persians of “300” with some of our
enemies today, the Iranians, and King Leonidas with our war
hero, i.e., President Bush.
Another side note to this battle is the clear
identification of the Eastern Oriental Persian army with the
Muslims, almost taken from Medieval imagery of the Moors who
attacked Europe. They are dark, have head covers, and are very
angry and disorganized. On the other hand the great general of
Leonidas who receives continual praise from his king bears an
uncanny resemblance to the Jesus in Franco Zeffirelli’s landmark
“Jesus of Nazareth” and even experiences Christ-like suffering.
Thus Bush, with Jesus at his side, defends Western Civilization
against the Eastern Islamic-esque army who are coming to invade
the West and take away our freedoms.
The Persian ambassador/Al-Qaida agent is
killed in Sparta and so war begins and the Persians make plans
to take away Spartan women, children, and freedoms. King
Leonidas is not going to let this happen so he takes his elite
fighting force to the pass of Thermopylae to stand against the
million man slave-army of the kingdom of Persia. The Spartan
fighting men very much act and sound like the U.S. Marine Corps
with their slogans and their growls. Of course, this is only a
coincidence. Then appears the powerful and homoerotic King
Xerxes who first tries to deal with the Spartans by sending a
conveniently stereotypical angry, fat Black man to brandish his
whip at them. Then comes the almost baboonish Persian army,
composed of monsters who cannot speak (another way of
identifying the Persians as barbarians, i.e., the Greek
name for those whose language is unintelligible). Although they
resemble Iraqi insurgents, cinematic events unfold differently
than they have in President Bush’s Iraq: the 300 Spartans kill
thousands of the enemies of freedom without receiving so much as
a scratch.
The battle between the outnumbered Spartans
and their Persian enemies took place at the pass of Thermopylae
in the year 480 BCE. In the movie version, the Spartan warriors
kill the Persian soldiers without any losses until one wave of
the Persian forces begin throwing fanciful explosives that shoot
shrapnel into the chiseled physiques of our Greek “heroes.” Are
we to believe that the Improvised Explosive Devices which are
killing our soldiers in Iraq, and which the Bush/Leonidas
administration claims to be manufactured by the
Iranians/Persians (Iran was called Persia until an official name
change in 1935), can suddenly appear on a fifth century BCE
battle field?
Along with the IEDs, the doom of our Hellenic
heroes is encompassed by a deformed half-Spartan who turns
traitor and shows the Persians the backdoor route which results
in the entrapment of the Greeks. Although King Xerxes comes one
last time to convince the freedom-loving Leonidas to surrender,
and even tempts him with the whole of Greece just for giving his
obedience to the Persians, our hero does not give in. In an
almost sexual gesture Xerxes holds Leonidas from the back and
asks him to submit, to bend before the Persian ruler. The king
goes into a dream (lifted from the Russell Crow film
Gladiator) about his wife, child, and city, raises the
battle cry, and then dies along with his entire regiment while
the Spartan Congress, crippled by bribery and backstabbing,
debates whether or not to send aid.
One Spartan survivor is sent back to tell the
story and so the heroism of the 300 Spartans who fought a
hopeless battle against the overwhelming Persian slave army is
remembered for posterity. This event galvanizes Greece into a
unified force that can withstand the Persians (although unity
soon dissolved into the Greek civil conflict known as the
Peloponnesian Wars), and defeat them at the battle of Salamis
(although Athens was sacked and burnt). The moral of the story
is that 300 men sacrificed their lives for freedom, their way of
life, and Democracy, something echoes in today’s broadcast
updates on the war against so-called Islamic terrorism. Again,
another coincidence.
But let us address the historicity of the film
and the way in which the film uses history to mount a defense
of “Western Civilization” against the invading “Other.” The
reasoning for King Xerxes’ invasion of the continent of Europe
is never discussed in the movie, and is rarely mentioned in the
West. This is because accuracy is sacrificed in order to
manipulate ancient history to buttress the Western view of the
world. The borders of the Persian empire stretched from the
Indus and Oxus Rivers in the East, to the Mediterranean Sea in
the West, extending through Anatolia (modern day Turkey) and
Egypt. This way the rivers and the seas were to provide a
natural defense. But one of the cities along the cost of
Anatolia, Miletus, ruled by a Greek tyrant named Aristagoras in
499 BCE staged a revolt and turned to the Athenians for aid.
Until then the Persians had no plan or desire to go into Europe.
The tiny Greek archipelago was probably almost beneath the
notice of the Persian king. But then an Athenian attack on a
major Persian province, which culminated in the sacking and
burning of the city of Sardis, naturally alarmed the Persians.
It is this destructive event that started what is known
as the Greco-Persian Wars. It was not an unprovoked
Persian invasion of Greece. Nor did Aristagoras start this
trouble for “freedom” or “democracy,” but rather as step in his
intrigue to take control of another Greek city (Naxos) on the
Anatolian coast. The Athenians did not bring freedom or
democracy to Sardis either. It was burnt and looted. So much so
for the cause. In 494 BCE the Persians soundly defeated the
Greek forces at the battle of Lade, and the coast of Anatolia
was once again peaceful. Of course most of these preliminary
events are of no significance today in the West and the
subsequent battle between Xerxes and the Greeks is taken out of
context, manipulated, and the freedom-loving, democratic Greeks
are set against the slave empire of Achaemenid Persia. Is this
is a fair and balanced view of history?
The result of these events was that the revolt
started by Aristagoras was stopped by the Persians, the Athenian
forces retreated, and then the Spartans and others were the
defeated at Thermopylae. Luck was with the Greeks since in the
subsequent battle of Salamis they gained the upper hand.
However, Athens was sacked and burnt for its indiscretion at
Sardis in 480 BCE. But if you read any history book in the West,
none of these events really are highlighted, and only the
Persian defeats are emphasized and such modern mantras as
“freedom” and “democracy” are projected into the past onto
ancient warfare.
Such jargon relating to “freedom” and
“democracy” as used in the movie “300” is utterly untrue and
exactly the opposite of what is revealed in the historical
sources. It was not the Persians who were the slave nation. In
fact the Persians allowed the different peoples of their empire
to carry on their lives and traditions as they liked. Thus, the
ancient city of Babylonia and the Greek-speaking settlements on
the coast of Anatolia continued to use slaves, but in general
the Persians hired people and paid them regardless of sex or
ethnicity. This is made amply clear by the cuneiform documents
from Persepolis, the capital of Achaemenid Persia. There were
Persian women supervisors who controlled various economic
activities in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Such women were
granted a stipend for the support of their children and even
given maternity leave. We find none of this in Greece. But in
“300” we hear the “we are the mothers of men” quote, out of
context, as if it applies to Persian ideas about the low status
of women.
In the “freedom”-loving and “democratic”
Sparta, slaves called helots were owned communally and
there was an annual festival during which young Spartan men were
allowed to terrorize the slave population and even kill a few of
them to remind the rest of their place. And Sparta was not a
democracy. It was a militaristic monarchy with a council of
elders which decided political matters, but it was not a
democracy. It was constantly on the warpath and constantly
attempting to control and enslave its neighboring Greek
city-states. Likewise, “democratic” Athens did not behave any
better after it became the Hegemon in the fifth century BCE and
began enslaving its neighbors, taking their lands, and
destroying their way of life. Democracy (literally, rule by the
people, Greek demos) was but a brief experiment in Greek
history. Some estimates suggest that even when Greek democracy
was at its height in 431 BC, less than 14% of the members of
this society were allowed to participate in this “government by
the people.” Not only was the vast majority of the population,
including women, excluded from policy making, but nearly 37%
lived in actual slavery [See: "
Decolonizing Persian history"]. In contrast those who joined
the Persian army, which included many non-hunchbacked Greeks,
were paid for their service!
In the film “300” there is a constant
reiteration that only 300 fought against two million, of which
probably one million died in the course of the film. In reality
the “freedom”-loving Spartans used slaves along with free
“citizen-soldiers,” while the Persians employed paid forces and
no slaves. The battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE) has been recorded
as the last stand of 300 Spartans who died to the very last man
to protect free Greece, which is a myth happily held up by the
modern West as a symbol of resistance against the East. In fact,
each of the Spartans had seven slaves (the same helots
mentioned above, who also fought to the death) with him in
battle, bringing the total to 2400, plus another 2,000
non-Spartan Greeks (Thespians and Lacedaemonians) who also died.
Some estimates put the Greek forces at Thermopylae as high as
7,000. The Persian force was not in the millions. An ancient
army could never have mustered so many people, even if the
Persians had resorted to slavery. But of course 300 against
millions sounds much better than thousands of Spartans against
thousands of Persians.
In the end, what is most troubling is the
timing of the film’s premier. The fight between the Greeks and
Persians, two civilizations representing the West and East, is
screened in many movie theaters just when the U.S. and Iran are
facing off in a bitter battle of words and ideologies. The two
countries claiming descent from these two ancient peoples. On
the one hand the movie Persians are shown as the representation
of all that is alien and distasteful to the white Western life.
Then there is the added ingredient of Black people, homosexuals,
pierced and tattooed people, who in many way represent the
archetypal outcasts in the collective imagination of middle
America. And on the other hand there are the beautifully
sculpted men who are moral, righteous, and willing to die
together for freedom and Democracy. They obviously represent
Western values.
In a time when we hear the sirens of war over
Iran (Persia), it is ominous that such a film as “300” is
released for mass consumption. To depict Persians / Iranians as
inarticulate monsters, raging towards the West, trying to rob
its people of their basic values demeans the population of Iran
and anesthetizes the American population to war in the Middle
East. This way Bush, Cheney, and other “compassionate”
conservatives can more easily rain their precision guided
missiles down on the heads of my parents, family members and
other Iranians, establish Abu Ghraib detention centers, and
perhaps take revenge for the death of the 300 Spartans in
antiquity and finally bring democracy, peace and a better way of
life to the East. Iraq was such a success, now the Spartan
Marines need to head out to Iran and destroy it in order to
protect our American freedoms. The fantasy movie “300” is just
another of the propagandistic tools to reiterate this
preposterous belief and to get the American people, children and
adults, ready to endorse another Shock and Awe operation. I am
saddened that we never seem to learn from history!
About
Touraj Daryaee is Professor of Ancient History at California
State University, Fullerton.
See:
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Academic page
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TourajDaryaee.com
* Sasanika.com
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