Interesting.

[bladespark]

If you've seen 300, well... I'm currently reading a wikipedia article on the battle of Thermopylae and it seems that the movie is actually rather more historically accuarate than one might think.

Comments

[graydown.livejournal.com]

I listened to one of the NPR ladies interviewing a classicist about the movie. The conversation was something like this: "So that part was just made up, right?"

"No, actually, that's pretty much word-for-word from Herodotus (http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.html)."

"But just focusing on the three hundred Spartans when there were thousands of other Greeks at the battle?"

"That's how the Greeks themselves told the story."

^_^

[daughterofhavok.livejournal.com]

300 is based off of a comic book that was loosely based off of the battle, so you can't really expect it to be too terribly accurate.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

No, see, the thing is that it IS accurate. Mostly. That's why I'm surprised. I know it's based on a comic book, so I expected it to not be accurate at all, in any way, but it's actually very accurate.

[jackalopejess.livejournal.com]

My dad said he'd just watched a documentary on that battle the other day. We were talking about how the Spartans were much better trained and armored and such, so that's how they managed. I think I might see the movie sometime.

[reaverta.livejournal.com]

Better training, better equipment, the other guy sent his cannon fodder in first, and their bodies got in the road when he finally sent in the crack troops.
Most significantly of all, they were exploiting a natural 'bottleneck' so that while they had only 300 men, the other guy could only bring 300 men to face against them too. It's a lot easier to fight 10,000 men if they can only bring 300 of those to bear at any one time... and that was straight into a greek phalanx that was physically impossible to outflank... >.>

Diabolically clever, really.

[malakim2099.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was actually fairly accurate. As a big Herodotus fan, I dig it. A lot of the small details Miller threw in were lame, as well as leaving out a lot of the other Greek city-states (particularly Athens)... but the actual BATTLE was pretty close.

Of course, Xerxes wasn't some BDSM eight-foot tall freaky man-god either. :p