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.

[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.

[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