* Portions of this article are based on a transcript of a public lecture delivered ex tempore at Hillsdale College, two months after the September 11 attacks, parts of which in turn were later published in the February 2002 issue of Imprimis.
CHAPTER 3
Raw, Relevant History:
From the 300 Spartans to the
History of Thucydides
Why the Public Is Still Fascinated by the Wars of the Past*
Real, Imagined, or Stylized Spartans?
WHILE, AS I argued in chapter 2, the study of classics can serve as a valuable foundation of military history, Greek and Latin nevertheless are difficult languages that require hundreds of hours of study, apart from the study of military history itself. And even in translation, the themes and ideas found in classical history, philosophy, and literature are not easy to digest. To study the Persian Wars is to enter a distant world of esoteric place names, unpronounceable nomenclature, and weird protocols presented by Herodotus or Plutarch as if they were second nature to the reader. A knowledge of the arcane disciplines of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, numismatics, and philology is often necessary just to make one’s way through the written record of the Greek past.
The result is that classics is often a mandarin discipline, as poorly understood by the general public as it is fascinating. Almost any effort, then, that brings the Greeks to the general public—vulgarization, as it is sometimes called—is to be welcomed. The public’s innate interest in our classical heritage sometimes manifests itself in surprising ways.
For example, on a Monday night in Hollywood in March 2007, I attended an advance screening of the Zack Snyder–directed movie 300, starring Gerard Butler as Leonidas, king of Sparta. The prior October, I had watched an earlier uncut working version of the film at the request of screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, who drove a copy down to my farm. I liked much of what I saw, and then wrote an introduction to the book accompanying the film. So I am not a disinterested observer.
I thought from the outset that many critics would dislike the final version of the film, for a variety of reasons, even aside from its unabashed defense of the Spartan notion of martial excellence and the superiority of a free Hellas over a subservient Persian East. At earlier prescreenings, for example, some Europeans apparently bristled at such Western chauvinism, came to the strange conclusion that the movie was an allegory for George Bush and Iraq, and were appalled that the Persians appeared both bent on conquest and less valiant, man for man, than the free Spartans guarding the pass. Quite understandably, the autocratic, authoritarian contemporary Iranian government subsequently railed that the film depicted ancient Persia as an autocratic authoritarian government.
The movie is certainly violent, with beheadings and lopped limbs aplenty. The characters are one-dimensional, with little complexity and no self-doubt or evolution in their thinking. And, of course, 300 does not claim to be the true story of the battle at Thermopylae but rather an adaptation from a comic book that is itself an adaptation from secondary books and films about the battle. While there are plenty of direct quotations from the accounts of Plutarch and Herodotus, we are nevertheless a long way from the last stand of the Spartans, Thespians, and Thebans in the late summer of 480 B.C. If you wish to learn the story of what actually happened at Thermopylae, this movie won’t necessarily help you do it.
But the impressionism of 300 is oddly Hellenic in spirit; the buff bare chests of the Spartans holding the pass are reminiscent of the “heroic nudity” of stylized warriors on Attic black- and red-figure vase paintings. Even in its surrealism—an ahistorical rhinoceros, futuristic odd-shaped swords, and an effeminate, Mr. Clean–esque Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who gets his ear flicked by a Spartan spear cast—it is not all that different from some of Euripides’ wilder dramatic adaptations, like his tragedy Helen or Iphigeneia at Taurus, in their strange deviation from the mythological party line of the Homeric epics.
Like the highly formalist Attic tragedy—with its set length, three actors, music, iambic and choral meters, and so forth—300 consciously abandons any claims of realist portrayal. The film’s actors may not seem believable, but remember that ancient Greek actors wore masks. Men played women’s roles. They chanted in lyric meters, broken up by choral hymns. The audience understood that dramatists reworked common myths to meet current tastes and to offer commentary on the human experience in stylized drama.
Again, 300 does not claim to follow exactly ancient accounts of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Instead, it is an impressionistic take on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, intended first to entertain and shock, and second to instruct. Indeed, at the real battle King Xerxes was bearded and sat on a throne high above the fighting; he wasn’t, as in the movie, bald and sexually ambiguous, and he didn’t prance around the killing field. And neither the traitor Ephialtes nor the Spartan overseers, the Ephors, were grotesquely deformed.
When the Greeks were surrounded on the battle’s last day, there were seven hundred Thespians and another four hundred Thebans who fought alongside the three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas. But these non-Spartans are scarcely prominent in the movie. All that said, the main story line mostly conveys the general truth of Thermopylae. A small contingent of Greeks at Thermopylae (which translates to “the hot gates”) really did block the enormous Persian army for three days before being betrayed. The defenders, as they are portrayed in the history of Herodotus and canonized in lyric poetry, claimed their fight was for the survival of a free people against subjugation by the Persian Empire.
Many of the film’s corniest lines—such as the Spartan dare “Come and take them,” when ordered by the Persians to hand over their weapons, and the Spartans’ flippant reply, “Then we will fight in the shade,” when warned that the cloud of Persian arrows will blot out the sun—are literal translations from ancient Greek accounts by Herodotus and Plutarch.
The warriors of 300 look like comic book heroes because they are based on Miller’s drawings, which emphasize bare torsos, futuristic swords, and staged fight scenes. In other words, director Zack Snyder tells the story not in the fashion of the mostly failed attempts to recapture the ancient world in costume dramas, such as Troy and Alexander, but in the surreal manner of a comic book or video game. Overt suspension of belief at the outset relieves the viewer from wondering whether the usual British-accented actors playing Greeks are all that close to their ancient counterparts.
The movie also demonstrates surprising affinity with Herodotus in two other areas. First, it captures the martial ethos of the Spartan state, the notion that the sum total of a man’s life, the ultimate arbiter of all success or failure, is how well he fought on the battlefield, especially when it becomes clear at last that bravery cannot prevent defeat.
Second, the Greeks, if we can believe Simonides, Aeschylus, and Herodotus, saw Thermopylae as a “clash of civilizations” that set Eastern centralism and collective serfdom against the idea of the free citizen of an autonomous polis. The ancient morality tale emphasized that a haughty imperious Xerxes was punished by the gods for trying, in hubristic fashion, to subjugate self-reliant and rather pious Greeks, whose creed was moderation, not superciliousness. That Hellenic-centric view comes through in the movie, especially in the fine performances of Butler and Lena Headey (who plays Leonidas’s wife, Gorgo). If the Spartans seem too cocky and self-assured in their belief that they are the more effective warriors of a superior culture, blame Herodotus, not necessarily Zack Snyder or the influence of cardboard comic heroes like Superman and Batman. The cinematography, acting, and computer-generated special effects are often quite stunning. The Spartans’ mood of defiance is chilling, especially when we remember that their gallant last stand ended in the greatest defeat in the history of Greek city-states—until Alexander ended their freedom 140 years later, at Chaironeia.
Some reviewers argue that the film’s graphic violence is gratuitous and at times revolting. But Thermopylae was no picnic. Almost all the Spa
rtans and Thespians were killed, along with several hundred from other Greek contingents. Some of the film’s most graphic killing—such as Persians being pushed over the cliff into the sea—derives also from the text of Herodotus. And the filmmakers omitted the mutilation of King Leonidas, whose head Xerxes ordered impaled on a stake.
Some have suggested that 300 is juvenile in its black-and-white plot and character depiction—and glorification—of free Greeks versus imperious Persians. Yet that good-bad contrast comes not entirely from Snyder or Miller, but again is based on accounts from the Greeks themselves, who saw their own society as antithetical to the monarchy of imperial Persia.
True, 2,500 years ago, almost every society in the ancient Mediterranean world had slaves. And all relegated women to a relatively inferior position. Sparta turned the entire region of Messenia into a dependent serf state. But in the Greek polis alone, there were elected governments, ranging from the constitutional oligarchy at Sparta to much broader-based voting in states like Athens and Thespiae.
Most important, only in Greece was there a constant tradition of unfettered expression and self-criticism. Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Plato questioned the subordinate position of women. Alcidamas lamented the notion of slavery. Such openness was found nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean world. That freedom of expression explains why we rightly consider the ancient Greeks as the founders of our present Western civilization—and as millions of moviegoers seemed to sense, far more like us than the ancient enemy who ultimately failed to conquer them. In the end, 300 went on to earn nearly five hundred million dollars in global box-office receipts, making it among the top one hundred grossing films of all time—a testament not only to its comic book splashy violence and video game imagery but also to an action-packed retelling of an ancient tale in which free men prevailed over their far more numerous oppressors.
Thucydides for Everyone
POPULAR INTEREST IN the Greeks at war occurs at a more serious level as well. As a teacher of classics for some twenty-one years in the Central Valley of California, I was often surprised that the ancient Greek historian Thucydides was among the most popular authors I assigned to undergraduates, the vast majority of whose parents had not attended college. “An Athenian, who wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians”—with those words of introduction, the disgraced Athenian admiral matter-of-factly opens The History of the Peloponnesian War, his monumental, though unfinished, narrative of the twenty-seven-year war (431–404 B.C.) between Athens and Sparta that left the Athenian empire and the entire culture of the Greek city-state in ruins.
Because he had lived through and participated in the events he described, Thucydides had an advantage over later historians, who have had to dig through unreliable records and consult secondary sources about the war. But even as he set down his record of contemporary events, Thucydides was eyeing posterity. His work, he boasted, was “not an essay to win applause of the moment, but a possession for all time.”
If his contemporaries failed to appreciate his true genius, perhaps people like ourselves would fathom it two and a half millennia in the future. And so we do. Studying how a seafaring democratic Athens fought an insular oligarchy like Sparta teaches us a lot about current world crises and the fickleness of public opinion. Thucydides knew nothing about conflict-resolution theory, God’s will, or the United Nations, but he could declare for all time that people—as the Athenians did to acquire and preserve their empire—go to war for reasons of “honor, fear and self-interest.” Period.
Thousands of paperback translations of Thucydides are sold each year, bearing out his extraordinary boast. But if his book, like other great works, is timeless, it is also very difficult, in places even obscure. A page of Thucydides takes as long to read as five of Tom Clancy. Thucydides doesn’t dispense easy virtues and won’t do a thing to get you into heaven. And his disturbing ideas turn every modern bromide on its head.
So it’s surprising that so many people read him at all—and in surprising places. There’s no reason to think a book by an ancient Greek would interest students at the California State University campus in Fresno, home to the wayward Bulldogs basketball team—once coached by the much maligned Jerry Tarkanian.
To generalize, most students are the children of farmworkers and the working poor from places like Bakersfield and Tulare. They are neither privileged nor well prepared for college. Their reference points come from television, not ballet, computer camp, or prep school. Many have never been outside the Central Valley—Thucydides’ Athens might as well be Athens, Georgia. Students here confuse Cleon, the Athenian demagogue, with a warrior race in Star Trek and think the Spartans are a rival San Jose football team, not dour foot soldiers from the Peloponnese.
At Stanford, where I did graduate work, Thucydides was an entirely different historian from the one I came to know in Fresno. The Thucydides of the graduate seminar is often now Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Hayden White all rolled into one. His book is the subject of many pages of jargon in which, for example, Pericles’ funeral oration is discussed as a dry rhetorical exercise that reflects subjective, not absolute, “truth,” or that can serve as a valuable “construction” that reveals the gender, class, and ethnic biases of Thucydides himself.
I prefer the analysis of the text offered by a Fresno State student I taught in a night class. “Sure, he might have lied a little,” he said. “Who doesn’t? And what do you expect? Thucydides with a tape recorder?”
Scholars and graduate students talk grandly of Thucydides “the realist,” whose bleak assessment of human nature was a valuable antithesis to romanticism. But this remote, literary language takes us far from the actual Thucydides, a hardheaded admiral whose judgments derive from firsthand experience and profound career disappointment. As a working mother at Fresno put it, “Thucydides might like Carter better, but he’d want Reagan dealing with the Russians.” Another student, an immigrant, agreed: “Be trusting with someone else’s life—not mine.”
Students in Fresno come to savor Thucydides as the disgraced commander too late to save the Athenian outpost at Amphipolis. In time they soak up the street fighting at Plataea, where the women and slaves “yelled from the houses and threw stones and tiles,” and root for the blood-hungry Athenians at the slaughter near Delium, who in their fury “fell into confusion in surrounding the enemy and mistook and killed each other.”
“I bet he killed a few himself to write like that,” observed one student, tattooed and scarred, in a humanities class. “It gets crazy like that in a free-for-all,” another added. When we discussed the slaughter of the Athenians on Sicily, which brought a pathetic end to the greatest generation of the greatest Greek city in its greatest age, one student urged me on: “Check it out. Don’t be afraid. Read it to us out aloud.” So I did:
The Peloponnesians also came down and butchered them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most fighting to have it.
If we’re to keep the ideas of ancient Greece alive, we must first rekindle the Hellenic spirit, for the two are inseparable. That spirit, though it may already be lost in the Ivy League, thrives here among students working at Burger King and among night-school returnees, who, once hooked on Thucydides’ blood and guts, then—but only then—begin to appreciate the power of his thought.
Students working off their tuition in places like Fresno, of course, don’t need the university to tell them how unique their own lives are and how richly diverse their past experiences are. But they welcome a tough guy like Thucydides, who shows how their brutal experiences are universal, even banal, and thus explicable through abstract canons that exist “for all time.” He is a storyteller first, an obtuse philosopher a distant second.
In an age like ours, in which setbacks and disappointments are often dealt without acceptance of the tragic nature of our existence, Thucydides’ honesty c
omes as a welcome touch of realism. With him there is no “feeling your pain,” no pretense of cheap compassion, and no easy apologies for what we are and what we have done. His description of the horrific plague at Athens is both scientific and gruesome, as he chronicles the social chaos in the manner of a physician reviewing symptoms, formulating a diagnosis, and offering a bleak cultural prognosis. His noble hero Pericles, Thucydides reminds us soon after his description of the plague, will die from the disease as well—ironic since the old man’s own inspired plan of withdrawing the population inside the walls of Athens will ensure the subsequent squalor that births the epidemic. Thucydides offers students of all races and classes the reassurance that, as humans, in many respects we are all more alike than we think. And in so doing, he offers wisdom about the present, but relief from it as well.
In central California, students naturally assume that Thucydides wrote his history from what he saw and did rather than from what he read, that he became a historian only because he could no longer be a warrior—that he was a man more like themselves than like their professors.
In Thucydides there is a soul every bit as powerful as his ideas. What has nearly killed classical learning is not too little but rather too much scholarly information, at the expense of unbridled enthusiasm about the unscholarly Greeks. In our eleventh hour of classics, we can often learn the most about Thucydides from those who still remain very much Thucydidean in their own lives.
* Parts of this essay derived from an article in the April 18, 1998 New York Times and an article in the March 7, 2007 City Journal (online edition).
Part II
Writing About War
CHAPTER 4
Thalatta! Thalatta!
The timeless attraction of Xenophon*
The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern Page 6
