Likewise, the Spartans brought their own armor ‘for their own sake’ (cf. 234.41) that individual Spartans painted their shields with a variety of individual devices. Each Spartan in the film has an identical shield with an identical lambda (Λ) on it, but we actually know (Plut. What’s interesting here is that Frank Miller and Zach Snyder have taken such pains to emphasize the identical nature of each of these men to the point of breaking with things we know about them. This image of neatly identical Spartans is decidedly a-historical. When 300 shows us the Spartans living in town, they look like this: It’s hard to capture this in a still screen shot, but as the camera pans in a circle around the main characters, there are at least 10 Spartans, dressed exactly like the two in the back, all milling around.Īnd in on the march, they look like this: It’s strange – the ancient sources portray the Spartiates, if anything, as a bit vain, combing out their hair before battle, decorating their shields and so on. But let’s put in the effort – if just so that I’m not accused of attacking a straw-man. Visual language in film is, if anything, more powerful than dialogue, but it can be harder to really pin down. Rather, what they tend to do is show us that it is. Now, 300 – and indeed, many pop-culture representations of Sparta – do not always tell us in words that Spartan society was equal. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings. I sometimes have mid-week updates, time permitting, but obviously my day job comes first – especially now that classes have started.Īs always, a helpful glossary of terms is here if you need it, but I’ll be defining things as we go, so you should be a-ok.Īs always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon. We’ll do this first by looking at the various classes of people in Sparta – citizens, non-citizens and slaves – and then by looking at the issue of wealth equality among the Spartan citizenry.Ī helpful note to any new readers – this series seems to be reaching a lot of first time folks (welcome!) – Collections are part of my regular update schedule every Friday, so part III of this series will appear next Friday and so on. This week, we’re going to expand our look at Spartan society and examine the claim of Spartan Equality. We also found that the Spartan agoge was more like a child-soldier training program – something out of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda – than any kind of education system as we understand it. We found that our sources look nothing like the grizzled veterans who narrate films like 300, being instead mostly wealthy (and snobbish!) Greeks from outside of Sparta. Last week we took a look at our sources for Sparta and then examined the Spartan child-training system, the agoge. This is Part II of our seven part look at Sparta ( I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, Gloss., Retrospective).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |