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Let’s talk about the movie 300 for a moment then get down to what the actual shit went down at the Battle of Thermopylae. Yeah the film ain’t at all accurate and is also racist as fuck. But! But! Maybe Dilios is an unreliable narrator who of course would be expected to laud his homeland while demonizing the invaders. Okay. Maybe. But maybe a huge swath of the audience doesn’t do nuance for shit. They just watched it and said fuck yeah Spartans are the saviors of beautiful white people freedom n’ murica.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 20, 480 BCE--
It’s debated as to whether shit went down on August 20 or September 8, 480 BCE, but I had a good story for the latter already picked and here we are. Okay. Sparta was a city state in ancient Greece, and they were dicks. You don’t become a dominant military power without being a dick. It’s just how it works. Spartans were also a minority, and they had all these great freedoms and shit for themselves while enslaving the majority Helots to do all the real work so they could play six-pack-ab soldier impenetrable phalanx something something.
There was a naval battle at the same time at Artemisium that was kinda sorta a tie … maybe Persia won. The big Greek naval victory that came a month later at Salamis got a 300 sequel starring Eva Green. The Battle of Thermopylae did take place at a highly defensible narrow pass on the coast called the Hot Gates, named after a local hot spring, but no one was there to do any hot tubbing. And they would have needed much bigger than a 300-person hot tub. A force of 7,000 various Greeks held it for a week against 100,000 or so Persians.
Leonidas was running the show while wearing body armor and not showing off a sick set of Gerard Butler abs. His forces killed about 20,000 Persians, so the Greek dealing of megadeath in the film is accurate. But when Leonidas saw they were being outflanked he said everyone get the fuck out we’ll hold the rear so you can escape. That valiant last stand of a rearguard action is where the tale of the 300 Spartans comes from, but there was also a bunch of Thespians and Helots and Thebans who stayed behind with them. The Thebans mostly surrendered but the rest of the Greeks who remained fought to the death to allow a couple thousand other Greeks time to escape so they could live to kick Persian ass another day.
If Zack Snyder wanted to do a trilogy of movies, he could cover the Battle of Plataea. It’s that final scene in the first film that happened a year after Thermopylae when a force of 80,000 Greeks obliterated a (probably) larger force of Persians, ending the latter’s imperial expansions into the region.
The present-day location of the Battle of Thermopylae has a major highway running through the middle of it.
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