More people need to pay attention in history class..
Peloponessian war was with Athens and Sparta.
300 is a 2007 film adaptation of the graphic novel 300 by Frank Miller, itself partly inspired by another film, The 300 Spartans,[1] and is a semi-historical account of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC.
"quoted from other source"
Historical accuracy The film's director Zack Snyder states that "The events are 90 percent accurate. It's just in the visualization that it's crazy... I've shown this movie to world-****historians who have said it's amazing. They can't believe it's as accurate as it is." He continues that the film is "an opera, not a documentary".[69]
Snyder describes the film's narrator, Dilios, as "a guy who knows how not to wreck a good story with truth."[13] Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History at Cambridge University, advised the filmmakers on the pronunciation of Greek names, and states that they "made good use" of his published work on Sparta. He praises the film for its portrayal of "the Spartans' heroic code," and of "the key role played by women in backing up, indeed reinforcing, the male martial code of heroic honor," while expressing reservations about its "'West' (goodies) vs 'East' (baddies) polarization."[70]
However, Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of Hellenistic History at the University of Toronto, states that 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society in a "problematic and disturbing" fashion, as well as portraying the Persians as monsters and non-Spartan Greeks as weak. He suggests that the film's moral universe would have seemed as "bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians."[71] Military historian Victor Davis Hanson, who wrote the foreword to a 2007 re-issue of the graphic novel, states that the film demonstrates a specific affinity with the original material of Herodotus in that it captures the martial ethos of ancient Sparta and represents Thermopylae as a "clash of civilizations".
He remarks that Simonides, Aeschylus and Herodotus viewed Thermopylae as a battle against "Eastern centralism and collective serfdom" which opposed "the idea of the free citizen of an autonomous polis".[72]. He further states that the film portrays the battle in a "surreal" manner, and that the intent was to "entertain and shock first, and instruct second."[73]
However, Touraj Daryaee, associate professor of Ancient History at California State University, Fullerton, criticizes the central theme of the movie, that of "free" and "democracy loving" Spartans against "slave" Persians. Daryaee states that the Achaemenid (Persian) empire hired and paid people regardless of their sex or ethnicity, whereas in fifth-century Greece "less than 14%" of the population participated in democratic government, and "nearly 37%" of the population were slaves. He further states that Sparta "was a military monarchy, not a democracy," and collectively owned slaves (the Helots).[74]
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