Litt mer om filmen “300″. (Se også den tidligere posten om filmen: “300″: Spartansk selvmordsoppdrag)

På nettsiden Real Clear Politics (som samler engelskspråklige kommentarartikler i en blogglignende form) skriver historikeren og klassisisten Victor Davis Hanson om hva som stemmer og hva som er galt - historisk sett - i “300″.

Hanson påpeker flere feil, men er likevel gjennomgående positiv til filmen. Han skjønner at dette først og fremst er en mytologisert fiksjon, for å si det slik. Men altså:

Indeed, at the real battle, there weren’t rhinoceroses or elephants in the Persian army. Their king, Xerxes, was bearded and sat on a throne high above the battle; 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 700 Thespians and another 400 Thebans who fought alongside the 300 Spartans under King Leonidas. But these non-Spartans are scarcely prominent in the movie.

Still, the main story line mostly conveys the message of Thermopylae.

(…)

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, or the Spartans’ flippant reply, “Then we will fight in the shade,” when warned that Persian arrows will blot out the sun - actually come from ancient accounts by Herodotus and Plutarch.

Som sagt viser Hanson forståelse for fiksjonelementet. Han skriver blant annet:

The Greeks themselves often embraced such impressionistic adaptation. Ancient vase painters sometimes did not portray soldiers accurately in their bulky armor. Instead, they used “heroic nudity” to show the contours of the human body.

Similarly, Athenian tragedies that depicted stories of war employed contrivances every bit as imaginative as those in “300.” Actors wore masks. Men played women’s roles. They chanted in set meters, broken up by choral hymns. The audience understood that dramatists reworked common myths to meet current tastes and offer commentary on the human experience.

En detalj som filmen ikke videreformidler, er lemlestingen av den spartanske kongen - Leonidas - etter at perserne hadde nedkjempet de 300 + allierte. Men Leonidas fikk hodet kuttet av post mortem. Xerxes beordret det plassert på en stake.

Mange filmkritikere har påpekt den “tegneserieaktige” (sic) forenklingen, at historien er delt opp i god vs. ond. Hansons kommentar:

But that good/bad contrast comes not from the director or Frank Miller, but 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 importantly, 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.

Derfor - mener Hanson - er det tross alt gode grunner til å holde med spartanerne, til tross for deres erkekrigerske innstilling.