At the beginning of director Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, we are told that that if the Spartans of ancient Greece decided that a newborn infant was physically unfit to grow up to be a warrior, they would throw him to his death. The baby we see onscreen doesn’t meet such a fate, but we do get to see a mound of infant skulls.

This sight leads me to contemplate my own beginnings. I was born prematurely, spent some time in an incubator, and suffered from eczema as an infant. While no one would ever mistake me for a warrior, I’ve led a healthy life and have never spent a night in a hospital since my infancy. But watching this scene in 300 makes me realize: if I had been born in Sparta in the 5th century B. C., I would have been killed like all the other “unfit” newborns.

I don’t find this to be a propitious opening for a movie.

Both the 300 graphic novel and the movie recount the story of the Battle of Thermopylae (translated as the “Hot Gates”) in 480 B. C., wherein King Leonidas of Sparta and three hundred soldiers sacrificed their lives in combat against the massively larger army of the Persian emperor Xerxes. But although Leonidas’s forces lost the battle, they inflicted surprisingly large losses on the Persian army.

Moreover, the Three Hundred’s brave resistance at Thermopylae became an inspirational story, as Miller shows in 300 through his emphasis on the role of Dilios, the soldier turned storyteller. Before the climactic battle, Miller’s Leonidas observes that Dilios has “a talent unlike any other Spartan.” Though Leonidas and Miller do not spell it out, it is that Dilios is a storyteller, a creative artist, in effect. Leonidas commands Dilios to “make every Greek know what happened here. You’ll have a grand tale to tell. A tale of victory.” Dilios appears in 300’s framing sequence in his role as storyteller, and most of Miller’s 300 is thus presented as the “grand tale” that Dilios tells to all of Greece, and to generations yet unborn.

This reminds me of the end of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the dying title character prevents his friend Horatio from committing suicide, and instructs him to live on and to tell Hamlet’s story; immediately after Hamlet’s death, we see Horatio begin his task, telling what happened to the newly arrived prince Fortinbras. There’s a similar idea at work in the end of the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot, in which King Arthur, just prior to his final battle, knights a young boy and imposers a different sort of quest upon him: to leave the battlefield and devote his life to spreading the legend of Camelot.

The saga of Thermopylae was not only conveyed through succeeding centuries by historians but also through references by poets including Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot. Miller surely identifies with the warrior king Leonidas. Though he looks considerably younger in the movie, the 300 graphic novel establishes that Leonidas is in his fifties. Hence, he is yet another of Miller’s middle-aged heroes facing his last battle, like the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns and Hartigan in Sin City: That Yellow Bastard. But surely Miller also identifies with Dilios, since they are both artists telling the “grand tale” of the Three Hundred.

My question is just how well 300 succeeds in communicating the heroic spirit of the Thermopylae saga. Through the way in which they present their story, do Miller and Snyder distort the inspirational message they seek to convey? How justifiable is their idealization of the Spartans of 300, who, among other things, practice infanticide? I admired the graphic novel, though I never felt the affinity for it that I have to Miller’s 1980s work. The movie, however, through dramatizing and amplifying them, made me more aware of the troubling aspects of the book.

For example, take the infanticide business. In the graphic novel, this is dealt with in two tiny panels in Chapter Three. “We are born. We are inspected,” reads Dilios’s narration for a small panel showing a newborn who is mostly concealed from our sight by two enormous adult hands. Just what are those hands doing to the infant’s eyes? Is that blood? And why use the word “inspected,” as if human babies were livestock? Then, in the next panel, the narrator tells us, “If we are small or puny or sickly or misshapen, we are discarded.” We see the silhouetted figure of a man, standing on a silhouetted cliff, dropping a silhouetted baby from it. The small size of the panel deemphasizes the scene’s dramatic importance; the silhouettes prevent us from seeing clearly what is happening; and the word “discarded,” as George Orwell would point out, suggests that nothing more is happening than tossing out the trash. But what is really going on is the murder of a baby.

In the movie Zack Snyder can’t vary the size of the “panels,” and so the image of the adult “inspecting” the baby atop the precipice fills the screen. Not surprisingly, Snyder did not show the baby being dropped, but we see the remains of those who were killed before him.

I am reminded of 24, a television series which I otherwise enjoy, but which has reversed what I had thought was an immutable principle of entertainment. In stories it is the Bad Guys who torture. Indeed, in the most recent episode (April 21) of the commendable new Robin Hood series on BBC America, Robin’s servant Much is horrified that Robin intends to torture his foe, the traitor Sir Guy of Gisborne, and Robin does not go through with it. I presume that the series’ writers and producers had the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in mind, but I wonder if they were also thinking of 24, in which hero Jack Bauer tortures people without hesitation. In 300 the Good Guys kill babies, and there is no hint in either the movie or the graphic novel that this sullies the Spartans’ heroic reputation.

Actually, Wikipedia states that the babies “were abandoned on the slopes of Mt. Taygetos to die”. The 300 book actually makes matters worse by showing an adult actively killing a baby by dropping him off the cliff!

Miller has stated in numerous interviews that he was inspired to create 300 by seeing a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae called The 300 Spartans (1962) when he was a boy. That was the last movie version of the “grand tale” until 300, nearly a half century later. Obviously, the “grand tale” had faded from American consciousness in the interim.

Indeed, my understanding is that in the later decades of the last century, interest in ancient Greece and Rome declined in American schools, but it was still going strong when I was growing up. There were casts of the Elgin Marbles, the frieze from the Parthenon, on the interior walls of the prep school I attended; I wish I had appreciated them more at the time. What I did love since childhood were John Singer Sargent’s murals of gods, heroes and even monsters from Greek mythology above the grand staircase at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts: they fired my childhood interest in mythology, which would lead to my lifelong fascination with deciphering the mythic archetypes in comics. And it was in grade school that I first learned about the two great rival city-states of ancient Greece: Sparta and Athens. Right from the start, I felt an affinity for the intellectual Athenians and didn’t much care for the warlike Spartans.

As I’ve been observing for the last few weeks in this column, fashions shift over time, and perhaps now in the early 21st century American interest in
classical culture is resurging. There was HBO and the BBC’s recent Rome television series, for one thing. (The 300 movie, I suspect, is less a sign of renewed interest in Greek history than of the growing cultural influence of the graphic novel.)

Back in 1949, a director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to convert its Roman court into a restaurant, thereby halving the space available for displaying the museum’s collection of ancient Greek and Roman art. This month the Metropolitan reopened the newly renovated Roman Court, transformed into a spacious sunlit showcase for Roman statuary. Turn immediately to the left as you enter, and you will find a bust of Herodotus, the “Father of History” (3480-430/420 B. C.), the Greek author who is the original source for 300’s saga of the Battle of Thermopylae.

In 2001 the Onassis Cultural Center, which presents temporary exhibitions of ancient Greek art, opened in midtown Manhattan. Its current show, running though May 12, is, appropriately for this column, “Athens-Sparta,” which compares and contrasts the two city-states through artwork from both city-states. There is a large marble statue of a hoplite, or Greek soldier, who is said to be Leonidas himself, and the exhibit includes arrowheads and spearheads that were found in the battleground of Thermopylae.

But the opening wall text in the exhibit reminded me just why, even as a child, I preferred Athens to Sparta. Noting Sparta’s “strict training of its citizens,” the text states that Sparta’s “primary concern” was “the creation and maintenance of a mighty military force.” In contrast, Athens, was “imbued with a progressive worldview that promoted the individual” and “took a totally different direction that led to major intellectual and artistic achievements as well as to the unique phenomenon of the Athenian democracy, making the city the most important cultural center in the Hellenic world until the Roman Age.”

The wall texts in the Metropolitan’s new Greek galleries trace the cultural history of Athens, depicting the reign of Pericles in the 5th century B.C. as a Golden Age that produced extraordinary achievements in philosophy, democratic government, architecture, sculpture, science, philosophy, and literature. These wall texts ignore Sparta.

The Onassis Cultural Center’s show seeks to correct the imbalance by presenting works of art from Sparta. But, according to one of the show’s wall texts, ““From the mid-sixth century B.C. this burgeoning of the arts began to wane. . .The adverse domestic situation that had begun to take shape, with the gradual decline in the economy and trade, led to Sparta’s alienation from the rest of the world and to the dwindling of interest in the arts.” That “dwindling” strikes me as less ominous than Sparta’s “alienation from the rest of the world,” which seems an unhealthy attitude to have.

It also occurs to me that choosing between Sparta and Athens may be something like the red state/blue state split in contemporary American politics. The Onassis show does characterize the militaristic Sparta as “conservative and restrained” in a wall text, whereas Athens, presumably liberal by contrast, was the birthplace of democracy.

Considering my childhood affinity for ancient Athens, the leading cultural center of its time, it makes sense that I ended up spending most of my life in New York City, the cultural capital of the United States, and perhaps the world, filled with museums, theaters, publishers and educational institutions.

Athens was also the birthplace of drama, home in the fifth century B.C. to the first great authors of tragedy, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the first great comic playwright, Aristophanes. With my own lifelong passion for storytelling in a variety of forms–novels, plays, movies, and, yes, comics–it’s no wonder that I regard Athens as a cultural Camelot of the ancient world. Why, wouldn’t anyone who loves storytelling feel the same way?

On the basis of 300, apparently not. Here’s Leonidas talking to the Persian messenger early in the 300 graphic novel: “Rumor has it that the Athenians have already turned you down, and if those boy-lovers found that kind of nerve. . . .” So here’s the Athenian civilization dismissed with a homophobic jibe.

It also turns out to be hypocritical on the part of the fictionalized Leonidas, although you wouldn’t know this from either the graphic novel or the movie.
Referring to 300’s seeming characterization of Xerxes as gay, academic Ephraim Lytle of the University of Toronto comments, “This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan’s education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb ‘to Spartanize’ meant ‘to bugger.’”. Not only that, but according to Wikipedia, “In antiquity it was thought that a youth was expected to find himself an older lover, and that pederasty, a social practice common throughout most of Greece, was especially so in Sparta, where the ephors fined any eligible man who did not have chaste relationships with youths”.

As for heterosexuality in Sparta, by law each Spartan man had to marry a woman when he was twenty. According to the aforementioned Wikipedia entry, the wedding ceremony “consisted of the intended bride being abducted with simulated violence.” Doesn’t seem very loving, does it? But wait, there’s more. Wikipedia continues, “After the wedding night the husband remained living in his barracks and would have no further contact with his wife except for the purpose of procreation.” (Actually, as a lapsed Catholic, I’d have to say this isn’t that different from the Church’s traditional position on marital sex.) And what effect might that have on the psychological well-being of any straight young Spartan? No wonder they sublimated their libidos into the violence of warfare.

By the way, while the Onassis show acknowledges the “Spartan supremacy on land,” the Athenians were no slouches, despite their lack of a militaristic culture. The main villain in 300 is the Persian ruler Xerxes, whose father, Darius, did indeed intend “to create a worldwide empire,” according to the Onassis wall texts, which further state that Darius’s army “marched onto Marathon, where, despite being outnumbered four to one, Greek troops led by the Athenian general Miltiades achieved a remarkable victory over the Persians” in 490 B. C.. Lytle points out that while the Spartans were facing Xerxes’ troops at Thermopylae ten years later, “a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, ” In the 300 graphic novel Miller has Dilios acknowledge that “In the waters of Salamis, Athenian seafaring mastery led the united Greek navy to shatter the Persian armada.”

But look how Dilios describes the Athenians’ triumph at Marathon in the 300 book. “Armored men, Athenians, with their leather skirts and lovingly sculpted breastplates. What a pretty pack they must have been! Athenians. Amateurs. Foppish, frilly citizen soldiers. . . . and still they drove the Persians back to the sea and away!. . .How can we fail–against foes so fearful of combat they’d show their backside to Athenians?”

How many things are wrong with this? Rather than commend the Athenians for their courage and battle prowess in defeating the Persians, Dilios disparages them by “feminizing” their image, as if he were some bigoted adolescent saying, “They are SO gay!” (Of course, in contrast to the Athenians in “skirts,” the Spartan soldiers of 300 walk around virtually naked, but we’ll get to that later.)

Of course, if the Persians are supposedly such cowards that even the allegedly incompetent and girly Athenians could put them to flight, then the Battle of Thermopylae is really not such a big deal, right?

There’s something more subtle that I find disturbing, as well. In 300 Dilios and Leonidas speak condescendingly about the “citizen soldiers” from other Greek city-states, whom Dilios calls “amateurs.” When Leonidas encounters the Arcadian army in 300, he asks various Arcadians what their professions are. There is a sculptor, a blacksmith, and as baker, all creative artists of one sort or another. Leonidas and Dilios, however, prefer the Spartans’ full time professional army: “You see, old friend,” Leonidas says, “I brought more soldiers than you did.”

My father fought in World War II. He was an engineer, not a professional soldier. The vast majority of American soldiers in World War II were ordinary people who were drafted or who enlisted out of patriotism, not career soldiers, and yet they won the war. Amazing, eh? In fact, movies about World War II, those made during the war and right up through Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), celebrate the courage and endurance and skill of these “citizen soldiers”; you may recall that Tom Hanks’ character in Ryan was a schoolteacher in civilian life. In fact, this celebration of the “citizen soldier” seemed to be a celebration of the democratic spirit of America.

But 300 turns this ideal upside down. “Citizen soldiers” may be “brave,” as Dilios acknowledges, but 300 argues that they should leave the real fighting to the pros.

So, thus far 300 has badmouthed my dad’s wartime service and thrown me over a cliff. This is not looking good.

Well, what if I had been born in ancient Sparta and I hadn’t immediately been thrown over the cliff? According to the graphic novel, in Dilius’s words, “we are starved, driven to steal, and fight and kill. We are tested, tossed into the wild, left to pit our wits and will against nature’s fury. By rod and lash, we are punished, trained to show no pain.”

It seems that this is more or less true. According to Wikipedia Spartan boys started their compulsory military training, called agoge, at the age of seven (!), which “consisted for the most part in physical exercises, such as dancing, gymnastics, and ball-games.” That doesn’t seem so bad, but consider this. The kids also had to run what was called the gauntlet: “They would have to run around a group of older children, who would flog them continually with whips, sometimes to death.” And I thought the bullying I endured in grade school was bad. So had I not been thrown over the cliff, this is where I’d get killed.

Following the agoge “a select few young men were arranged into groups, and were sent off into the countryside with nothing, and were expected to survive on wits and cunning” and, yes, were expected to steal. Professor Lytle states that Spartan boys “were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground.”

So, from the age of seven, all Spartan boys are set on the same mandatory career path, and they remained full time soldiers until they were thirty. There doesn’t seem to have been the opportunity for someone like myself to become a scholar or a writer. If Frank Miller had been born in ancient Sparta, presumably he wouldn’t have been able to become an artist.

But wait! If all the men are soldiers, then who performs all the other jobs in Sparta? It’s not the women, who, even though they had more freedom than the women of other Greek city-states, were still confined to managing the home. Citizens made their money from their land, which was farmed by the helots, a class that Wikipedia compares to medieval serfs, who made up ninety percent of the Spartan population. Not only did helots have no civil rights, but according to Professor Lytle, the initiation rite for young Spartan soldiers consisted of “murdering unarmed helots.” Lytle dryly observes that “By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job. . . .” Before the Fifth Century B.C. Sparta pursued what the Onassis show calls an “expansionist foreign policy”: the helots were descendants of the other Greeks they conquered.

So, in the graphic novel Leonidas says on the eve of the Battle of Thermopylae that “Come tomorrow, we light a fire that will burn in the hearts of free men for all the centuries yet to be.” Miller’s Leonidas is well aware that he is the impelling force behind the “grand tale.” But just how free are the people of Sparta? They may not be under foreign domination, but ninety percent of the people living in Sparta are effectively slaves. Spartan male citizens are forced to become part of the military machine. And how much freedom did those abandoned infants experience?

Wikipedia states, “ From the earliest days of the Spartan citizen, the claim on his life by the state was absolute and strictly enforced.” Isn’t this the kind of overbearing government, restricting individual freedom, that Miller presents as the enemy in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (see “Comics in Context” #30-31, 34), Elektra: Assassin, Sin City, and the Martha Washington books?

Notice that right after Leonidas makes that speech about “the hearts of free men,” one of his subjects says, “We’re with you, sir, to the death,” and Leonidas replies, “I didn’t ask. Leave democracy to the Athenians, boy.” So much for liberty.

I shouldn’t go further without dealing with some unfinished business. I never did complete my discussion of the neo-noir movie Frank Miller’s Sin City and the graphic novels on which it is based (see “Comics in Context” #78-79, 83), and I should at least wrap up the storyline about Marv, The Hard Goodbye. Perhaps it’s just as well that I waited, because some things I’ve written about in subsequent columns have added to my understanding of Sin City, and that in turn helps illuminate the meanings of 300.

In The Hard Goodbye the brutish Marv is trying to find out who is responsible for the murder of Goldie, the one woman he says ever showed him kindness, and to avenge her. (Actually, Marv’s mother, his female parole officer, and his fried Nancy the stripper all like him, too; what Marv, who is grotesquely ugly, means is that Goldie is the only one who would have sex with him.) I left off just before Goldie seemingly returns from the dead to try to kill Marv, repeatedly hitting him with her car.

This isn’t Goldie resurrected, but her twin sister Wendy, who soon finds out that Marv didn’t kill Goldie and becomes his ally. It was clever of Miller to introduce Wendy, because she serves several important purposes. First, when she first appears, and is trying to kill Marv, she represents Marv’s own sense of guilt over Goldie’s death. When he discovered she was dead, he blamed himself for having lain there obliviously drunk and asleep next to her when the murderer struck. The male protagonists of the Sin City movie are driven by a kind of chivalry: they regard it as their duty to protect women, even though the women in some cases are quite capable of defending themselves. It’s possible that in beating up, torturing and killing various antagonists in his quest to avenge Goldie’s murder, Marv is displacing his own sense of guilt onto the various members of this conspiracy. In punishing them, he feels less guilty. Then again, perhaps his sense of guilt is on reason why it’s appropriate that Marv ends up in the electric chair: he subconsciously may feel that he must be punished, too.

Second, Wendy’s role in the story underlines the extent to which Marv’s Goldie is not so much the real person as a figment of his imagination. At first Marv thinks that Wendy is Goldie, and even after he learns the truth, he continues to confuse one for the other. In a sense Wendy is no more Marv’s Goldie than the real Goldie was. The Goldie he is in love with, whom he seeks to avenge, is his image of the ideal woman, which he projects onto the real Goldie. Even as he learns Goldie’s true motivations, and that she wasn’t in love with him, he keeps saying that it doesn’t matter: he is still loyal to the death to his idealized conception of Goldie, and he won’t let facts get in the way.

When Wendy visits Marv on death row just before his execution, he thinks again that she is Goldie. And at this point, symbolically she is: Wendy is expressing the gratitude to Marv that presumably Goldie would have felt had she lived.

Recently watching the Sin City movie again on television, I connected it with my long commentary on Dr. Peter Coogan’s book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (see “Comics in Context” #162-166). (See, I warned you that this book would keep popping up in my column.) Coogan pointed out that superhero stories fit into the literary mode that the late Northrop Frye designated in his book, Anatomy of Criticism, as “romance.” By that term Frye meant a story of extraordinary adventure in which the protagonist is “superior in degree to other men and to his environment,” but is still a human being, who “moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended.”

This explains some of the improbable things in Miller’s Sin City comics, which seem even more improbable on the movie screen. Wendy repeatedly hits Marv with her car, yet he suffers no serious injury, and is barely slowed down. Ultimately Marv is sentenced to the electric chair, but not only survives the first electrocution, but is able to mock his captors: it takes two to kill him.

But if you perceive Marv as a hero of “romance” who is somehow “superior in degree to other men” and the world around him, and who exists in a world “in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended,” it makes sense. Sin City sends mixed signals, since the setting, the urban underworld, is what Frye would consider a “low mimetic” milieu, in which we would not expect blatant elements of fantasy. Nor do we expect the characters of film noir to be stronger or more resistant to injury than normal people. But although Marv is not a character in the superhero genre, he is to some degree superhuman, and in my earlier review I compared him to the Hulk, both physically and temperamentally.

Since Sin City is a Frye-style romance, that also explains the odd science-fiction element: in That Yellow Bastard Hartigan shoots off Roark, Junior’s hand and genitals, but unusual treatments somehow enable him to grow them back! This may also explain certain characters’ resistance to bullets. Hartigan can sever Roark Junior’s hand and genitals with a single gunshot apiece, yet in the same scene Hartigan is shot repeatedly, without losing any body parts, and, despite his heart trouble, manages to survive. This is why the serial killer in The Hard Goodbye, who looks like an ordinary preppie, displays strength, agility and speed on the verge of impossibility.

There are also elements of Frye-style romance in 300, especially the movie. As I reported in this column, at last year’s San Diego Con, Miller “pointed out that sometimes Snyder changed the speed of the cameras to make the Spartans look ‘superhuman’ during the fighting” (see “Comics in Context” #146). In the movie one of the principal Spartans is impaled by a spear and nonetheless manages to keep on slaying enemies until he finally dies: he too is “superhuman.”

In that Robin Hood episode I mentioned, Much does not want his master, Robin, to lower himself to the moral level of the bad guys by torturing Gisborne. In The Hard Goodbye Marv not only kills people but tortures antagonists in the course of his quest for vengeance. Marv even cuts off the arms and legs of the cannibalistic serial killer in Hard Goodbye and lets a dog eat him. Hartigan tears off the Yellow Bastard’s new genitals with his bare hand and then kills the Bastard by beating his head to a literal pulp. However awful their antagonists’ actions, surely Marv and Hartigan have gone beyond the bounds of moral justification in taking their revenge.

Marv ends up being killed in the electric chair, and Hartigan commits suicide. I wondered whether Miller gave them these fates as an acknowledgment that Marv and Hartigan had each gone too far, and had to suffer punishment themselves. They were both like the classic hero whose violence ensures the safety of society, but for that very reason cannot be a part of it: that’s why Alan Moore’s V effectively commits suicide, leaving Evey to guide a new, freer British society.

Is this the subtext of Miller’s 300? Are we meant to be horrified by the Spartans’ militaristic society? Are they sacrificing themselves, like V, in order to assure the rise of a better world, of which they could never be part? Does Miller mean us to deconstruct 300 in this way? Or does he mean for us to accept his heroic portrait of the Spartans at face value, warts and all, offering no moral condemnation of those warts? Are we meant to excuse Marv’s and Hartigan’s violent excesses, as well? We shall look into this further in the near future.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
This spring Art Spiegelman has been an artist-in-residence at my alma mater, Columbia University. For the latest edition of Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week, I wrote a report on a lecture that Spiegelman recently delivered on campus.

And congratulations to fellow Quick Stop columnist Fred Hembeck, whose column will celebrate its hundredth anniversary within the coming week!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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