Bless the Toronto Star.

I haven’t seen the movie the 300, that’s on Thursday’s agenda, but the battle for the audience’s hearts and minds just won’t end.

The Toronto Star panned the movie the 300 as a Full Bore-Gore in its official review which has done absolutely nothing to turn the tide against this block buster. So I suppose the entertainment editorial department at the Toronto came to an executive collective decision to make the rounds of the Classics department at University of Toronto to locate an ‘expert’ to pronounce judgment against the 300 and by extension the ancient Spartans. I suspect international renowned classical historian, Victor Davis Hanson, wasn’t in their budget or their worldview. Anyhow, check it out:

Sparta? No. This is madness

An expert assesses the gruesome new epic
The battle of Thermopylae was real, but how real is 300? Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, has seen the movie and offers his view.

History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.

What’s laughable is the full on politicization of this film and the deadly earnestness of its critics. The point that the critics and the good assistant professor seem to miss is that this is not the celluloid dramatizing of a historical event but the recreation of a comic book story come to life on the silver screen.

But it gets better.

No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.

This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.

But Lytle is right about history being altered all the time, and it does matter how and why it is altered. If one understands that, it’s easy to comprehend why so many “liberals” have their knickers tied up in knots over the success of this movie or any idealization of ancient Sparta. Victor Davis Hanson succinctly sums up the liberal moral unease with the 300 review.

But most importantly, 300 preserves the spirit of the Thermopylae story. The Spartans, quoting lines known from Herodotus and themes from the lyric poets, profess unswerving loyalty to a free Greece. They will never kow-tow to the Persians, preferring to die on their feet than live on their knees.

If critics think that 300 reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny, they should reread carefully ancient accounts and then blame Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus — who long ago boasted that Greek freedom was on trial against Persian autocracy, free men in superior fashion dying for their liberty, their enslaved enemies being whipped to enslave others.

In truth, one good course on life in ancient Sparta would take the gloss off most male admirers of ancient Sparta though women might take a slightly different view. The Spartans granted their women access to education and property rights, as well as encouraging Spartan women to take multiple lovers in addition to their husbands. I suspect that would go a long way in easing life in the hovel.

As far as most ancient Greeks trading their homes in Athens for a hovel in Sparta - I defer to the judgment of Aristotle who once remarked; it was better to be a slave in Athens than an Athenian woman. Personally, I would take the hovel in Sparta where I could stand on my feet as a free Spartan woman. And woe-be-tide the husband or lover who incurred my wrath as I might just be inclined not to pay the mess hall fees.