Last Stand of the 300 (2007)
Last Stand of the 300 (The History Channel, 2007). This documentary originally aired around the theatrical release of the feature film 300. The documentary tells the story of the battle of Thermopylae, where the Spartan king Leonidas and a small force of picked Greek soldiers fought to the death to hold a narrow pass against an invading Persian army. It aims at being historically accurate, yet its main interpretative theme (emphasizing the heroic sacrifice of the Greeks) results mostly in reinforcing old myths of Western cultural superiority.
Throughout much of Western history, the Persian Wars have been celebrated as the triumph of “free men” over enslaved subjects, of Western liberty over Eastern despotism: the sacrifice at Thermopylae representing the first blow in a struggle that Alexander the Great finished a century later. In its need to find meaning of the ancient conflict for our world today, Last Stand of the 300 offers the dubious generalization that the Greeks represented a direct line to modern democracy and that a Persian victory would have destroyed liberty in Western culture. The Persian Wars are positioned as the birth of Greek “nationalism” in the contemporary sense—completely overlooking the subsequent Peloponnesian War and centuries of divisive wars between the successors to Alexander the Great that kept Greek civilization fragmented.
What is particularly ironic about the film’s conclusions is that most of the scripted narration contradicts such simplistic notions. The documentary quite rightly emphasizes the importance of Greek naval victories over the Persian fleet, without which the Persians could not sustain such a large army in the field. Earlier portions of the film describe in depth the undemocratic nature of Spartan society: warrior elites, Helot slaves, exposure of unhealthy infants, and brutal physical education for children. While the Spartans may have been the first culture clearly to develop a notion of citizenship, it was hardly the democratic and individualistic citizenship we think of today. A Persian conquest of Greece would not have interfered with the development of the Roman Republic—the source for a much greater portion of modern representative government. When the American Founders talked of free government, they talked a lot about ancient Rome and very little about ancient Greece.
This documentary relies heavily on dramatic recreations. While there is quite a bit of sound, there really is not spoken dialogue. Voice-over narration provides almost all information. Three on-screen commentators provide additional insights. Most prominent is Stephen Pressfield, author of the successful historical fiction novel Gates of Fire. Visually, the film is mixed. The dramatic recreations are quite striking, evocative of the cinematic style of 300. The scale of the battle scenes is impressive, and the costumes are quite good—at times the film shows the Spartans carrying their famed shields marked with a lambda (the upside-down V) for “Lacedamon” (Sparta’s home region). Unfortunately, the other graphics are less impressive. When depicting bird’s-eye-view strategic situations, computer-generated maps with round tokens that look like pieces from a board game slide around and bounce off each other—hardly a clear representation.
At a total running time of around 90 minutes, Last Stand of the 300 is much longer than it needs to be. It is too long to fit into a typical college history class or middle/high school period, and because of its story-based structure it is difficult to show portions of the film out of context. In terms of educational value, the 2003 PBS documentary The Spartans and even the previous History Channel offering Rise and Fall of the Spartans are more useful than Last Stand of the 300, which ultimately only has its striking battle visuals to recommend it.
Scott Metzger Pennsylvania State University sam59@psu.edu
