Go Tell the Spartans!

So Who Wants to Go See 300?

There’s no convincing the wife of the virtues of 300: I just can’t get her to enjoy entertainment based on stylised violence outside the mileu of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Therefore, I hereby declare that there should be some kind of boys’ night out where we lads go catch 300 at the downtown Paramount. Bonus points for anyone who’ll join me for dinner at the Burger King there, and double bonus points for anyone who yells “Tonight we dine in Hell!” while doing so. Interested? Drop me a line or leave a message in the comments.

Neal Stephenson on 300

Here’s a snippet from It’s All Geek to Me, a New York Times editorial written by Neal Stephenson, a sci-fi and geek favourite author:

Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it.

References to the Battle of Thermopylae in The Uncanny X-Men

In the latter part of Chris Claremont’s first run as the writer for the comic book The Uncanny X-Men — the run that turned the X-Men from a B-list comic in Marvel’s roster to one that became more popular than Spider-Man, he was fond of making references to the Battle of Thermopylae when comparing the X-Men’s struggles against numerically superior foes. The most notable example I could find is in issue 226 (from 1988), Go Tell the Spartans, where the X-Men face the Trickster, the cosmic personification of chaos itself. Here’s the title spread:

The title spread from The Uncanny X-Men, issue 226 (1988), titled Go Tell the Spartans.

Luckily for those who never studied classic battles (but really, North American comic book readers of that era were mostly nerds, who should’ve been Dungeons and Dragons players, who in turn should’ve studied classic battles for inspiration), Claremont uses Wolverine to explain the issue’s title:

A scene from The Uncanny X-Men, issue 226 (1988), titled Go Tell the Spartans.

Here’s the dialogue:

Wolverine: So we’re on our own, as usual.

Mystique: The devil of it is, we still don’t know what we’re dealing with, much less how to stop it.

Wolverine: Maybe we’re the ancient Spartans, Mystique. Holdin’ the line at Thermopylae against impossible odds, buyin’ our fellow Greeks time to raise proper defenses an’ mass their armies. Here we remain, obedient to their will, even unto death.

Mystique: Since when did you become a romantic?

Wolverine: Darlin’, how can anyone be an X-Man an’ not be a romantic?

Wolvie’s line about being “obedient to their will, even unto death”, is from the epigram on the tomb of King Leonidas’ 300, which is often translated as:

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by

that here, obedient to their laws, we lie

For a bar brawler from the Canadian rockies, Wolvie’s a pretty well-read guy.

Changes to the Meaning of the Word “Spartan”?

Damn, that Leonidas guy is cut.

The term “Spartan” with a capital S means ‘someone from Sparta’. Spelled with a small s, one of its meanings is ‘austere’ or ‘lacking in amenities’. For example, a room in a Buddhist monastery or a Ramada Limited motel (which we used to derisively refer to as “Ramada Very Limited”) could be called spartan.

With the popularity of 300, it’s quite possible that “spartan” could acquire a new meaning: possessing incredible abdominal muscles. Even from watching the trailer, I feel like hitting the gym.