A Geek History of Time - Episode 146 - Three Hundred Problems But Historical Accuracy Ain't One Part II
Episode Date: February 19, 2022...
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The
World
Disney
Yes, beloved, beloved figure of our pop culture.
That's how they get you.
And out of Yada, she eventually causes her own husband to be born to death.
And that makes me so happy on cold nights.
Especially in the badly for the idiot Pecker Woods.
You have a bottle of stonch.
Okay, that's twice that he's mentioned redheads.
It is un-American to get in the way of our freedom to restrict people's freedom.
That was the part where I was.
I know plenty about this thing.
I love me some Bobby Drake.
Well, if that's all we've got then we're being really lazy.
Yeah.
Y'all bone.
You can literally poke a hole in it as soon as someone gets pneumonia.
Well, I'm not as old as you.
Well, ha ha mother fuck motherfucker, I got a wizard. This is a geek history of time.
Where we connect Nurtory to the real world.
My name is Ed Blalock.
I'm a world history and English teacher here in Northern California. And my son recently had a birthday. He's four now.
And my brother from another mother and friend of the show, Bishop O'Connell, has taken it upon himself
to spoil my son. I don't know whether like on my behalf or just because well you know he's
my nephew I'm gonna do that. But over the course of a couple of weeks both
before and after my son's birthday we received three sweatshirts. One of them
was designed to look like the the armor of Din Jarin from Mandalorian. One of them is a spider-man hoodie.
The third one is a Captain America hoodie, which came with a set of blue sweatpants. And earlier,
he had sent a Captain America shield in my son's size.
Now the only downside to this is,
I am now envious of my four year old
because he has some better toys than I have.
So Uncle Bishop also sent him a set of three laser swords
from a Chinese manufacturer working to try to avoid getting sued by Lucasfilm that light up and make clashing noises but are, you know, sized for a smaller
kid. And so, yeah, he's getting spoiled in a truly geeky way.
And since I know Bishop is a friend of the show
and an actual listener, thank you for the moments
you're giving me with my son, with all of this stuff.
It's absolutely amazing.
And by the way, my wife says you can stop now.
That's what I've got going on. How about you? way my wife says you can stop now.
So that's what I've got going on.
How about you?
Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin and drama teacher up here in Northern California.
And I had something cool to share, but like your story was just so goddamn cute
that it chased any and all stories out of my head.
Okay. Well, my son does that. Yeah. I don't know if it was I was going to share something
along the lines of what my kids are cooking or. Well, tell you what, whether you're going
to bring that one up or not, I kind of want to know what, what is your son or your daughter
and your kids going to be cooking this weekend, because I know I'm going to see it on Facebook.
Yeah, that's probably true.
So my my son is having friends over.
And and we're totally masked.
Everybody's quadruple vaccinated and whatnot.
And so I think he's going to be making
bosque brownies, and he's also going to be nice.
I think it's like gritos, taters, or something like that.
Okay. So that's what he's making. I'm not sure what my daughter's making.
She didn't leave me a recipe. So they always have to give me a requisition list
before they go back to their moms,
or they go to their moms.
And so she did not give me such.
But last week, she made the best buttermilk biscuits.
Oh my God, like I've been dipping them in my soup.
They're so good.
Oh wow.
Oh yeah, it's fantastic.
But very cool.
I will tell you this. I don't know if
you know this, but it is now as of this recording, it's the end of January by the time you're listening
to it. The season will almost be over. But yes, the first harvest of the year of donuts is coming.
Do probably I think we'll all start here in the pop pop
sounds around two o'clock tomorrow.
Nice. Uh huh. And so very how many they planted 12.
We always plant 12 because we don't want to overtax the soil.
Okay. Um, good thing. We used, uh, we used honey nut
Cheerios because they're hoping that there's a correlation between the
sugariness of that and the glazing that happens later on.
I like their logic.
Yeah, we'll see.
It has not been a particularly wet couple weeks.
So we'll see if any of them end up jelly-filled
because we found the wetter the year,
the more often there's fillings.
The amount of effort you've put into,
the amount of thought and effort you've put into this
over the course of the last several years.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
That's a one parenting right there, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So we might actually pick a few extras for our guests to be able to enjoy the next day
as well.
Thanks.
We shall see.
Yeah.
All right.
So that's that was the thing I had in mind, but that's very cool.
It's got me around to it. Yeah. That's pretty fucking cool. Yeah. That's that's
very cute. So cool. So when last we left ourselves. Yes. Hip deep and Spartan Cape.
That sounds like a euphemism. And there are so many things in Spartan culture. It could be a euphemism
for, oh my god. I have a quick question about sports culture. I remember a friend of mine
took an ancient Greek history class. So I assume that this is correct. Okay. Spartan women would
have to shave their heads so that their men would actually want to fuck them. I don't know about it.
shape their heads so that their men would actually want to fuck them.
I don't know about it.
Just just the way that you phrase that is funny to me.
Very. The thing.
Yeah, just blunt.
Very.
The key is Spartan.
Here's, well, here's the thing.
Yeah, there it's it's it's based on something we know to be true.
Like the the underlying,
I'm trying to think of the word to use to describe it.
The underlying concept is basically correct,
but the thing is,
Spartan men didn't actually shave their heads
or cut their hair short.
Oh, okay.
One of the things that we know as a matter of fact, it's part of the legend of the hot gates
of Thermopylae is that before the battle, and I was going to bring this up anyway, before
the battle, the Spartan warriors bathed, cleaned themselves up, and it specifically mentioned that they
oiled their hair and combed it and braided it to make themselves beautiful before going
off to their certain death.
Because to them, and this was a point about Spartan culture, I was going
to get to later, but we'll bring it up here to the Spartans again, because they'd gone
through this incredibly brutal training from the age of seven. And for them, death did not hold any fear.
They were not afraid of death.
To them, a death in battle was the culmination of the most actualized their life could get. You have essentially a purposeful emotional crippling of an entire generation repeated.
Over and over and over.
It's not like American where it's just we don't deal with our traumas and we drink and
beat each other.
Yeah.
Generation to generation.
It's purposeful.
It's no, no, no, this is how we're going to make sure
that we harness your emotional crippling
so that we can scare other people.
Yeah.
And I mean, they literally believed
that the most actualized you could possibly be
as a Spartan man, because as a Spartan man, you were a warrior.
The best culmination of your life would be glorious death on the field of battle. That was it.
That was it. That was how you were going to get into the illusion fields. That was like that was just that was that was the goal
right
dying dying at home
You know at the age of 70 surrounded by your
wife and your grandchildren and you know all the comforts of home was not a warrior's death
That's for sissy's. That's for that's for that's for sissy's your cowards or people who failed to find the
right fight to die it.
And so and yet there was like.
Well, I guess it well, it depends on when and sparta we're talking.
Yeah, there's this idea of courage is not the same as recklessness.
Yes.
Reckless is the one and that's the Aristotelian meme.
Yeah.
But that doesn't come around until a hundred years later from this.
From Sir Mopoli, yeah.
Yeah.
And so Spartan, Spartan men will spend a little bit of time talking about him.
So the Spartan army had this terrifying reputation on the other Greeks.
At the moment, the Spartans said, hey, we're going to war against you.
Right.
Other city states just basically said, okay, everybody pack up your shit and get inside
the city walls.
And we're just not going out.
Right.
Because they're going to murder us. Because every individual Spartan warrior
was a highly trained and incredibly physically fit, physically and psychologically hardened
murder bot, like they were the best of the best of the best with honors, sir.
Right.
You know, because again, they started their training. I can't stress this enough. They
started their training at age seven. And they didn't get to leave the barracks until age 30.
Jesus. Yeah, we're talking really emotionally crippling people like this is. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. This is far worse than 4h ever could have been oh oh yeah yeah
hoplite so he locks yeah yeah yeah hasta hasta yeah homeboys there you go 4h it's perfect yeah so
so Spartan men would go through the cryptea at roughly 18.
And then they were expected to live in the barracks with their cohort until the age of 30.
Now, so they were expected to be this incredibly highly self-disciplined, keep your emotions totally under control, stoic, like conic, don't use unnecessary words,
like everything is focused around this idea
of toughness and discipline, like all of the virtues
that I mentioned, they always come around
to self control, right?
Right.
And so they lived in this barracks until the age of 30
and part of how they encouraged bonding within the fanlinks,
within the unit that you were in, was they encouraged.
This is a natural outgrowth of having that many young men going through puberty and close
confined quarters at a time. homosexual relationships would develop. And they took that and they encouraged
that. And furthermore, they encouraged heteristic relationships, relationships between grown men and
teenage boys. And to them, this was a way of building bonds within the unit. This was this strength of the bond between older teacher and younger student, this strength
of the bond between members of the fail-anks because the men you were fighting with are
fighting alongside were not only your brothers and arms.
One of them was your lover.
Right.
You know.
And this is, well, no, this actually, all of this comes before a pebbin
as this, I can never say his fucking name,
Epa Mennon Das and Pelopetus, the two Thebans.
Yeah.
All of this is well before those guys.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and the thing is, you know,
they're gonna be scholars and they're gonna be commentators
looking at this going, well, okay, so obviously they were gay.
Well, all right, so we have to understand that
the relationships that were involved here
were overtly, clearly homosexual,
but our ideas of sexual identity,
modernity, are a modern invention. Yeah. And to the Greeks around them,
Spartans kind of had this reputation as being the pretty ones who fuck everybody.
And this is shown very clearly in the play,
Lyce Estrada.
Yes.
So for those of you in the audience,
not familiar with Athenian plays.
Lyce Estrada, your drama teachers, of course,
you'd be like, oh, well, yeah,
but for anybody in the audience is not aware.
Lyce Estrada was a play that was actually written
during the course of the Peloponnesian War.
And it was a satire of the Peloponnesian War.
And in it, the title character Lysostrana
is an Athenian woman who starts a campaign
to have all the women of all the Greek city states
go on sex strike
against their husbands until the husbands
all stop fighting the war.
Right.
And it's an Athenian, it's a classical Greek Athenian comedy.
So it's a farcical comedy.
It's a farcic.
Yes, it's as they're walking around with giant dicks strapped to their bodies.
Yes, to to show to the audience in the amphitheater, just exactly how much pain they're in because
their wives aren't giving them any.
Right.
And and the husband with the biggest phallus who is in the most pain, who is the youngest
and lustiest of all of them, is the Spartan
husband. And the wife who is having the hardest time maintaining her strike and has to be
restrained by her peers from the other city-states is the Spartan wife. They are the young pretty
couple who just want to go off and bone because they're newlyweds and they're young. And by the way, they're Spartan. And this is how Spartans are. And they're all
physically fit. And they're all pretty. Yeah. And I want to, you know, that's the way
they got satirized in this play. So there's, so there's this, this, this, this nuance to
the character, to the way the other Greeks saw the Spartans that I think is important for us to keep in mind when we're talking about them.
I think that I also want to push back just a little bit more even on your use of the term homosexual. is kind of an 18th or 1800s term, the Spartans would have just been like,
well, that's who I'm fucking.
Like, it's not, they didn't distinguish between guy and gal
in terms of, and it's not like they couldn't tell the difference,
you know, but one, one you do for the babies
and the other one you do because you love the guy.
and the other one you do because you love the guy.
So, but this distinction between male and female coupling is far less important than love versus duty. And there is procurative sex and there is lovers sex. And whether your lover was male or female, it kind of only
mattered in terms of your level of dominance, in terms of social acceptability. Now, I might
be romanizing it a bit because you know, I think you're, I think you're romanizing it slightly.
Okay. But the idea that like a Spartan man having sex
with another Spartan man would not ever be looked down upon
or anything that should be worrisome.
It's kind of, if you're the older man,
then you should definitely be the one on top.
You should be the one running the show.
Yeah, you're the younger man.
Exactly. And if you're the younger man, exactly.
And if you're the younger man, you're the, you're the,
you're the little or spoon, which is stupid because I store
spoons that are all the same size right next to each other.
My table spoons are in a different slot than my teaspoons.
I would never think of storing a teaspoon inside of hooked
into a tablespoon that doesn't.
Yeah, it's just, no, you're right.
It doesn't make sense.
But yes, the giving partner, or the choosing partner,
is the older man.
Yeah.
And so the, just the use of the term homosexual,
I'm just gonna push back on in that.
Yeah, that's a Victorian use.
It's not appropriate here because they didn't
distinguish in that way.
Yes, yes, same sex. You would loving sex with your lover not appropriate here because they didn't distinguish in that way. Yes. Yeah. Yes.
Same as that.
You would loving sex with your lover and you had procreative sex with your procreation
part with your spouse.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and I'm going to slightly push back about a lot of friction.
Yes.
A lot of a lot of a lot of it.
But you know, that's kind of what makes it good up to a point
up to a point after point too much for God gave you three inches for free after that you have to explore
so but but I I will I will I'm gonna counter that I think in the way that you said what you said, there might be
an interpretation that a Spartan man having sex with a Spartan woman was always going to be
motivated by duty, and it was more complicated than that. I think there was a motion, there was,
I think there was a motion there was I don't know if romance is the right word, but it's the one that comes to mind love. There was like in the good earth how they fell in love. Yeah, you know, and and so this is this is a really weird gray area that our modern concepts of sexuality and sexual identity and romance and marriage like all all of our modern concepts of these things have evolved to be completely different things. And when
I say evolved, I don't mean in the pop culture, Darwinian sense of like improved, I just
mean they've mutated from what they were into something completely different.
So it is true, it is attested from historical sources that on their wedding night, a Spartan
bride would put on a man's cloak to go to bed with her husband on the first night because
he was used to sleeping in the barracks
with a bunch of other men.
Right.
Now, you know, whether that is ceremonial, that is ceremonial.
How much of that is ceremonial?
I know you can't get it up until you're free.
An actual Freudian thing.
How much of that is what?
We don't know, but, you know, that was that was part of the culture. And after marriage, a young man,
if you were married before 30,
you would spend your day in maneuvers and training
and whatever, if you were in Sparrow,
you'd spend your day in maneuvers and training
and whatever you were doing,
you'd go home to your house for a couple of hours,
and then when it came time to go to bed,
you'd go back to the barracks.
So you might go home and have a quicky with your wife.
Right.
But then you're gonna go back to the barracks.
And you may or may not.
Yeah, you may or may not, you know.
And so there was this intense division of the male
sphere and the female sphere, certainly up until the age of
30, and then once that had been established, it it carried on.
That like you just, I mean, I'm not going to socialize with my wife
because I haven't ever socialized around women,, I don't know how to do that.
Sure.
You know, and in an interesting way,
this kind of fuels the equality that the two sexes had
under the law because women had to be able to take care of
shit while the men were living in the barracks
until the age of 30.
So it's, you know, it's weird.
Yeah, like we don't have a context for it.
Yeah, we can't apply modern rationales to this kind of stuff.
Sure.
But what's interesting, so I think it's worth noting here that this is what Spartan
manhood looked like, was you lived in a barracks until you were 30,
after you were 30, you still spend most of your time
around other men, right?
Your recreational sex partners were probably
going to be male before they were female.
You may or may not have, you may or may not wind up developing a loving
relationship with your wife, but most of your relationship with your wife was
social, political, economic, you know, and her role in your life was to make
sure that you did your duty to the state by giving you children.
And then she would hand you shield before you went off to battle and would tell you come back with this shield were on it. So that was a thing.
That was a thing. Okay. That was no kidding. That was a thing for a Spartan woman. The
best status you could have was to be the widow of a man who had gone off and died gloriously fighting for the state.
Okay. So both sexes were tied up in the same death cult.
Okay. Okay. I mean, that's one way to include women.
Yes.
Yeah. But okay.
Yeah.
Yeah. But okay.
Yeah.
I just, it's interesting because, you know, there's nothing more toxic than an all boys club.
Yes.
I don't care where it's at.
If it's at the University of Pennsylvania, Duke or Duke, while I was thinking, you know,
with the moving of pedophiles around.
Oh, well, yeah.
Yeah. You know, you pen. I was thinking of, you know, ubiquitous moving of pedophiles around. Oh, well, yeah, you know, you pan.
I was thinking of, you know, ubiquitous rapists, but right also that too,
which then of course brings me to a certain institution that's housed in Rome.
But, but you again, but you have that, that all boys club thing,
or you have the fucking Senate, um, you know, you have, you have an all boys club thing, or you have the fucking Senate.
You have an all boys club, and you're gonna have problems societally.
And so it's just interesting how the Spartans
addressed the problem with that.
By kind of just co-opting.
Just get everybody involved.
Like, you know what it is?
It feels like
Amy got added to the A team
That's what it feels like
That's actually a better analogy than it sounds like it should yeah really yeah
Yeah, I you know, it's it's one of those things that you know the meme of the raising the finger like, I, I want to
argue, but yeah, okay, no, I can't. And so, so the, the, the, the spartan ideal of manhood
yes, was this was rooted in this idea that no, no, the best thing you can do
as a man is die in battle. Like that's that's the goal. And until you die in battle, you're going
to be a dune citizen, you're going to show iron self control. You're going to have children preferably sons with your wife.
Right.
And you're going to be a loyal lover to your boyfriend.
You know, and so there's two hour away of looking at it, the smart night deal of manhood is both like, okay, no, I can totally see that
stereotypical modern toxic masculinity.
I think that's hyperbrowy.
It's hyperb...
Like, it's take broy up to the point of, no, no, and then we're going to get gay with it
for a minute.
Right.
Like, it grows before hose.
Broves before hose in all aspects of life.
Yes.
And, and, and what, what is, and, and, and, and part of it
that I also want to include is their idea of masculinity also had a significant component of a masculine beauty.
Yes.
That was very Greek and that other Greeks looked at and went, you guys were taking us a little
far.
Yeah.
But it's like who's going to tell them?
Because like that.
You know, you know,
as you know, yeah, because I'm sure the the Thesbians were looking over at him before before the battle with her mom, like,
going a
Patrick list to take a look over there. Tell me something. Yeah. What's up?
I like the
Patrick list. What's up, Iris?
Pat tell me
are they are they?
Are they putting on Rouge?
Yes, they are.
What?
No, they can't be putting on.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's, that's, that's Rouge.
Oh, I guess they're adding Rouge brushes to their equipment. Yeah.
Right. And, and, um,
is it just mean do you smell perfume?
No, it's not just you.
That's, that's actually that's, that's perfume.
Yeah. Okay.
Just making sure.
Just wanted to like,
Martin's what is your scent?
Yeah, it could be.
Um, but, but yeah, they, they perfume themselves.
They, they, oiled their beards combed,
their had become braided their hair,
and depending on the source, put on makeup,
which by the way, that last part,
that last part was left out of the sources
that were taught to me when I learned this stuff.
The makeup got left out, the part of, no, no,
they weren't allowed to do the best before they died. That I got taught, the makeup part, Matt, the makeup got left out the part of no, no, they want to do it. That's before they died.
That I got taught the makeup part.
No, no, I didn't hear that.
Didn't learn that until later in life.
Yeah, no.
Okay.
So, so that was the Spartan idea of masculinity.
And that's, and that's what the Spartans looked like and did before the battle of thermopoli.
Historically, now I'm going to get to
one of the biggest things that Frank Miller fucked up. Oh, they're not 100. Well, that too. Okay.
But he chose to tell the story of what he considered to be. This paragon, this group of paragons of masculinity.
And so the beauty part of it got left out of the story entirely.
Oh, it got put back in the movie though.
Oh, but in the comic and in the movie,
we don't see them combing their hair before in the battle.
We don't see them braiding their hair before the battle. We don't see them combing their hair before in the battle. We don't see them braiding their hair before the battle.
We don't see that.
They're just kind of naturally praying.
They're just, they're, well, they're natural.
They're naturally cut because, you know, the, the trying to figure out how to phrase this.
But if you're going to, if you're going to be cultish about hypermasculinity, there's
always going to be a mildelotli homo erotic
subtext of, oh yeah, and they're all like, you know, fucking cut. And they're, you know,
rippling muscles, you can see all their abs, you're in a guttural off.
The male gaze has at its core and inherent objective, objectifying gaze, that also carries with it sexual connotation of some sort. That is 100% the male gaze every time will have
that aspect to its objectification. Yeah, and so that means by nature you you sexualize
Yeah, you're ideal no matter what
Yeah, yeah, and and so matter what. Yeah. And so the
failed gays are very eloquently. Yeah, thank you. Thank you
for eloquently summarizing what I was struggling to try to
say. Yeah, you're totally correct there. And that's that's
what I was trying to get around to saying there. But but the
consciousness, the self-consciousness on their part of their
beauty, right? Of, no, no, when we go to die, we're going to consciousness, the self-consciousness on their part of their beauty.
Right.
Of, no, no, when we go to die, we're going to present a good looking corpse.
Right.
God left out completely because caring about being pretty,
to Frank Miller and to modern American sensibilities is not manly.
It goes right back to Pat Buchanan's thing about those values up in New York
and talking about perversion and shit like that.
I mean, right back to 1992.
Oh, yeah, totally goes right back.
Yeah, and it goes back further than that.
It goes back to Jerry Falwell and Reagan and I mean, all that stuff.
Rock Hudson.
Yes. Steve, again, you get right back to the gay icon. Yeah.
Yeah. So at the same time, everything I just said about Spartan men on their wedding night, their new wife wearing a man's cloak, everything I just said about, you know, homosexual relationships among Spartan warriors, at all all of that is utterly excised from Miller's storytelling. The only, the only outright examples
of any expression of sexuality in the comic book
come in a couple of places.
We see Leonidas clearly having
loving romantic feelings for his wife.
Right.
His wife is raped by another Spartan man.
Right.
Yeah.
And I want to take a second to talk about this because this is another example of, of Miller just being fucked up.
This is another example of Miller just being fucked up.
So for those of you spoilers, for anybody who hasn't read or seen 300,
this other Spartan noble essentially
is a rival of Leonidas's sort of.
And he's part of the council back.
He's part of the council back. He's part of the council.
Yeah.
And in order to, he's, by the way,
that's up to military versus politician trope.
This is true.
Yes, very much, which is kind of funny,
because in actual Spartan society,
he would have been just as much a warrior
as every other Spartan male. Right.
But he approaches Leonidas's wife, Gorgo. And basically he tells her in order for your husband to receive any reinforcement, to receive any help,
you're gonna have to fuck me.
And if you don't give your body to me, I'm not gonna do this.
And you love your husband, your husband loves you, because somehow we're portraying
the king of Sparta as this, you know,
we're portraying the king of Sparta as this, you know,
Paragon of American ideas of traditional family values, which is like so completely anti-historic,
it was to be like fucking laughable if it didn't make me so angry.
But, but, you know, in order to save your husband,
you have to betray your husband and sleep with me.
Yeah. And, and it's turned into this thing like where, you know,
she has to make the choice.
And it's like, that's not a choice.
He fucking raps her.
Right.
Like that is, that is textbook coercion.
But Miller tries to sell it to us
as Gorgo being the strong woman
who makes this difficult choice. And then the asshole
who does it literally says to her, this will not be quick and you will not enjoy it.
Yeah, that made it its way into the movie as well. Like Frank, what the fuck, bro?
I mean, Frank Miller's dark night.
Like, is that part where Bullseye kisses Elektra
after stabbing her through with her own sigh?
He doesn't just stab her and drops her corpse.
He kisses her.
Like, he's big on that transgressive button.
And it's a good button to hit if you want to make someone a villain.
It's a little lazy, I think, but...
Well, it's lazy. And when you do it so often, because you're also leaving out his other magnum opus,
sin city. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's right.
Like, yeah. I mean, you know, in the argument that Miller fanboys are going to make is, well,
you know, everybody in that comments violence against everybody else is not just violence against women.
Okay, no, here's the deal. The violence that's truly sensationalized and that is used for
titillation purposes is the violence against women. Don't, don't, don't sugarcoat it. Right. So, you know, so he makes this choice
to be not only to try not only to be like hyper straight,
but like a rapey hyper straight.
Yeah.
And then on the other side,
we see in the Persian camp,
when Effie Altis is promised, you know,
high stationery, all that is for having betrayed the Spartans,
he gets seduced into this orgy with all of these,
heavily pierced again, all up piercings is like a thing in the artwork
and then in the film, you know, of these,
of these courtesans in this, you know,
and they're on a small trap, you know, you know,
kind of, kind of, everywhere.
Or opium, opium, then kind of kind of thing.
And, and, you know, in all the right thing bodies, it's hard to tell if,
if, you know, there are men and women in there and like, there's this homosexual kind of weird
weird ambisexual. I won't say homosexual. It's weird. Yeah. Ambisexual overtone. Yeah.
And again, Xerxes is portrayed like everybody's nearly naked in the film. But the way Xerxes
is naked, it's a sexual naked.
It's a sexual naked as opposed to a manly, you know,
leading with your hips, not leading with your shoulders.
That, that's, yes, very, very perceptive.
Yeah, very effeminized,
kind of nakedness.
Slutty.
Yeah. And well, to Frank Miller, that's feminized.
Actually, I was going to say more vampy, quite honestly. Okay, yeah, that works.
And so, so Miller decides, I'm going to ignore all the historicity of like what ancient civilizations in general
thought about sexuality.
And I'm going to impose this very 80s American
puritanically informed set of set of tropes
about sex.
And all of my Spartans are gonna be so straight
as to almost be sexless.
Right.
Unless they're corrupt in which case,
he's rapist.
Like, and it's again, he was not conscious of his own agenda, but looking at it from 20 plus
years later, and with the advantage of looking with hindsight at the rise of the Me Too movement,
and everything that's happened in sexual politics in our country in the last 20 plus years,
it's really clear there was an agenda here.
And he wasn't aware of it, and it wound up warping the story that he told.
Yeah, I mean, and because this is pop cultures, biggest windows became pop cultures, biggest window onto ancient Greece and the cultures of Athens and Sparta, it has warped our perception of that being, as a culture.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, you know,
well, who controls the story, controls the culture?
Well, yeah.
So when you make a visual story of a textual story,
and then you make a visual moving version
of that visual story.
Yeah.
You are memifying the shit out of it
to the point where you have completely,
like now, there was this wonderful skit on SNL years and years ago,
back when Kevin Nealin was on SNL, back when I think,
yeah, Phil Hartman was still there.
Okay. Dolly Parton was the guest and she's sitting around talking to them Neelin was on SNL back when I think, yeah, Phil Hartman was still there.
Dolly Parton was the guest and she's sitting around talking to them and they're like, hey, Dolly, did you ever grow up here in stories? She's like, matter of fact, we did. We didn't have
TV like y'all did. And my dad used to tell the stories, oh, and she starts telling you,
telling the story of like this, this man who's married to a witch and how she also,
you know, the witch has also got their mom who comes in visits and it's very clear. And so she
basically just retails a bunch of sitcoms. And they're like, wow. And then somebody like
chimed in, I think Mike Myers is like, oh yeah, yeah, that, that, you know, and did he have a such and such? And then somebody slaps him on the chat, you know, on the
shut shoulder, like, dude, shut the fuck up. And, and she's like, how did you know about that?
Well, I had family in the Tennessee Valley area as well. And, you know, so it's, it's all this kind
of funny thing. But she leaves to go do makeup or costuming for the next scene. And they're all sitting around
and they're like, well, isn't that just sad? Like, dad, her dad just
told her stories from TV. And then somebody's like, what her
Darren had curly hair? Maybe she really does get more out of
this than we do. Because she had her imagination to fill in the
blanks on how these people looked, you know,
and I just remember, what if her Darren had curly hair? Because neither guy playing Darren had curly
hair. But so when you take what is an imagination story that Herodotus gave us. Yeah. And there's historiography all around it.
And then you codify it visually in a comic book.
That's one thing.
But then you put it up on the screen.
And now everybody thinks that Leonidas, 100%
looks like a Scotsman.
Everybody thinks that he has this very northern European bone structure to his face.
And everybody thinks that what's his name?
Effedries? Effie altes.
Effie altes. Okay. Epiphedrin.
Everybody thinks that he's a hunchback now.
And how many people think that Xerxes is exceptionally tall and really homoerotic.
Oddly androgynous. Right. Yeah. Aggressively androgynous. Aggressively. Yeah. I like to phrase
aggressively androgynous. Yeah. But how many people now that's the image because I'll tell you my students were all shocked
This is again, I was teaching Latin but everyone's a while through other stuff in there
They're all shocked to find out that James Madison was five foot two and 115 pounds
Because I mean they knew he wasn't black, but if you watch Hamilton. Oh, he's a big dude. He's built like a brick
shithouse. He's a mountain of a man. So, but that's not what James James Madison is the
smallest president we ever had. And so there's stunts to find out that he was not fatter than
James Garfield, you know, like, yeah. And so again, you control the visual and you have memified the entirety of that story. Now you've limited their imagination to the point
where Darren does not have curly hair. Yeah. No, it's true. Yeah. Yeah. So within, within
Greece, sparta had this earned reputation as being, as I said in the last episode, the best of the
best with honors, sir. Right. Right. And this is the foundation of their culture. This is their
whole, it's like that one guy you know who guns are like his whole personality. Right. He's the
guy in early 2000s who everything was about bacon. Yeah, yeah. That's that's that is their one note.
That is that is their their hat is is they are so straight.
I only fucked it.
Like that.
Yes.
And and so so they they were they were this terrifying military juggernaut.
Sure.
They were, well, yeah, for a while,
they were the best trained most physically conditioned,
I mean, they were just, they were a military machine.
And so, and so in 490, they arrived to Athens a day
after the Battle of Marathon. Went to tour the battlefield and saw the aftermath of the conflict and had to admit
through bitter clenched teeth that the Athenians had won a remarkable victory.
Now they had to do that because they got there a day late.
Right.
Because we do not fight during the Karnaya.
Now, if you've seen 300, if you've read the comic, you're going to recognize there will
be no fighting during the Karnaya.
It's a big part of the story.
Yeah. Because it was a big part of the source in Herodotus.
Now, the thing is, this is rooted in actual cultural fact.
Every year, the Spartans held a harvest and kind of a
tonement festival to Apollo Karnai, in essentially the month of August.
The ancient Greek calendar doesn't line up with a modern calendar, but in the time of year it was roughly July, August.
Summer harvest.
Yeah.
It lasted eight days from roughly the seventh day to the fifteenth day of their month.
And all large-scale military actions were put on hold during the festival.
This is because the roots of the celebration, the ancestors of the Spartans, the people who
had shown up and conquered the Hilots, had their army had suffered a massive plague that
only stopped when they instituted the festival. And the reason they believed
the plague had been visited upon them was because their ancestors, this army, had killed a seer of
Apollo who they believed had been selling secrets to their enemies. And so the Karnaya was harvest festival that also had this kind
of atonement kind of aspect to it. So the Battle of Marathon had coincided with the Karnaya. So
the Spartans weren't able to mobilize in time to participate. Marathon was a massive orgy of manful death.
Oh, they missed out.
They missed out.
Yeah.
And alongside that, they had to admit
that those bookish-y feet-fucking nerds from Athens
had been the ones to actually fucking win.
And that by itself was a huge blow
in the Spartans collective ego.
Now, in 490, when they visited the battlefield, according to Herodotus, Leo Knightus was the
leader of the army who went and he had to admit that this was an incredible victory the Athenians
had won. So, so the parts of Miller's depiction of the Spartan warrior attitude toward the
other Greeks was largely entirely correct.
They looked down on warriors from any place else because your amateurs.
Right. It's the you there. What do you do? You what do you do? What is your profession?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's there's that is that is something that Miller actually gets that cultural note. But then he goes and fucks it up by having one of his characters talk about,
speak disparagingly of the Athenians about, well, you know, if they can stop fucking boys long
enough to send us help. Right. The boy lovers and athletes. Yeah, the boy lovers' vathons. There you go. Yeah.
When he mentions the boy lovers and Athens, anybody who knows anything about classical
history is like, we'll hold up. Yeah, yeah. That's protest too much. Yeah. And, and, um, Miller,
Miller got confronted about that. Like, I, I think it was Neil Geiman, said, okay, look,
I think it was Neil Gaiman said, okay, look,
like I don't think you are a homophobic for saying that. Right.
I mean, I think Neil was being very nice.
I'm pretty sure.
Giving him an out.
I think I was giving him an out there
that I'm personally unsure he deserves.
But it's like, I don't think you're a homo foe but I want to say a part of
Neil Gammons quote was Frank Rita book. Yeah. No. No. Or listen to some songs about it. Like I
don't only care. Caroline. Oh, fuck you. Good day, sir.
Have I told you that my son walks around the house singing that now?
Really?
He does.
He's like, sweet.
And then Julia, Julia in the background, you'll hear her and the other one go, BAP BAP BAP
BAP.
Your kids are, your kids are too sweet for words.
That's great.
So Neil Diamond had a problem with it.
Yeah.
Yeah, basically said Frank Miller and who is the author
of the Civil War.
He and Shelby foot can't be on Spotify with him
at the same time.
So, okay.
Have I mixed up names again?
Pretty badly. Yeah, pretty.
Put my Shelley in my mouth.
That's...
Ooh!
See, that one I'm not even mad about.
That's pretty near.
Good.
All right.
But, so...
Okay, but yeah, Mark Walbert.
But so...
Oh.
Ha!
Ha! What's that? but, uh, you know, Neil Diamond called him out and said, you know, it's totally historically
accurate.
And, and Frank, too, like you got to admire the guy's Hutzba. Oh boy.
Responded with, well, no, I mean, I know that the Spartans did that. But like, you know,
the Spartans could be hypocrites.
Like, okay, no, they wouldn't have seen anything wrong with it. So there's nothing
to be critical about. They wouldn't have looked down on it. So it wouldn't be anything to be
hypocritical. Right. Number one, number two, you're trying to make
that argument about, you know, well, they could be hypocrites
about it. But if literally everything else in this book is you
wanking off about what a man, for example, a virtue, the fucking
Spartans are. Like, like, you just, you just hear a worship these guys
to the ends of the earth.
And now you're trying to make us think,
oh no, I wrote that in as like, you know,
there being, that's one of their flaws
is there, they're like hypocritical that way.
No fuck you, Frank.
Right.
No, you didn't know.
I'm not gonna, I'm not giving that one to you.
No. Right.
So, um, not going to, I'm not giving that one to you. No, right. So, and, and so that the whole, the whole deal with the carnea,
then comes up in the comic because it historically was a big deal
at the time of Thermopylae because a few years from about a decade
goes by,
climb of Thermopoli because a few years from about a decade goes by,
Therious ismvation fails, Therious dies, his son, Xerxes decides he's gonna, all right, no, no, we're gonna, we're still gonna punish the Greeks. Right.
And so in 480, Xerxes invades and he comes down through Macedon.
Okay, so he goes, he goes essentially through, through largely a land route.
Right, and he goes through the butthole down into the stomach and then back up and out
the trunk.
Yes, yes, except Macedon, not mastodon.
Oh, sorry, it's, boy am I embarrassed.
A little bit, and no, you're not.
You're immune to embarrassment.
We all know this by now.
So, yeah.
So, and Circus, he shows up with the kind of army
that only the Persian Empire can put together at the time.
Right.
And he literally drives everybody before him.
States, states that he encounters either surrender
or they're crushed and their populations
were enslaved. Right. And so word of this reaches Sparta during the Karnaya. Again, because,
you know, ancient warfare being what it is, the time of year during which weather conditions are good for you to be marching means that like
the carnea
happens basically kind of late in the campaign season in some ways the carnaa is a good way to get people out of a battlefield
where bodily fluids are spilling everywhere and cholera rains
This is true. Just saying it's a good little quarantine there. Yeah. Yeah.
So this part is going to get word during the Karnaya.
And OK, well, we can't send the army
because we're not going to fight during the Karnaya.
But historically, if we're going to decide, OK, look,
we can dodge the religious restriction.
Right.
We're not going to send the whole army.
We're going to send a small force.
And the Anitus volunteers or gets picked to be the one
to lead it.
And he takes the force of 300 his royal bodyguard, the hippas.
OK, so they're his bodyguard.
Now, according to the legend of
Thermopylae from Herodotus, he knew because of a prophecy he went to see her, and there
was, where the Spartans had a see or speak to them. And there was a prophecy that spoke
of the sacrifice of a descendant of Heracles.
And since the United States,
two older brothers were already gone,
it kind of falls to him.
Yes, and Leonidas was a descendant of Heracles.
And so, and he knew the force he was going to have
was not going to be numerically sufficient for a victory.
He knew it was going to be knew he knew he and his men
were marching to their deaths. So which is awesome. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, like, that's
what you do. But he made he and again, this is in 300 and it is taken directly from Herodotus, he selected men who had already had
sons. So their family lines wouldn't go extinct. Now, everything I just said is the history that
we have from Herodotus. If you want to put scare quotes around history because it's Herodotus. Sure. If you want to put scare quotes around history because it's Herodotus feel free, but yeah, that is the historical source that that we get this from.
And Miller fucks it up.
Because Miller has to turn the whole thing into an opportunity to make Leonidas the hero of the story.
And instead of the A4s going, okay, no, look, we have to send a force to slow the
Persians down for one thing.
Because militarily, we have to do it.
For our own survival and survival of all of our neighbors, like, you know, we need to
have somebody to get it, somebody to get somebody to kind of at least slow them down.
Right.
One, two, we missed out on marathon.
We can't like for the sake of our collective identity,
we can't miss out on this.
So we gotta send somebody for the sake of our own self image.
And so historically, the A4s make the decision
and they send Leonardo with his men.
the A-force make the decision and they send Leonidas with with his men. For Miller, because he's got to make Leonidas a hero, like even though in a classical sense,
Leonidas already is one, like you don't need to embroider this, you don't need to
guild this lily, but but Miller has to guild the lily.
So not only is Leonidas taking this force of 300 men who he knows they're all going to their deaths and et cetera, et cetera.
But for Leonidas, he now has to do this. He's the one who comes up with the loophole of, well, you know, I'm just going to take a few men and go check the site out.
Yeah, he kind of outsmarts the politicians, right? Yes, yes. And in this case,
the politicians haven't even gotten involved yet because this is the religious authorities.
This is the the the council and their their seers, priests, whatever. And and there's this invented set of oracles that Miller makes up and he throws in a scene with a naked dancing girl who's under the effect of
Hennbane as a hallucinogen.
Right.
And and makes a big deal of all these gross old men lasting after this young woman and like these men have all been bought off by the Persians. So the whole reason they say,
no, the gods say we're not going to go fight during the the carnaia is because they've been bought
by the Persians with sex and money. Right. And so sex is evil. And foreign money. Foreign money.
You know, remember, remember all that shit in the 90s about the DNC getting money from China
Yeah, I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, okay. There you go
And so and so he creates this bullshit
story right
that includes a gratuitous scene of
right? That includes a gratuitous scene of nudity of a young woman being lusted after by older men who we are led to understand are going to rape her
while she's under the effect of this hallucinogenic thing because it's
Frank Miller and sexual violence is just like his jam. You know, and, and, and, and so again, in all of this serves the purpose of
taking Lin-Nitus, who's already heroic figure and trying to turn him into an American style hero
where he's not merely heroic for the deeds he did, he's heroic for his virtue.
Right, Right.
No, he's the one standing up to do the right thing.
Yeah, it's clearly America versus Iran in this movie.
It's the oh, well, yeah, we'll get we'll get we'll get to the movie here in a minute,
because that's that's a whole other that's a whole other permutation of this.
Sure. So now historically also, I skipped over this a minute ago,
but I want to go back to it real quick.
So the comic and the film both include
this truly iconic scene,
Gerard Butler does an amazing job in this moment
film where the Persian messengers show up at Sparta. And the Persian messenger, you know,
says, it's a very small thing. You just need to give me an offering of earth and water.
You'll get to keep all of your territory. Right. You know'll you'll still be a king. You'll just you'll just be part of the Persian Empire. Right.
Just a bit just a bit. It's easy. That's all you got to do. And, you know, they kill the one messenger.
And the essentially, so your messenger says you're killing a messenger. This is madness. Madness.
This is part of it. And it's this, it's this statement of identity. It's a statement
of, you know, fuck you where you're not going to let you rule us. And it kicks the guy
into the well. And I mean, it is this visually incredible moment in both media. It's this
moment that like, no matter even after everything I have said about Frank Miller
up to this point even after we finished this episode, if I want to sit down and read the comic
again, that moment will still be one where a part of me would be like, fuck yeah, because it's
just that powerful. I mean, it's, you know, and so that is actually attested in historical sources.
Yeah, that the Persians exists.
The Persians sent messengers to the Athenians and to the Spartans.
And the Spartans murdered the messengers and kicked them into a well.
Two things, two things that I think are very important
that Miller leaves out.
And then a punchline.
First, both the Athenians and the Spartans
told the messengers to fuck off.
The Athenians put the messengers on trial
and then executed them.
Again, with the democracy and the... Yeah, do process, right?
Right, come on.
The Spartans...
Hold on, right.
Yeah, no, the Spartans just outright kicked them into a well and killed them.
Yeah, because Spartans.
Right.
That's number one.
The Athenians did the same shit.
Right. Okay. Yeah. Point number two.
And, and, and this is, this is something about the Spartan character that I think gets lost in knowledge translation because he leaves this out.
The Spartans murdered the messengers.
And then deputized two of their own citizens to say, you're gonna go to Xerxes,
or actually you're gonna go to Darius
because we killed as messengers.
And so as a way to show that we're not barbarians,
we're gonna send you to him in payment.
And, you know, he's probably the fucking kill you.
So, but fairs, fair.
So here you go.
Which is kind of metal as fuck. Like, but it's also
decidedly less. This is sparta. Like, yeah, it is much less. We care about our people. Yeah,
you know, yeah, it is, yeah. And so the other, the punchline to all of this is that was actually before marathon.
That exchange was not thermopylai, that was my marathon.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
So, so he takes this moment and moves it forward in time to make it a useful prop in the
story he's trying to tell.
See, this sounds to me like he's watched Mel Gibson movies
then, like he watched Braveheart.
He's like, oh, who cares about time and location?
Yeah, time and geography.
You know, fuck it.
Yeah. Don't need that.
This is heroic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So now getting back to actually Thermopylai, we're now going back to 480. Yeah, yeah. Yeah so now
Getting back to actually thermopoli. We're now going back to 480. Yeah, yeah, so the Spartans march off
Knowing that they're gonna lose and being Spartans if they lose they're gonna die because that's right just how it works
Along the way and this was part of the plan that the A4s and Leonidas had from the beginning,
the Spartans pick up reinforcements from other city states, most notably Thebes and Thespia.
People who are not bound by the Kurnaea.
Yeah.
And so by the time they got to Thermopylai, there were 7,000 Greeks in the force.
Right.
For multiple city states.
Right.
Now, which has now deepened the stakes
for everybody around them too.
Yes, yes, yes, immensely.
Smart, very smart diplomacy by way of accretion.
Yes.
And so the Greeks would have had an understanding in the face of Persian opposition,
it would have had an understanding that we are, we have more in common with each other than we do
with our enemy. But to the Greeks, they were still a multinational force. They would have,
they would have seen one another as they would have they may have spoken
of each other as Greece, but they would have said, well, no, I'm a Spartan, you're a Thespian,
you're a Thiebian, you're a Phosian, like, you know, that was the core of their identity was to
their own Poulis. Yeah, of course, of course, they were they were united by a largely common
language, which we quimalt about that in the last episode.
But they wouldn't have considered themselves one people.
Exactly, until you have the pressures from outside.
Until you have the pressure from outside,
at which point it would be kind of like our alliance
with great Britain and Australia is like we're all the English speaking peoples
Tomorrow from Churchill, but I'm still an American
You're still a conject and you're still an imperialist, you know, no blessably as Jackass right from Europe
Because you know, we we are the true heirs of Western culture and all the rest of it.
Right. Right.
We have some mutation.
I think speaking of sarcasm, by the way, for everybody listening, if you pick up on it,
no, like, no.
Love you, my Commonwealth brethren and sister in.
But like our identity is still, I'm an American, you're an'm an American you're an Aussie you're a Brit you're a conuck, you know, right? Yeah
We're allied
Yeah, we're the allies
Yeah, we we are the allies the one so over yeah, we are not one people. We're all gonna go home to our own countries. Yes
The Persian army
First of all I spoke earlier about how ancient sources numbered the Persian army.
It's somewhere upwards of a million and some stories made it as high as four million.
When they left Persia, that's fanciful. It's modern military historians. Look at that,
and they're like shaking their heads and laugh. Yeah.
The logistics alone.
Yeah, and that's actually where modern, modern scholarly numbers, it's somewhere between
120,000, 300,000.
That's a fuck a lot.
Which still, for the ancient world, that's an incredibly huge number of men.
Yeah.
And that's based on 1000.
Yeah, I get 7,000.
That's based on modern estimates of the Persians' actual logistical capacity at the time.
Now we can't know for sure the number actually present at Thermopylai because remember by
the time the Persians got there, they had been marching all the way through Macedon.
Right.
And so we don't know how many troops they left behind,
like you want to do when you're playing a risk.
In order to hold on to territory,
you've got to leave Garrison's behind
to maintain control of the territory of Congress.
But they easily still would have had like a tenfold advantage
or much more over the Greeks and from Opelai.
Oh yeah. much more over the Greeks at the mobuli.
Now Miller does not make any effort at all
to be accurate about any of these numbers at all.
And the biggest crime he commits in my opinion
is the Thebans and the Thespians and the rest of the Greeks show up
piecemeal. And they are never none of them in their individual groups are ever a bigger group than the Spartans. Now part of that is an effect of the focus of the story is on the sparse.
Sure.
But he is telling a story to glorify the Spartans.
So in point of fact, the Thespians
sent a group of 700.
The Fosians had a group of 500. I'm trying to remember which other city
state it was. There was a group of a thousand centric one-polyse. The forces of
the Greeks at Thermopylae were made up of a force that the vast majority of the force was non-spart. But to look at the images and the story that Miller chooses to tell,
the other Greeks aren't there. We don't see that.
Right. And again, you can say, well, you know, he's focusing on them. This is an effective focus. It goes beyond that because he is contemptuous of the other Greeks.
The contribution of the other Greeks, like Leonidas got to Thermopylae and found that
the Gaets within the hot Gaets, the fosians had already had a force there for
at least a week before the Spartans arrived. And they had built a fortifications. They had
built a partial wall that narrowed the past even more than it naturally already was.
And that was and Leonidas looked at that and went,
okay, well, this is where our battle line is going to be because this, this is,
right. Look at the work you've done. Look at the work you've done.
And Leonidas historically was a smart enough guy to look at his allies and not be openly contemptuous
of them. Right. Because he wasn't an idiot. Right. He knows that he's going to die. But
like, oh, the more of you that are here, the more of them we can take with us. Yeah. And the more
effective, we can be the better we can hold them, you know, to allow everybody else to build forces
and do what they've got to do. Right. And so, so this Greek force arrives and this Greek force historically is multinational.
They set up in a prepared position. Okay. And Leonidas immediately deputizes. He finds out about the go-trak that's gonna allow
the locals tell him, hey, you should know,
we've used this go-trak for years to get around
to get around the terrain.
Right.
He sends a group of a couple of hundred Thespians,
I wanna say it was, to defend that.
Like, you guys, I am trusting you guys
to go be the ones to defend our flank here. We need you to hold that. Like you guys had, I am trusting you guys to go be the ones to defend our flank here.
We need you to hold that pass.
If they find out about it, we need you to defend it.
None of that happens in Miller's story.
None of that happens in Miller's story.
Miller's story, it's Spartans, what is your profession?
Who, they all raise their spears and it's all,
look at us, we're so much more manly than you are.
Fuck all of you.
Yeah, you're here, but like don't get in our way.
I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's very much don't get in our way.
Oh, that's great.
Why don't you fall to the back?
See if you can be useful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and, and like the Spartans, certainly would have said, okay,
look, we're going to be the tip of the spear.
We're gonna be in the front
because we're glory hounds.
That's what we want.
Also, by the way,
we're the best equipped,
we're the best trained, we're the most disciplined.
We're like, we're the guys that didn't have good arguments
for this.
They were the guys to do that job.
You know, and it also was an emotional payoff for them.
But to Miller, there's this frat boy,
jocular, no, we're just better than you are,
you know, fuck off lips, kind of thing to write.
And then everything I've already mentioned
with Fee Alties showing up.
And the very matter of fact, excuse for abelism,
that he like like a a full-throated defensive abelism that he makes in dismissing
fealties who then turns into the betrayer who tells the Persians about the Goat Track, which in Miller's story isn't being defended by
the Thespians or Fosseans. And so winds up being the fatal weakness.
And so he's telling this warped version of the story.
Now, one of the things that he oddly chooses to get right
Now, one of the things that he oddly chooses to get right is the portrayal of the Persian army. Now, he sticks with the ancient sources in the exaggeration of how big the Persian army is.
But one of the details that he emphasizes is that the Persian army was even more ethnically and culturally diverse than the forces made
up of the Greek city states. There were sithians, there were Babylonians, there were, I want to say they were referred to as Hindu shuns or kushites,
basically Indians. There was this huge multinational group of conscripts from all across the Persian Empire.
And so all the Greeks in Miller's telling, we only see the Spartans and the other Greeks,
everybody is a Greek, but then visually all the different forces of the Persian army
are very clearly very different and they're all visually recognizable as being from different
cultures.
He never gives them enough attention to say these are the
Scythians, these are the Babylonians, these are the whoever, but they're very clearly different,
they're very clearly from different parts of the Empire. He almost sounds like, though,
that's a weakness, not a strength. That's what makes them scary to Miller. They're multicultural.
Oh.
How pop you can't even get.
Oh, no, kipping.
Yeah.
Okay.
And, and like, so you, you jokingly mentioned the rhinocerye, right?
One of the things in the comic
and it's an amazing visual, it's killer.
Oh, it's beautiful.
It's beautiful.
Is the armor-grainocerye getting released
into the Greek lines and the havoc they create?
Okay, well, that's very clearly African.
If you see the troops with them are very clearly,
they have African features.
And they, again, with the weird facial jewelry and the piercings and all the stuff, it's like,
well, this looks very African. But like if you showed that to anybody of, you know, who
does African studies or actually studies traditional African cultures from the time period,
they'd be like, nobody wore that shit. Right. Like visually it's shorthand for
this is, you know, sub-Saharan African, but no. Right. Like just no. And then,
you know, the gunpowder bomb throwing wizards that he has and the and the troops that are very clearly sithians. Right.
You know, with the with the brightly almost motley looking very brightly colored sithian pattern
kind of clothing. Like he plays up the diversity of the Persian army, whereas everybody we see on the Greek side,
it's all the Spartans and they are a monolith.
Right.
Because this is Western culture
and the purity of Western culture
with the capital W, whatever the fuck that means
when you really pin it down, but anyway,
standing against multiculturalism.
Like that's part of, and again, I don't think he consciously realized that's what he was writing.
But it's very clearly defending your land from hostile immigrants.
Yes.
Yeah.
Or hostile invaders and to him immigrant means the same thing. Yes, and and here's here's the thing. It is it is certainly valid
that in
military
historical scholarly circles
One of the things that the Battle of Thermopylai has been used as is an example of the strength of troops defending
their own territory.
Yes.
Defending their own home.
That is true.
However, the spin that we see Miller put on that is profoundly culturally showvinistic. And all of the Persians are all of the forces of the Persians are demonic or monstrous.
If you actually look at the historical armor of a Persian immortal,
actually look at the historical armor of a Persian immortal. The actual Persian immortals were chariot troops in heavy armor. They were like cataphracts of the period. And they were called,
it is true, they were called immortals because there were so many of them that you could kill
they were called immortals because there were so many of them that you could kill a thousand of them and they just keep coming.
But in his interpretation of the story and then in the movie, which is again shot for shot,
the comic book, they look like Ninja.
They have these armored face masks that look like a middle Easter-neified version of like a Japanese
Kabuto helmet mask. Yeah, they remind me of the bad guys in Top Gun.
That's a good comparison, yeah. Because the Soviet pilots always have their risers down.
Right. Which like, are they Soviet? Or are they, we risers down. Right. What's like, or are they
Soviet? Or are they? We don't know. Yeah. You know, they're the enemy. We know that.
That's all we know.
Well, the big red star on the back fin of the China could be China.
Could be career.
Could be.
It's in the Indian Ocean. Russia doesn't hang out in the Indian Ocean very often.
And they might, I mean, don't get me wrong. They're probably torturing POWs and Vietnam.
That's why they're having to go over there and save them.
Yeah, all right. And a good point. But my point is that they're nameless faceless,
featureless agents of the despotic exactly. Yeah, faces are covered. Yeah, so okay, and and again, and again, we're back to the ethos of this movie is very 80s
Despite it being made in 2008 and the comic being written in 1998
Yeah, huh
Wonder what's going on and by the way, I believe the movie was made in 2006 or is released in 2006.
The source I found clear today said 2008.
Wikipedia told me 2008. Let me double check.
Oh, okay. I may have I may have miss.
I remember because here's why I remember it 2006.
I was having lunch with a bunch of the retired teachers from my school.
And I stopped doing that after my first year as a teacher.
Okay. And so or my first year at that.
Oh, you know what you're right. It was 2006 because that puts it much more in
bush during Fallujah and no, not Fallujah, but during the surge.
Yeah, it does during Obama at the very beginning.
Okay. Good point. Yeah. No, it's 2006. You're correct.
Digging to wish. That's what's going on. Yeah.
There's a surge. There's bush. There's a yeehaw. There's, you know, hypermasculine.
We're not weak. We, we project strength. We, we are going to beat these.
People who are basically from the same region,
because they hate us for our freedoms. these people who are basically from the same region
because they hate us for our freedoms.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, within the popular sit case,
anyway, all of that.
Yeah, I was gonna say they're not Iranian.
They're not like, we're attacking.
But we could spend an entire episode
talking about how that's flawed.
But yeah, I freaking like, I remember there were groups in America
who are like, dude, America, what the fuck?
Why are you declaring cultural war on Iran?
Because it was clear that the Persians are Iranian.
Yeah.
And so it's like, yo, you've already called them
the Axis of Evil.
What, what are you doing?
You've landed troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq
on either side of Iran.
Like, and now you got this fucking movie.
Like, how about you, you know, stop it.
Oh, well, the movie came out and the Iranian ambassador,
I wanna say it was, there might have been the Iranian
foreign minister.
I don't know what the ambassador, yeah.
Yeah, the ambassador. Yeah.
Yeah, the ambassador launched a formal complaint.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Which is interesting to me.
It's a bit of tone deafness on his part in terms of like how our movies get made.
Well one.
And it's also very insightful as to how our movies get made.
Two.
Like three. very insightful as to how our movies get made. Two. Three. The modern culture of Iran,
the post-Islam culture of Iran likes to, or the, yeah, I won't say the culture of Iran, but the state of Iran likes to point
to its lineage going back to the Persian Empire and going back to the Zoroastrian rulers
and all of that.
But in outlook and character, the post-revolution government of Iran is far more a product of caliphate culture
than Darius or Zerxes. Sure. You know, it's a lot more Abu Bakr than terrorists. There's Ericses by a long shot. But the perception within
our own culture, like the majority of Americans not knowing anything about Islam, not understanding
anything about who the Persians were. Like popular perception, it's a meaningful criticism
from the Iranian ambassador knowing what he knew about Americans.
It certainly makes sense.
So anyway, I'm getting off the subject, but so this comic
that Miller puts out is this myth-making hero story of these
very Americanized hypermasculine
toxically masculine,
like putting forward this awful
view of straight masculinity,
you know, Spartans as the hero with Leonidas as the chief hero, literally.
And then, and so he does this in 98.
And then the movie gets made in 2006.
And all of the context of all of that stuff is now warped in turn again by the fact that in 2006 when the movie got made, we were now three years into the War
in Iraq, right, 2003.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we were three years into the War in Iraq, which was a client stage or was conquered territory
of the Persian Empire.
And everything that had been a point of millers
in the comic about the clash of civilizations
is now, I don't wanna say it's even more overt,
but it's even more pointed, perhaps,
or even more intense, in it's even more pointed perhaps or even more intense in that
we now had our own leaders characterizing our military efforts in the Middle East as
being a crusade. Like, you know, we in the West have now have over the course of centuries taken term crusade
to mean any kind of long term moral conflict.
Like, you know, crusade against illiteracy or crusade against whatever, whatever.
In the Middle East, crusade still has a very specific
meaning. And it literally means a bunch of Europeans coming and trying to take your territory
away from you and kill you for your religion. Right. You know, like that's, that's the
meaning for them has not changed since 1099. When Jerusalem got conquered, the first crusade.
Like that pretty much defined the term for them forever.
Right.
And it just, it isn't going to undergo a mnemetic drift
in that part of the world.
So that having the American precedent refer to it
when we're invading Iraq, is a pretty dipshit move.
Yes.
And so we have, in 98, as you pointed out in our last episode,
we had had the first goal for,
we had had our, had had your money
shown to be weaker than we would like in Mogadishu.
And in, I'm trying to remember the other place you mentioned.
Oh, it wasn't so much our involvement.
It was our unwillingness to get involved in Rwanda.
Oh, yes, yes, our failure to get involved in Rwanda.
And so there was this sense of fragility to our hegemonic in 1998.
In 2006, we were busy enforcing our hegemonic.
And the movie became a ra ra, cheering section.
Oh, absolutely.
And it for that effort.
It grossed so much money as well.
Oh, my God.
Yeah. It was triple digits.
I think it was over 200 million.
Yeah.
It was, and to the point where it shocked the studio,
they were like, yeah, we should see dark city money. they're not dark city sin city money. Yeah, we should see
that's dark city. Sin city, Frank Miller, Mark Miller, Holland Moore. Yeah, Roger Moore.
Craven Morehead. It just there you go. Yeah, nice.
But yeah, it was a wildly successful. Yeah, it was, it was, it was a
definitely tough disaster. Yeah, because where the comic book, the comic book had come out and
there were, you know, classical history nerds who were big fans of it because it was somebody
finally taking a run at us and turning it into a comic book, right? And there were Frank
Miller fans who were taking it going, oh my god, this is so flat. Fucking awesome. Yep.
And you know, there were just generalized comic book fans going, oh my god, this is an incredible
piece of art. But nobody expected it to be a runaway success as a movie, but we had all of this other shit going on that made it resonate in this way.
Yes.
And so what Miller had originally not realized he was doing in terms of making an ideological
comic book.
Again, I think Snyder also,
to a lesser extent, fell backwards into an ideological movie.
Yeah.
I don't think, I get a figure out how I want to phrase this.
I give Snyder enough credit for intelligence and thoughtfulness to be at least partially
aware of what it meant to be making a clash of civilizations movie at the historical moment
in which he was making one. Right. I do not think he was consciously setting out to make propaganda.
No, but sometimes you can be so saturated with the cultures,
anxieties and preoccupations that no matter what you do, you're going to make a movie that is a reflection
of that saturation.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And after a certain point, when you, you closely enough to source material that subconsciously
is as profoundly ideological as the comic was, you're going to end up making
propaganda. Yes. And the all of the exaggeration and all of the melodrama of the comic
the mellow drama of the comic is just that much more profound.
Makes sense. When you, or maybe not profound, much more powerful.
No, I would say profound as well.
But yeah, but it's just that much more,
like the effect of it on the viewer,
is just that much more powerful when it's a moving image
and when you take that incredibly emotionally charged, heavily visually saturated imagery
and you make it move and you make it breathe on the screen that turns it from, well, there's an ideological component under the surface of this, it turns
it into, you know, triumph of the fucking will. Like, that's a pool. You know, I mean, you know,
and the thing is, here's the thing, I'm gonna say this, and this may sound off the word,
may not, I don't know, but I genuinely think anybody who is a student of film
Needs to watch triumph of the will. Oh, yeah
I because because it's evil like I mean, I mean the people the people it was glorifying were were the devil in carnit
But it is an incredibly powerful
it, but it is an incredibly powerful piece of film. It is cinematic art pointed in the direction of
having, I mean, Lennon Leriefenstahl was like, okay, no, I'm going to turn the emotional impact of all of this up to 11 and she did it.
Not only that, but I also think that another evil movie that was ahead of its time technically
and ties right back to 300 is Birth of a nation. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, anybody, you know, who
walks into the conversation at this point, maybe like, wait, you're lumping 300 in with those
two films, like, yeah, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and thematically, yes, and also,
Yeah, well, and thematically, yes, and also, I think Snyder's skill is overlooked or underplayed.
I think he is underestimated.
I think it's the word I'm looking for.
I think it's underestimated because so much of his stuff is comic book related.
And very poppy in where his source material comes from.
He gets overlooked as being a very, very, very skilled manipulator of the audience's emotions.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, you know, people recognize Christopher Nolan
for the same.
You go through a tunnel and suddenly it's night
and he's like, yeah, dude, your brain will fill it in.
It's cool.
You're like, holy shit, he's a genius.
Like, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, I think it's important for us to recognize the ways in which this film
takes a historical legend and a comic book that the film is a shot for shot recreation
of, takes a historical legend and unwittingly attaches an agenda onto it.
I would say co-ops it by asking.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
It works co-ops it for an agenda.
And I think we need to name what that agenda winds up being,
because again, in the same way that Neil Geiman told Miller,
I don't think you're a homophob for this.
Right.
I'm going to say, I don't think Miller is a fascist for this,
but the comic that Miller made winds up being pretty crypto fascists because it's
consciously, culturally showvinist, homophobic, toxically masculine, and desperately like
shockingly ableist.
Yeah.
And I left sexist out.
Let's not forget the sexism. Because look how manly the
Spartans are. And by the way, Queen Gorggo doesn't really get raped because she consciously chooses to
let the guy do it. Right. Because that's totally not how somehow not work. Yeah, somehow that's not sexual.
Like, you know, and it's, I wish, I wish this story
could have been adapted by somebody who was
as absolutely visually brilliant
and as good as storytellers Frank Miller
who wasn't Frank Miller.
Yeah, it would have been nice to see a comic book. Well, I can point out to you
good, good graphic novels that handle all this stuff that still get your blood pumping because
their epic is hell and they don't Frank Miller it. So that'll be when you ask me what I'm reading.
Yeah, okay. Good. Yeah,
looking forward to that. Sure. So, I mean, that's essentially where my thesis on this comes back
around. And where I think we can kind of tie this up. You know, I mean, we could obviously, you and
I could keep talking about this for hours, but I think the point the point has been made. Yeah
You know, and and this is this is one of those works that like I'm gonna recommend to anybody who's like I want to I want to
Learn about the genre of graphic novels. I'm gonna recommend I'm gonna recommend 300 to them
Yeah, when I recommend to them. I'm gonna say understand. I'm telling you to read this in the same way that I'd recommend
Let me refench all
Yeah, to anybody who wants to learn about cinema like, you know, it is it is a masterpiece of the medium
Mm-hmm, and it is it is emotionally
Like you will feel shit, right?
But go into it understanding. There's an agenda here that is not fluffy.
Yes.
You know, yeah.
I think that he is, I'm going to just jump right to what I gleaned.
Yeah.
I think that he is, if you're going to give him a pass on being those things actively
and intentionally, I'm cool with it in the same way that I'm cool with us giving John
Millius a pass on being those things intentionally.
Yes.
Yeah.
Separate art from artists.
Right. They're both
manly men wanting to do manly man shit and not not having done
the reading to understand how quickly and easily manly man shit
gets co-opted and absorbed into crypto fascist shit. Yeah. Yeah.
And I just I have to say this that you say, you know, manly men doing
manly man shit. And my brain goes to places at once. It goes to the Robin Williams saying,
manly man doing manly things, which, and I can't remember the rest of the quote, but I just remember
it was hysterical. And then I also think of the Darwin award
from several years ago, where a group of Finnish men in the middle of winter after a five-day
drinking binge took a change, Tom, out into the woods with them too. And I quote play man's games.
The fuck? Okay. And, and, and one of them, and, and they're all of them apparently,
according to the story, hammered out of their minds on whatever it was they were drinking.
And one of them cut, cut his own hand off with the chainsaw. And they
were so blitz that he didn't feel it. His friend picked up the chainsaw, still running,
picked up the chainsaw, and proceeded to cut off his own head with it. Manly man doing manly things. Jesus. If you take that to an extreme, as you
said, if you have an all-boys club, toxic shit happens, like, you know, at the end of
the day, someone's gonna lose fucking head. Somebody's there will literally be maming
and death like, there you go. Yeah and death. Like, there you go.
Yeah.
So.
Well, there you go.
So now, what are you going to recommend to me to read?
Because I really want to really want to read some good graphic novels that are not
Frank Miller.
Yeah.
Uh, you know what?
Do the Odyssey or the Iliad by Gareth Hines?
Okay.
Um, phenomenal, beautiful artwork.
I mean, it's dealing with the Iliad or it's dealing with the Odyssey. It's your choice. Okay. Phenomenal, beautiful artwork. I mean, it's dealing with the Iliad, or it's dealing with the Odyssey.
It's your choice.
Okay.
I frankly, there's more bloodshed,
oddly enough, in the Odyssey than there is in the Iliad.
Okay.
I know, I know.
But-
Now are we talking about the slaughter of the consorts?
Yes.
Oh.
Like, it's just a more visceral scene.
But, and honestly, I think the Odyssey bounces around a little bit between narrators in Heinz's work. But he does a fantastic job with the Iliad.
I frankly, I'm just more partial to that story anyway.
But I'm going to recommend that because the artwork is beautiful.
It handles a the Trojan War and the interference of the gods and all that kind of stuff.
So it's very mythological.
It's not historical, but it handles it in such a way that is not the Frank Miller.
Okay.
Manly, manly, manly.
So that's that's what I recommend.
Do you have any recommendations? Yes, I am going to very, very highly recommend Persepolis. Oh, nice. By I'm I know I'm going
to I'm no I'm mispronouncing the first name, but Marjohn Marjane. Marjane? Yeah, that was so trappy. Yeah. Yeah. It is a very modern story. Yes.
It's beautiful. But it is a wonderful kind of memoir about modern Iran.
And I think as a counterpoint to the hypermasculine nationalist
culturally-shoventist stuff involved in 300 Perseverance
is a truly wonderful antidote to that.
And so I'm going to very highly recommend that.
Yeah, the stark use of black and white just really adds
to the story. Yes. And the film is also an amazing animation
adaptation of the graphic novel as well. So highly highly recommend both of those.
All right, well where do we want to find you on social medias?
I don't know if you want to find me at all, but if you decide you do want to find me,
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found, sir? You can find me at duh Harmony on Twitter and Insta, usually bullying school districts
into doing the right thing by their members.
So you can find me there, two Hs in the middle, the harmony, hit me up.
Let me know what you think I got wrong.
Corp.
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We can be found as a unit on Twitter as geek history time and on the internet Geek History of Time.com and
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Yeah, one of those places if you were listening to us right now
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You know we have earned with this insightful
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And there we go.
Cool.
Well, for a Geek History of Time, I'm Damien Harmony.
And I'm Ed Blanlock.
And until next time, keep rolling 20s.