300

You may have seen the movie "300" that came out in 2007 and was about the Battle of Thermopylae.

The Battle of Thermopylae was fought between about 300 Spartans and the invading Persians under the Emperor Darius. I learned about this battle in High School, in Mr. Warford's classical history class, and it always stuck in my mind.

I remember the descriptions of the battle tactics, as I was taught back then. The Greeks used a phalanx formation, where they interlocked their shields, and fought like an enormous turtle, with the shields forming a solid shell against the archers. I remember being told that they occupied a valley so narrow, that the enemy could not overwhelm them with numbers, but was forced to narrow their front down to the point that Greeks were never outnumbered during actual battle.

The movie brought to life the mental image of the battle and tactics I had learned about. The vague picture in my mind finally got filled in by images of the first hand action. The strange and stylized look of the film was fine with me, because that's kind of how memories are. When you read a story, the picture in your mind isn't crisp, it's kind of vague around the edges.

I've often played a science fiction game in my mind about epic historical events. What would it be like to actually go back in time and see famous sights? Besides the point of correcting historical inaccuracies, you have to admit that there would be nothing like actually watching this action. Whenever a movie comes along that tries to be as accurate as possible and actually answer this question, I find it very gratifying.

I remember something I heard about how they made the movie The Last of the Mohicans from 1992 with Daniel Day-Lewis. Someone making the movie was tasked with producing the action of fighting with tomahawks as accurately as possible. They adapted a French manual of arms for saber fighting into the moves used by the men wielding the tomahawks. I enjoyed the movie a lot more by being able to notice and compare the scenes where the tomahawk was employed. You begin to understand what it was like.

Another example of a movie striving for historical accuracy of battle scenes was Saving Private Ryan. You can't watch the beach scenes without having a new appreciation of what those men went through.

I have recently been working through a couple of podcasts that cover Roman history. One in particular, The History of Rome has some excellent descriptions of the way they fought. See http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ and go back to the two episodes labeled "A Phalanx with Joints" from November 28, 2008. Mike Duncan has an excellent way of describing the action. I looked into the Maniple Formation as a result of his coverage of the Samnite Wars. I understood that the tight Greek Phalanx was modified by the Romans and adopted to less desirable terrain. They explained how the old Greek Phalanx finally died out under the Romans' superior way of using similar tactics.

So any movie that attempts to show what it would be like to fight in the old days is interesting and exciting to me. I remember watching the battle scenes in Braveheart and thinking that this must what it was like to stand nose to nose and hack away at each other. I read the book Timeline by Michael Creighton, where the characters use a time machine to go back in time and see medieval warfare. I remember a line from the book by a character that had studied and trained to be ready to go back and live the old ways. After about 2 minutes in a sword fight, he was exhausted.

I feel the same way - that you are getting a good glimpse into actual battle history - when I watch 300. So go ahead and scorn the movie, call it homoerotic, it doesn't matter. I still think it's a good window to the past.