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The
battle of Thermopylae and the war between Greece and Persia have an
almost mythological status in western civilization. However, there are
some nasty aspects to this popularity. A discussion of
- Frank Miller, 300 (1998; comic
book)
- Zack Snyder, 300 (2006; movie)
- Tom Holland, Persian
Fire (2005;
history book)
Conclusion:
The works discussed have shown that the study of ancient
history in the twenty-first century has two serious defects: historians
are still suffering from their nineteenth-century blindness towards the
Near East, and know less about theory and method than they used to do
in the early 1900's.
A well-known story
The story is well-known. In 480 BCE, the Persian king Xerxes
tried to
conquer Greece with an army that was so large that it needed an equally
large fleet to bring sufficient supplies. After three hundred Spartan hoplites
and their allies, who offered resistance at Thermopylae,
had been defeated, the Persians could proceed to Athens, the largest
town in Greece. They were still looting the city, when their navy was
defeated at Salamis,
and although the Persians still had naval superiority, Xerxes decided
not to take unnecessary risks, and retreated. The ruins of Athens
testified that he had achieved his main goal.
The naval battle had not been decisive, and no one knows why Xerxes did
not return. In 1992, Pierre Briant, the greatest iranologist of our
age, has suggested that a rebellion
in Babylonia
demanded the great king's attention.[1]
There is indeed some evidence for this theory, but it has recently been
shown that at least the cuneiform sources do not support it
sufficiently.[2] Whatever the
explanation, the
key fact is that only a small Persian army was left behind to guard the
king's conquests. In 479, it was defeated at Plataea,
and in 475, the last Persian stronghold in Europe, Eïon,
was captured by the Athenian commander Cimon. The Greco-Persian war was
over.
The battle of Thermopylae is just an incident in this great war, but
over the centuries, it has become some sort of foundation myth of
Western civilization. Novels were devoted to it, like William Golding's
The Hot Gate
and Steven Pressfield's Gates
of Fire. In 2005, historian Tom Holland accepted this myth
in his Persian Fire;
and Frank Miller's award-winning comic book 300 is now
a major movie.
The reason for this continuing interest in the Greco-Persian war and
the battle of Thermopylae is easy to find: the brilliant account by Herodotus
of Halicarnassus (c.480-c.425), included in the seventh book
of his Histories,
one of the most entertaining and accessible texts from
Antiquity. Unfortunately, the great care with which he
separates
facts from opinion has not always inspired later historians, and it is
not exaggerated to say that "Thermopylae" is rapidly becoming political
propaganda. And that is to be regretted, because novels, comic books,
and movies are -more than scholarly research, which reaches not many
people- the way people conceptualize the past.
Self-sacrifice
First: the story by Herodotus, who is sometimes "father of history" but
might as well be called the "father of
investigative journalism". He always presents both sides of a story,
offers variant explanations, and seeks to separate facts from opinion.
In his
account of the battle of Thermopylae, he makes it clear that he knew
more than one story
about the treason that enabled the Persians to circumvene the Greek
positions (7.213-214). A bit later, when he has reached the moment on
which the Greeks discover that they will be surrounded, Herodotus
states what
he believes is the last thing he knows for certain: that the Greek army
desintegrated (7.219). He does not know what happened after this
moment, because none of the Spartan soldiers who remained at
Thermopylae survived. Therefore, he introduces the sequel with gnomê,
the word he often uses to introduce his own ideas (7.220).
His hypothesis, and the beginning of the myth, is that Leonidas knew an
oracle that offered him a choice: either he had to die, or his town
would be destroyed. This may be a correct hypothesis. A modern one is
that the
Greeks were retreating and that the Spartans were cut off before the
could leave the trap. This may also be correct. We simply do
not know.
The historian Hignett has called Thermopylae "an unsolved riddle", and
that's about everything we can say about it.
Fighting for freedom
This general ignorance has not dissuaded the American artist Frank
Miller to use Herodotus' hypothesis as basis of his classical comic
book 300.
He has successfully
created a visual language to render Herodotus' literary
arsenal.
For example, the Greek researcher inserts in his story an element from Homer's
Iliad:
the Spartans fought for the possession of Leonidas' dead body. This
must be fiction (who could have told Herodotus?) but any Greek
would have recognized the suggestion that the Spartans fought like the
heroes of yore. Miller could not use this trick, so he presents his
Spartans as fighting almost naked, because we all know from our movies
that action heroes become invulnerable once the put off their shirt
(e.g., Rambo,
Die Hard).
So far, so good. Miller runs into trouble when he offers an
interpretation of the story. The Spartans, he says, sacrificed
themselves for the freedom of Greece. And not only for Greek liberty:
the Spartans were "the world's one hope for reason
and justice", and the Persians were living "in a sea of mysticism and
tyranny". Although Thermopylae was a defeat, it showed the
world
what free men are capable of, inspired the other Greeks, and
therefore saved
Greek culture and all of western civilization.
Miller's reading of Thermopylae and the Greco-Persian wars is not
unique. It can also be found in Persian
Fire,
a book by the British historian Tom Holland, published in
2006. It is a good read, if
you can ignore exuberant lines like "As the storm clouds of seeming
Persian invincibility loomed ever darker over Ionia, so strange shadows
from the past returned to haunt Athens, too". In his
introduction, Holland states that democracy, rationalism, and the
philosophy
of Plato
would
not have existed if the Persians had not been expelled from
Europe. The book is completely different from Miller's comic book, but
in one respect they are similar: Herodotus' story about
self-sacrifice has
become the foundation myth of western civilization.
Rationalisms
Holland and Miller are not the first to make this claim. Holland refers
to
nineteenth-century philosophers like Hegel and Mill, and he could have
added the famous art historian J.J. Winckelmann (1717-1768) as well.
The general idea is that the Greeks were a special nation that
possessed qualities (like rationality and a passion for liberty) that the nations of
the
ancient Near East were lacking. Of course quoting non-specialists is
not the best way to argue a thesis, but the authors referred to by
Holland are not the only ones. He could also have quoted
a serious historian like Eduard Meyer (1855-1930), who in 1901
maintained
that the Greco-Persian war marked the birth of western civilization,
defined by rationalism, freedom, and democracy.[3]
But one has to be careful when one accepts judgments that were offered
more than a century ago. Meyer's arguments were analyzed in a famous
theoretical
discussion with Max Weber (1864-1920), who is best known as one of the
founders of the social sciences, but started his career as a historian
and was a pupil of Theodor
Mommsen.
Weber's question was simple: how did Meyer know that a Persian victory
would have obstruct the rise of freedom, democracy, and rationalism?
Weber
could easily prove[4] that
Meyer's reasoning was
counterfactual: he explains the significance of an event by pointing at
what would have happend if it had not taken place. And
counterfactual explanations are rarely accurate.
Take, for instance, these considerations. In 493, a mere thirteen years
before Xerxes invaded Greece, his general Mardonius
(one of Xerxes' main advisers) had accepted democracy as system of
government of the Greek towns in the Persian empire. And how hostile
were the Persians towards mysticism? The research program of
the Chaldaeans
in Persian Babylonia had a purely scientific method. In Xerxes' eastern
capital Taxila,
Panini wrote the world's first scientific book of grammar. And in
Judah, the book of Job
was written, in which God and man discuss the
nature of good and evil. These are not the products of the presumed "sea
of mysticism and tyranny". For any example Meyer and Holland mention,
one might offer a counter-example.
Offering examples and counter-examples is not the best way to
proceed. What is necessary is a grand theory that enables
us to compare the relative weight of Greek and Persian
rationalisms. A possible candidate is Richard Dawkins' recent
theory about cultural memes, which may also help us find a way
to
make meaningful judgments about the importance of Greco-Roman culture,
compared to other cultures, as
"root" of western civilization. One might,
for example, want to weigh the influence of the Greek
inheritance and other influences.
As far as I know, no ancient historian has ever attempted this, and it
is
easy to see why: no one wants to cast doubt on the European foundation
myth. Although,
for the moment, the truth of the statement that "the project
of
reason started in Greece" can not be established, the statement is the
recognized consensus and adds cement to western society.
Stereotyping the enemy
However, Miller goes one step beyond the agreed-upon foundation myth.
In his comic book, he depicts the Persians as effeminate, gives them
Negroidal features, and presents them as religious devotees. The
traitor is a hunchback. The Spartans are physically perfect. It is
white versus black, man versus woman, mysticism versus rationalism,
healthy versus sick. Although some of these aspects are hinted upon in
Herodotus' story (like a woman, Xerxes does not control his emotions),
Miller creates something novel, and there is no artistic need to
use these particular oppositions.
And now, we have the movie, which goes even further. In one scene, the
Persian Immortals
put off their face masks, and they resemble the orcs from The Lord of the Rings.
We also see a giant attacking the Spartans. The movie makers deny
humanity to the Persians.
If they did so because they wanted to make some sort of sword &
sorcery movie, they failed. The point is that there is another
innovation in the movie that is not in the comic book: an entirely
novel plot line about the Spartan queen Gorgo, who is trying to get
reinforcements for the soldiers who are fighting in a far-away country.
This message must be dear to the movie makers, because they changed
Miller's story, and it is easy to read this as a message to the
American cinema audiences.
This is a sincere message - there is nothing wrong with that. But the
makers can not have it both ways:
- either the movie has a serious message and they
honestly believe that Persians can be represented in this way;
- or they think that it is just an action movie -
but then the political message is gratuitous.
In the first case, they insult the Iranian population, in the second
case, the coalition soldiers. Both deserve more respect.
A new cartoon riot?
It may be clear that I am not happy with this movie. However, the
answer to the
dilemma I described above may in the end be irrelevant. It may
not matter in the
west, because it is safe to assume that many people will be
strengthened in
their belief that it all started in Greece, and that the ancient Near
East is less important. Nor may it may matter in
the east. The Iranian authorities have already shown that they find it
difficult to cope with the western line between fact and fiction. If
someone in Tehran wants to organize an anti-western demonstration, the
comic book and the movie offer all ammunition he needs.
If we are approaching a new cartoon riot, 300
will at least have proven that the study of
ancient history in the twenty-first century has two serious defects:
historians are still suffering from their nineteenth-century blindness
towards the Near East, and know less about theory and method than they
used to do in the early 1900's.
The only correct answer to the book by Tom Holland would have been a
review
in which it is shown that his introductory statement about the birth of
European civilization in the age of the Greco-Persian wars is outdated.
However, ancient historians -with a couple of exceptions- do not care
very much about correcting
misunderstandings. It is this attitude that has made it possible to
make a movie like 300.
Note 1:
P. Briant, 'La date des révoltes babyloniennes contre
Xerxès' in: Studia
Iranica 21 (1992) 7-20
Note 2:
C. Waerzeggers, 'The Babylonian Revolts Against Xerxes and the "End of
Archives"' in: Archiv
für Orientforschung 50 (2003/2004), 150-173
Note 3:
Ed. Meyer, Geschichte
des Altertums
(1901), part III, pp. 445-446: "The outcome would have been that some
kind of church [...] would have put Greek life and thought under a yoke
and would have chained all free dynamics, and the new Greek culture
would, like the oriental cultures, have had a theological-religious
nature."
Note 4:
Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (1973),
pp.282-287. |
©
Jona Lendering for
Livius.Org,
2007
Revision: 11 March 2007 |
