Ever since the movie version of 300, and to a lesser extent The Deadliest Warrior, has come along, it’s pretty common to run into yammering douchebags who learned everything they know about Spartans from God of War and Gerard Butler’s greased-up abs.
And it grates. Among my other geekeries, I’m a minor-league classics geek, and while the Spartans are undeniably fascinating in a train-wreck kind of way, by modern standards, they’re pretty much vile, nasty, disgusting people who were ultimately wiped out not by glorious battle but by their own stupidly designed social system. Seriously, Sparta dying off was not a tragedy; it was social evolution.
In other words, it’s pretty much exactly what would happen if a bunch of meatheads started their own society. And now Kieron Gillen has teamed up with Ryan Kelly to take it down a notch.
The book, called Three, details the story of three Spartan slaves on the run. Along the way it will explore exactly why Spartan society collapsed and the lot of slaves in a society that highly prized having a penis and being good at stabbing people as the sole measure of whether or not you deserved freedom.
Gillen promises to be as historically accurate as possible with the book, which is especially interesting because Spartan society felt apart literally because it cost too much to be a Spartiate. Seriously, that’s what wiped them out: The top echelon of society became too expensive, and got into too many fights, and their society collapsed.
Hmmmm, that makes for some… interesting history lessons. Three will be coming next year.
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Complaining about 300 being an inaccurate, blown-up version of reality is like complaining your burger didn’t look like the one in the commercial.
I don’t have a problem with the movie. The comic I have my issues with, since Frank Miller is being an ass about the history a bit deliberately and basing the book off a crappy movie he saw on TV as a kid (seriously). Really it’s the guy getting in my face about how free and awesome the Spartans were and how Spartan society was undone by, like, all the other Greeks being jealous.
Can we get a Sacred Band of Thebes movie at some point? That would be rad, and the homoeroticism would be intentional!
I vaguely recall reading that inbreeding was also a big factor in the downfall of Sparta. As in, they believed in that whole genetic purity stuff, and Spartiates only bred with Spartiates, and after a few centuries they all looked like the Ephors in 300.
And yeah, I’ve been hatin’ on the Spartans since season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (not long, but boring, story).
The Spartan society declined because of low birth rates and natural disasters. The Spartans also, arguably,treated women better than any other Greek city-state. Spartan women were allowed to go to school and weren’t considered second-class citizens.
That’s like saying Chris Brown treated women better than Ike Turner, dude. Granted we’re not talking about an advanced time, but by any reasonable yardstick, the Spartans were as awful as all the other Greek societies at the time.
1. The society did not “felt apart”, it “fell apart”. If your going to try to display some undeserved since of intellectual superiority, at least check your work. The social system wasn’t stupidly designed, it was just immoral. In actuality it was a system that sustained Sparta for a very long time, the downfall associated with the system occurred when the enforcement of certain rules/laws within its military interfered with the birth rate of its non slave population, which led to a decrease in their security, couple that with wars within the Greek world. I say undeserved since of intellectual superiority because of your apparent lack of knowledge in history, and your derogatory use of the word “meat head”, as if a person can not be active in a work out culture and be intelligent and or have a deep appreciation for geek culture. Individuals are not bound to be so one sided, nor should their levels of masculinity or femininity be based on your preconceptions of felt inadequacy.
Funny that you bring up one spelling error on Seitz’s part, but you used “your” instead of “you’re” in your second sentence, and you used “since” instead of “sense” twice.
Critiquing people is fun!