300 and the Perils of Lionizing Oppression

Following the 2007 release of 300, the Greek city state of Sparta has increasingly captured the imaginations of people around the world.

In the Battle of Thermopylae, a small number of 300 Spartan soldiers -- with periodic assists from Athenian soldiers -- stalled an invading Persian Army. According to 300, the Spartans waged their desperate fight in the name of freedom and justice.

The biggest mistake one could make after watching 300 would be to believe that Sparta was a free city.

At one point, King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) proclaims that "a new age has begun, an age of freedom. And all will know that 300 Spartans gave their last breath to defend it."

Yet when one considers how Sparta was governed, it becomes immediately apparent that Sparta was not a free land. In fact, Sparta may well have been history's first command state, and in fact had more in common with oppressive regimes like the Soviet Union than they did with any free society in history.

The Spartan martial society was born after an uprising by the Messenians, whom the Spartans had conquered so that their fertile land could be used to feed their growing population.

The biggest problem for the Spartans was that the Messenians outnumbered them ten to one. So the Spartans re-conceptualized their political system into a military state, and rendered the Messenians into Helots, essentially slave farmers who would pay an annual tribute to the Spartan owner of their land, keeping a small portion of it to sustain themselves.

But, in time, Spartans wouldn't merely enslave the Helots. They would eventually enslave themselves.

For Spartan men, joining the military was not a matter of choice. Enrollment at military school was mandatory, as was military service. They would be forced to live apart from their families for nearly their entire lives. Only at 30 would Spartan men be allowed to live with their families, but were compelled to continue their military service until the age of 60.

A particularly vexing element of Spartan society was their approach to childrearing.

Not only was the future of Spartan children decided well in advance by the state, but whether or not a child would live to see a future at all was also decided by the state.

The Spartans may well have been history's first practitioners of institutionalized eugenics. As 300 depicts, Spartan children were inspected thoroughly and, if deemed weak, were abandoned to die in the elements.

More than two thousand years later, Adolph Hitler would embrace eugenics with a similar homicidal zeal. While many other juriisdictions that practiced eugenics were content to merely sterilize those deemed unfit, Hitler mused in his writings about euthanizing children deemed unfit. In fact, Hitler feverishly estimated that up to 100,000 German children per year may be culled as part of his eugenics program.

Fortunately, history denied Hitler the opportunity to put this particular program into operation. It was one of the few horrors produced by Hitler's imagination that humaity was spared.

While Sparta treated its women far more liberally than any other Greek state, this is nearly entirely immaterial. Women comparatively free within an unfree society are still themselves not free. They were denied freedom just as anyone else within Sparta was.

Like the modern-day Chinese legislature, Sparta's government consisted of cleverly-hidden hierarchies. Power ultimately rests at the top of a pyramid-styled structure, in which increasingly large groups of legislators wield less and less power. In the end, the lion's share of political power in Sparta was wielded by the five men who made up the Ephorate.

Despite the portrayal of Sparta in 300, Sparta was neither democratic nor free. In fact, Sparta may well have been history's very first fascist society.

While 300 makes for fantastic entertainment, lionizing Sparta based on it is politically a deeply dangerous notion.