History ComicBook / Three

* TheReveal: Of a sort. Throughout the series, what little description from the Spartans seems to paint Agesilaos, who's currently in Egypt as a mercenary, as the ideal Spartan king who would have run Sparta much better than Kleomenes. In the epilogue, however, it's revealed that he is now a broken and weak old man, who died before he even returned from Egypt.

* TheReveal: Of a sort. Throughout the series, what little description from the other Spartans seems to paint Agesilaos as the ideal Spartan king who would have run Sparta much better than Kleomenes. In the epilogue, however, it's revealed that he is now a broken and weak old man, who died before he even returned from Egypt.

--> '''Gillen:''' [He read] one of the speeches about ‘The only free men the world has ever known,’ and literally had a moment of incandescent rage and shouted at the book, ‘You hunted slaves!’

* YouShallNotPass: Klaros's one-man ''300'' act at the entrance to the gully.

* InVinoVeritas: The plot kicks off when an Ephor and his escort force a group of helots to drink unwatered down wine. When they don't like what the drunken Terpander [[KillEmAll has to]] [[TheDogBitesBack say...]]

* {{Hypocrite}}: Spartan society in general, and a central theme of the novel. King Kleomenes comments that the tale of the two hounds taught to young Spartan boys, in which breeding is said to be as important as training, is different from the one taught to him as a child, in which training was emphasised as being more important than breeding. The altered tale reflects Sparta's military and political decline and how the education system tries to compensate by emphasising Spartan blood. The Ephors disparage Kleomenes and his late father Kleombrotus, the Spartan king who commanded the Spartan-Peloponnesian army at Leuctra and fell in the battle, while praising Agesilaos, who essentially used a loophole in Spartan law in order to avoid the numerous survivors of the battle from being branded outcasts. Kleomenes calls out the Ephors on their hypocrisy and also points out the mistake that Agesilaos made in waging punishment wars against Thebes for 30 years, thereby inadvertently strengthening Thebes, leading to the disaster at Leuctra. Nestos also points out his parents' hypocrisy in having only one son in order to avoid having to split their large estate, even though parents in Sparta were specifically expected to have many sons in order for there to be sufficient manpower for the army.

* VestigialEmpire: Sparta is in the process of developing into this at the time of the novel, which helps explain why there is such an extreme reaction to the Three's revolt.

* DeathFromAbove: Kleomenes has Klaros killed by having his men drop a huge boulder on him from the top of the gully.

* ShownTheirWork: Keiran Gillen did a lot of research into Spartan society to get the details right according to the most recent academic literature on the topic. The notes even contain an extended discussion between Gillen and a professor of history who specializes in that particular period.

* LoverAndBeloved: Kleomenes and Tyrtaios had this relationship in their back story.

--> '''Gillen:''' [I read} one of the speeches about ‘The only free men the world has ever known,’ and literally had a moment of incandescent rage and shouted at the book, ‘You hunted slaves!’

* SpiritualAntithesis: To ''ComicBook/ThreeHundred''. Its initial conception was to expose the actual brutality and injustice of ancient Spartan culture, and point out how self-destructive its martial ideals were in the end.

* SomeoneToRememberHimBy: [[spoiler:Damar ends up with twins by Klaros, and [[DeadGuyJunior names them after him and Terpander]].

* NiceJobFixingItVillain: Nestos's attempt to hunt down the helots personally ends up giving Klaros the military armour and weapons he needs to battle the main group of Spartiates.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: [[spoiler:Damar's speech early on to the two guys about how living well is the best revenge.]]

* {{Forshadowing}}: [[spoiler:Damar's speech early on to the two guys about how living well is the best revenge.]]

* FakingTheDead: Damar survives by hiding and letting the Spartiates assume that Nestos's corpse is that of one of the three helots, realising that they don't know that one of the escapees was a woman.

''Three'' is a graphic novel by Creator/KieronGillen and Ryan Kelly, which began as a deliberate SpiritualAntithesis to the glorification of ancient Sparta in ''ComicBook/{{300}}'' but then became more complex in its approach. It tells the story of three helots (the serf class in Sparta), Klaros, Damar, and Terpander, who are pursued by 300 Spartiates after killing a group of Spartiates who massacred their community.