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* Leonidas tells the traitor Ephialtes "May you live forever". At first, it seems that Leonidas is telling him "Good luck with your life," a moment later Ephialtes breaks down in tears. Why? He was trying to regain his father's spartan honor, and in Sparta, you were only respected if you fought and died in battle.
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* Leonidas tells the traitor Ephialtes "May you live forever". At first, it seems that Leonidas is telling him "Good luck with your life," a moment later Ephialtes breaks down in tears. Why? He was trying to regain his father's spartan honor, and in Sparta, you were only respected if you fought and died in battle.battle, making this the ultimate Spartan insult.
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* Leonidas tells the traitor Ephialtes to live a long life. At first, it seems that Leonidas is telling him "Good luck with your life," a moment later Ephialtes breaks down in tears. Why? He was trying to regain his father's spartan honor, and in Sparta, you were only respected if you fought and died in battle.
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* Leonidas tells the traitor Ephialtes to "May you live a long life.forever". At first, it seems that Leonidas is telling him "Good luck with your life," a moment later Ephialtes breaks down in tears. Why? He was trying to regain his father's spartan honor, and in Sparta, you were only respected if you fought and died in battle.
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** [[FridgeBrilliance It's meant to be a jab at racism / classism]]: Spartans' disgust and contempt against deformed men is so deeply ingrained, they reject them even when they're obviously useful.
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* The Spartans using the corpses of the Persian scouts they slew to build the wall at Thermopylae. While it's an example of the Spartans being both practical with "human resources" and using it as psychological warfare, there is another purpose to it, as well. Earlier, the Spartans and their allies had encountered the Tree of Death, a tree to which numerous civilians had been nailed to, with only one young survivor to tell them what had happened. The men who had done this? The aforementioned Persian scouts. So the Spartans killing them and using their bodies as mortar for the wall was also a case of payback.
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* In ThreeHundred, Leonidas tells the traitor Ephialtes to live a long life. At first, it seems that Leonidas is telling him "Good luck with your life," a moment later Ephialtes breaks down in tears. Why? He was trying to regain his father's spartan honor, and in Sparta, you were only respected if you fought and died in battle.
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* In ThreeHundred, Leonidas tells the traitor Ephialtes to live a long life. At first, it seems that Leonidas is telling him "Good luck with your life," a moment later Ephialtes breaks down in tears. Why? He was trying to regain his father's spartan honor, and in Sparta, you were only respected if you fought and died in battle.
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** On the subject of combat: Yes, the phalanx formation falls apart almost instantly in favor of stylized melee. But look at how Leonidas and the rest of the Spartans are fighting in that melee -- they're not killing or finishing all of the soldiers they run into as they charge. Many are instead left stunned or knocked over for the Spartans behind them to finish off. They might not be in the tightly-packed phalanx, but they're still fighting as a unit and trusting their fellow soldiers to protect their backs and flanks as they advance.
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*Ephialtes is heavily deformed, but not only does he show himself to be fiercely loyal to Leonidas despite his parents' self-imposed exile due to Sparta's policy of killing anything less then perfectly healthy babies, he also shows that his spear-thrusts may as well be coming from a post-driver, and also that he has an intimate knowledge of the surrounding landscape that could prove vital to the success or failure of Leonidas' plan. All that he asks of Leonidas is a chance to fight with the Spartans to earn his father's helm and shield, and validate his parents' faith in him...and Leonidas turns him down, telling him instead to pile up bodies, tend to the wounded, and fetch them water, which he ''visibly already has his own warriors doing.'' Leonidas justifies this because Ephialtes' deformity means that he can't lift his shield very high, which would admittedly weaken a phalanx...but the Spartans are rarely ever ''all'' arrayed in a phalanx, and the narrator already snidely refers to the supplementary Arcadian force as "more brawlers than warriors [and] brave amateurs [who] do their part," so why couldn't Ephialtes be included in the defense force? If nothing else, why on Earth did Leonidas just turn him loose after trampling literally the only thing he wanted out of life?
