Most common is an exchange that is initiated when one person mentions madness, triggering the other to respond, "Madness?This! IS! SPARTAAA!!!" Explanation Spoken by Leonidas as he kicks a messenger into a pit.
It's been so overused that some forumites have already gone meta, responding to mentions of Sparta with, "Sparta? This...is...[INSERT MEME HERE]!!!"
When we talk about the trope created through that line on this very wiki, we will type! WORDS! LIKE! THIS!
As a result Leonidas gained an even more fearsome archenemy than even Xerxes and the Persians: Patrick Star. "This is SPARTA!!!" "No, THIS! IS! PATRICK!!!"
One image has Xerxes and Leonidas playing Magic: The Gathering, where Xerxes plays a creature with the effect "Madness". After several Beat panels, Leonidas blows up the planet shouting the word, cutting to Stephen Hawking stating "And that, gentlemen, is how the universe began."
Using "THIS IS SPARTA!" with a character pointing at a map of Greece has become a sub-variant. Naturally, it led at least one person to shout, "THAT! WAS! ATHENS!"
A lesser parody is also taken from the quote "Tonight we dine in HELL!!" Example here◊ Explanation Taken from a sorta-inspirational speech Leonidas uses to get his men to fight.
Inevitably it resulted in crossovers with Gordon Ramsay.
The Spartans themselves are this. Ask a Ph.D in History, and they will say Spartans fought in conventional phalanxes and wore heavy armour. Ask everybody else, even a high school student learning basic History, and Spartans will almost always be described as hypermuscular Supermen who kill millions while wearing only tiny briefs. A single movie turned a little city state nobody would even hear about into an entire race of Memetic Badasses, which pissed off historians to no bound.
