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I was thinking of asking what people thought were the most interesting post-election Trump related media.
The Good Fight on CBS Access devoted their entire second season to dealing with the subject.
Edited by kory on Feb 26th 2025 at 5:46:51 AM
If 300 were more historically accurate we'd probably be rooting for the Persians.
Whatever the historical context may be for the Spartans (and the Spartans were incredible bastards from a historical sense, beyond the Eugenics, the child abuse, possible pederasty, the use of slavery and the rampant abuse and murder of said slaves), from the framing of the movie, it was meant to appeal to certain parts of American audiences, so even if freedom in historical times means sovereignty, they used freedom for it's emotional appeal to Americans and what we mean it to be. The fact that they used boy lovers as an insult to Athenians, despite historical evidence that they also engaged in the practice definitely frames that the story was trying to appeal to modern audience sense of machismo, playing up the horrid training practices as a fantastical ideal of bringing about true men, when they're kind of okay in warfare compared to other major Greek city-states and their priorities on military might seem vastly overstated in actual history. A good deal of alt-righters hold up this fantasy of Sparta as something worth emulating, rather than the barbarism it should be.
Yeah, 300 is a adaptation of a comicbook written for Frank Miller himself, its very obviously idealizing a lot of horrid behaviours.
Watch me destroying my countryThe Persian Empire actually did outlaw slavery at one point, don't recall all the details about that.
Leviticus 19:34The Achaemenid Empire did have slavery, but it was a rather different institution from its Greek equivalent. Remember that it wasn't a single country ruled by fiat so much as a cluster of countries that the imperial throne had to constantly bargain with. They didn't write down their history, so for most parts we're forced to rely on administrative texts (like trade receipts) and Greek sources like Herodotos to figure out the extent of slavery in the empire.
Some of its constituent nations, like Babylon, definitely had slave trading going on. Others might have had different laws regulating it. Overall, it seems that the number of slaves never came close to supplanting free labour, let alone turning it into a slave-majority society like Sparta; some practices that were formerly legal in these regions, like debt slavery, were actually outlawed when Kourosh conquered them and founded the empire.
But. Slavery is still slavery and still provably there. On a more centralised basis, the Achaemenid throne would often deport prisoners of war (like the Egyptians who rebelled against Darayavaush, a few years before his invasion of Greece) to far-flung corners of the empire for forced labour. This is something that does tend to get whitewashed in some revisionist readings, especially after the Mohammad Reza Shah regime tried to promote the Kourosh Charter as "the world's first declaration of human rights" back in the '60s.
More generally, though, every subject of the empire was technically a "slave" (bandaka) to the King of Kings and liable to be called up for labour and military service. Some of these subjects, surprise, were Greeks! There were Ionian Greeks on the west coast of Anatolia who lived under Persian rule; turned out that they were mostly happy enough to do that provided you leave them alone and have assemblies and stuff whenever you're not asking them for tributes. Said Ionians did end up rebelling against the Persians with financial support from the Athenians (which was Darayavaush's casus belli for the invasion of Greece), but even then there were more Greek states that stayed neutral or sided with the Persians during their invasion than sided with the anti-Persian coalition.
The key thing here, though, is that the relationship between the king and his subjects depended on bargaining, and was nowhere nearly as autocratic as the movie and comic made it out to be. This was something that got lost in translation with Greek sources, who interpreted the label bandaka as an equivalent of their own doulos (or the many, many other words the Greeks had for slaves), giving off the impression that the whole Achaemenid Empire was literally made up of slaves rather than people who had legal obligations to the state (that said state often struggled to enforce).
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Sep 27th 2021 at 6:42:15 AM
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.Persian Empire practiced only identured servitude rather than outright slavery per see. Usually people would fall in debt (or be captured in battle), work for free for a varying period to their debtor and then "earn their freedom" through it (or the same process but with prisoners of war). It was quite different from Spartan slavery, which even had a literal secret police for slave-hunting.
The idea of the Persian Empire was this massive slave empire was more of a Greek perception with the idea that Persians were all slaves to their Emperor.
Edited by Gaon on Sep 27th 2021 at 6:45:59 AM
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Anyhow, we actually have a History Thread
over at Yack Fest before this veers too far off media discussion. But I'd be careful about taking the slave-hunting krypteia as a fact: pretty much our only source on it is Plutarch, who lived much later in Roman times (when Sparta had been reduced to a minor curiosity for tourists, like an ancient equivalent of the Tiger King zoo) and had to insist that he got his facts straight from Aristotle (who only mentioned it in very vague terms IIRC).
If you want a Sparta-themed work whose author actually did the research, I can't recommend Kieron Gillen's Three enough.
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Sep 27th 2021 at 7:01:04 AM
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.To understand 300 one must really only know one thing: Frank Miller really hates Middle Easterners.
Though it's not like he invented the whole badass myth surrounding the Spartans Thermopylae - that basically goes back all the way to ancient Greece - other city-states had their fair share of Spartaboos who'd bang on about how much cooler Sparta was compared to everyone else.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Sep 27th 2021 at 6:20:59 PM
We learn from history that we do not learn from historyThe main reason really has a lot more to do with the main writers that give us information about Sparta being primarily Athenians who were disgruntled with their city state's democracy allowing commoners to vote and thus would use Sparta as a means to critique Athens. It also doesn't help that these writers primarily get their information from the Spartiates (Basically the elites of Sparta. They made up barely 10% of the population of Sparta at their greatest) who went through the Agoge (Which is not a school, but really more of an indoctrination program) and did well. It would be like trying to get a picture of America from interviewing solely Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
Also my only comment on the Slavery talk is that anyone who says that Athens and Sparta are equal about Slavery really doesn't know a lot about Spartan slavery. It's so bad even other Greek Writers note that being a Spartan slave or Helot was extremely terrible even in comparison to other slaves. For starters, Helots made up 85% of the population in Sparta. By contrast, Athens had 1/3 of their population as Slaves. In addition, the Helots were worked far harder than the Athenian slaves because the Spartiates outright did not work. We have writings of Spartiate men and women making fun of the very idea of working a job or hobby so Helots had to do pretty much everything for them while also caring for themselves. Then there's the murder and rape of the Helots. 300 depicts Leonidas and his fellow Agoge members having to hunt down a wolf as part of their final test. The truth is that they actually hunted down Helot men as a means of indoctrination and terror. They would stalk them at night and murder them. In addition, The Ephors (the weird mutant guys. They were not actually mutants irl, but rather Spartiate men elected to the position every year or so. They also weren't priests and such, but rather more the equivalent of Magistrates) would declare war on the Helots every year. During this war, a Spartiate could murder a Helot and not be held liable for murder. Killing a slave in Athens at any time was still murder and would be legally charged as such. Helot women would get raped so often that an entire underclass of people had to be named and legally defined in the form of the Nothoi (Spartan men who were bastards born to Helot women.)
This is a picture comparing the population percentages of Sparta, Athens, and Rome. Take this information as you will.
In fairness he has disavowed some of his comments and ideas since. It doesn't make it all okay and the views are still pretty awful but he does seem to acknowledge as much, for what it's worth.
"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel."I found this article
on copaganda in manga and anime though it also looks at it in US media. One of the series it criticizes is My Hero Academia.
Granted, I would site this as much more troubling than My Hero Academia:
For those more familiar with anime and manga as well as more versed in Japan's police system,
Question, which type of hared do you think is "better" as showing how even a villain is "egalitarian" hatred or more focused bigotry?
