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Ten days ago, I received the welcome news from Waterstones that a copy of the graphic novel 300 I'd ordered before New Year had finally arrived. This morning, I at last got the opportunity to travel into Glasgow and collect it.
Shock horror! The book they'd found for me wasn't the graphic novel at all. It was 300: The Art of the Film. Okay, it's a nice book, but I like my Spartan hoplites to be dressed properly, in skirts, as opposed to cheesy leather underpants a la Conan the Barbarian, so I really didn't want to take it. Easily remedied, said I. Order me the graphic novel instead, and I'll be quite happy with that.
My extremely helpful and efficient shop assistant set to work at the computer. She soon discovered that their supplier can't get hold of the graphic novel, though it was available from Amazon...
No 300. Ah well. This left me with a £25 voucher to spend, so I went rooting through the Ancient History section looking for Herodetus, only to emerge instead with a) The Illiad, and b) a rather intriguing and hefty textbook entitled The Greeks and Greek Love: A Critical Re-Appraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. Since someone gives the hero of my novel (who's from Sparta) a copy of the graphic novel as a gift, I felt I ought to have some idea of what it's like, hence my desire to purchase it. However, I'm sure that my replacement titles will prove much more relevant to my research, though whether the references made to the 'bizarre Spartan sex acts' (!) which were highlighted on the back cover blurb of The Greeks and Greek Love will prove useful remains to be seen.
The Spartans have had rather a bad press throughout the centuries. Perhaps this is partly because their rigid and proto-communist social system inspired such unsavoury historical figures as Robespierre and Hitler. They were certainly strange. My reasons for choosing a Spartan for my hero were twofold. It was partly because, if I was inverting the time-slip scenario by having the hero brought through into the future (instead of the heroine going back to the past) then a Spartan would be most likely to have the grit, determination and resiliance to cope. But I also liked the Spartans because I felt they were the only Ancient Greek city state who treated their women with respect.
There's a lovely quote from Gorgo, wife of Leonidas I, which Plutarch quotes in On Sparta:-
When asked by a woman from Attica: 'Why are you Spartan women the only ones who can rule men?', she said: 'Because we are also the only ones who give birth to men.' (Plutarch (Trans. Talbert), 1988. On Sparta. Penguin (London), 184.)
Nice. But what they say to their sons isn't quite so pleasant. Another quote from an anonymous Spartan woman goes as follows:-
When some woman heard that her son had been saved and had escaped from the enemy, she wrote to him: 'You've been tainted by a bad reputation. Either wipe this out now or cease to exist'. (Plutarch (Trans. Talbert), 1988. On Sparta. Penguin (London), 185.)
You've got to admit it. Even two thousand years on, their propaganda machine is spot-on. Their pithy, Laconic (yep, derived from Lakonia) retorts are always guaranteed to be biting.
But what makes me laugh about the film 300 is the William Wallace-esque speech from Leonidas (played by Scot Gerard Butler) which goes something along the lines of 'They'll never take our fre-e-e-dom-m.' This kind of ignores the fact that the only way the Spartans could maintain their militaristic lifestyle was because their economy was reliant on an enslaved indigneous population which they'd overrun a few centuries previously!
