Quiz: Who Am I?

[D-Day_Dodger]

I have not seen the movie yet, but it must have been quite nice having inspired you getting acquainted with history of Greece! What kind of liberties did the hollywood people take?

Where did "300" go wrong? First, this is not a knock on the movie as it made no pretense to be historically accurate because it was adapted from a graphic novel and it was a jolly good adventure flick. But as Ricky B mentioned, Xerxes army seemed to full of freaks and Xerxes himself is portrayed as a giant faggot. The only historical record of the war is that of Herodotus and surprise, surprise he never mentions the Persian army having rhinos or guys with big lobster hands. I can understand why Iranians took offense at this movie. It would be like an Iranian making a movie about Valley Forge and portraying George Washington as a transvestite.
The episode where Leonidas pushes Xerxes' heralds into the pit actually happened but a couple of years sooner. In fact the Spartans knew that the murder of the heralds was an affront to the Gods and thought the threat of war with Persia was a form of retribution from the gods. The Spartans went so far as to send two representatives to the court of Xerxes to offer their lives as a way of appeasing the great king. Xerxes just laughed and sent them on their way.
The guy who betrayed the greeks at Thermopylae was a local resident named Ephialtes, not a deformed gnome. Leonidas tells him that he can not fight with the greeks because he can't maintain his place in the line. And indeed this is a good point the Spartan king makes. The integrity of the phalanx was critical in hoplite warfare. If the phalanx becomes dis-ordered the whole formation is at risk, and yet as often as not in the movie we see the Spartans fighting one on one with the enemy or throwing their spears (a definite no no back then).
As an example, there is one Spartan named Aristodamus who was absent from the final day at Thermopylae and so was scorned as a coward on his return to Sparta. In the climatic battle of Platea, which saw the defeat of the Persian army and their expulsion from Greece, this Spartan fought with unmatched bravery, like a Viking berserker, in front of the phalanx until he was overwhelmed and killed. After the battle the victorious Greeks acknowledged those who had showed the greatest courage, but Aristodamus was not among them. He fought for himself and not as part of the whole and this was heretical to the Spartans. (In the movie Aristodamus is the one that gives the speech at the end of the movie as the Greeks get ready to fight the battle of Platea).
I could go on about the Spartans in the movie fighting without body armour or the weird uniforms of Xerxes' Immortals, but you get the idea. It is a shame that film makers see the need to distort history to make their films more interesting, especially when the truth is often more fascinating than any script from a screen writers imagination.