print‘Spartans at the Hot Gates were magnificent men, warts and all,’ writes Stephen W. Browne:
If you haven’t seen “300” yet, do so – but think of it as a play rather than a movie. A Kabuki or Noh play.
Pfaugh on the caveats! The Spartan 300 and Thespian 700 did indeed save the West and it is perverse to deny it. Nor did the Spartans have a Samurai-style death cult. They were consummate professionals who favored victory over vainglory. And, they generally did not like to campaign too far from home for too long – because they were masters of a nation they had enslaved. Which is part of the reason they perfected themselves as soldiers. (Athens of course had slaves, but from a heterogeneous population, not a united people with a history as a free state.)
The history of every free nation starts with a state that has free classes among the unfree.
This of course, evokes ambiguous feelings. You want to admire them personally, and pay tribute to their courage but…
Tough. Life is full of ambiguities. If you expect men to be all of a piece, they will always disappoint you. The ability to deal with ambiguity is pretty much a definition of “intelligence.” The Spartans at the Hot Gates were magnificent men, warts and all. The story of what they did outlasted their civilization and will certainly outlast ours, and men will be finding new ways to tell their story as long as stories are told.
In this context, I think the popularity of comic book heroes reflects a desire for morally unambiguous (or less ambiguous) heroes, without the baggage of real people. When we socialize our kids with the ideals we wish them to have, it is natural to point first to archetypes of the ideal before dealing with the mixed bag of qualities that our real-life heroes are. And if we didn’t have those archetypes to refer to, how would we learn to deal with people as they are, without succumbing to cynicism and moral relativism?
Steve blogs at Rants and Raves.