by James Clarke

Created on: March 14, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

300 is just out, and in an attempt to lure my girlfriend along, I tried to explain that it wasn't just a gorefest, but a mythical retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae. And I thought I'd share it with the world as well, this is a brief historical background to 300.

It's a rather mythical account of how 300 Spartan killed 80,000 invading Persians at the battle of Thermopylae. They all died [sorry to spoil the film, but that spoiler has been out for 2487 years] but they gave the Athenians time to assemble a fleet and lay a trap for the Persian navy, forcing them out of Greece for ever. That sea battle was called the battle of Salamis, and if Greece had lost that one, then Athens would never have developed the origins of modern philosophy, democracy, architecture, literature and a host of other things.

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