Posted on 01/16/2007 5:11:53 AM PST by 7thson
And like Sin City, it looks like it may be all visual style, and no depth.
Greek ping!
Many of us are counting the days for this one to open.
Actually, most all peoples before the development of Christianity and Islam had a master race mentality.
Sin City is a striking cinematic masterpiece replete with symbolism and Miller's take on the world.
No doubt 300 will be all the above as well.
"I am 1/4 Spartan, I'll have to look into that."
Yasou, Patrioti!
I disagree. Christianity alone developed the very concept that of "all men are created equal," out of the Hebrew idea that all men are descended from one man created by God. The Jews never developed it explicitly because of their ethnic orientation. It wasn't until this Jewish idea was freed from an ethnic matrix that the idea of human equality could evolve.
Look at Greek, Roman, Chinese, Mongol and Japanese history if you don't think each group thought of itself as superior by nature to everybody else. The ruling classes in India developed the idea of caste as a way of perpetuating the master race. The Aztecs and Incas, in our hemisphere, had a very definite idea of their right and duty to conquer and rule everybody else.
In almost every language around the earth, the word by which its speakers refer to their own group translates as "The People," with the strong implication that other groups are NOT people. This implication is usually, although not perhaps always, made explicit by the terms used to refer to outsiders.
It is the idea of human equality that is unique and unusual, not the idea of human inequality. And of course if you believe humans are unequal, you will generally think of your own group as being at the top.
Well the Persians at that was not Muslim.. I'm not sure which religion they where at the time..
Most rivalries before the coming of the Lord were concerned with cultural economic and political conflicts. The "master race" ideology is a more recent 19th century Germanic racial theories derived from Schopenhauer and the rest - don't forget the Darwinian contribution to this bunk - and is a phenomenon that does not explain the conflicts among ancient peoples.
However, in all the examples I gave, and many, many others, there was a strong element of feeling that your own race/ethnic group/nation was by nature superior to others and destined to rule over them, with this superiority handed down by descent. In many cases, it was based on the idea that the nation, or at least its rulers, was descended from the Gods, while other nations were not.
It is a question of semantics whether you wish to call this a "master race" ideology. I think a Nazi would have been quite at home in many ways in ancient Rome or Sparta.
Muslims are generally devoid of a "master race" ideology, as their master group is based on religion, not descent. The way this master group treats its inferiors, however, has much in common with Nazi theory and practice.
Perhaps the closest parallel to Muslim practice is to the Jim Crow South, where the obsession was with keeping the black man "in his place." Similarly, in Islam the dhimmi must be constantly reminded of his inferior status. The big difference, of course, is that the dhimmi can become a Muslim very easily, thus joining the master class. A black man in the JC South was stuck in his inferior position.
You are correct about the amazing Roman capability for assimilation. Probably the reason they were the only one out of the thousands of city-states around the Mediterranean to build a lasting territorial empire.
A freed slave of a Roman immediately became a Roman citizen, although at considerable social disadvantage over "real" Romans. But his son and especially grandson would be real Romans, at least if the family was wealthy, with the process of assimilation sped up by an industry providing fake genealogies.
However, the Romans never really lost their pride of race. They just more or less ignored the non-Roman origin of most of their citizens.
At the time, just about all Jews lived in the Persian Empire. It's the time period of the biblical book of Esther.
The Persians of the time were probably Zoroastrians, today's Parsees, although there is a lot of argument about the exact time this religion got going.
The First Persian War - Greek Wars
Iranian Cultural Heritage | 8/21/04 | Iranian Cultural Heritage
Posted on 08/21/2004 10:35:01 PM EDT by freedom44
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1196577/posts
MOLON LABE(Come and get 'em)
Multiple instances | Unknown, though thought to be shortly after 500BC | Historical
Posted on 08/14/2002 10:11:57 PM EDT by Freemeorkillme
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/733353/posts
Now *this* is peculiar:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=300
It shows as a keyword in this topic, but this topic isn't listed in the keyword.
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Sadly, you were right...but the good thing is that it doesn't seem to be the studio making the comparison.
I went to the Hollywood Premier of the "300" last night, and talked a bit with Director Zack Snyder, screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, and graphic novelist Frank Miller. There will be lots of controversy about this film—well aside from erroneous allegations that it is pro- or anti-Bush, when the movie has nothing to do with Iraq or contemporary events, at least in the direct sense. (Miller's graphic novel was written well before the "war against terror" commenced under President Bush).
I wrote an introduction for the accompanying book about the film when Kurt Johnstad came down to Selma to show me a CD advanced unedited version last October, but some additional reflections follow from last night.
There are four key things to remember about the film: it is not intended to be Herodotus Book 7.209-236, but rather is an adaptation from Frank Miller's graphic novel, which itself is an adaptation from secondary work on Thermopylai. Purists should remember that when they see elephants and a rhinoceros or scant mention of the role of those wonderful Thespians who died in greater numbers than the Spartans at Thermopylai.
Second, in an eerie way, the film captures the spirit of Greek fictive arts themselves. Snyder and Johnstad and Miller are Hellenic in this sense: red-figure vase painting especially idealized Greek hoplites through "heroic nudity". Such iconographic stylization meant sometimes that armor was not included in order to emphasize the male physique.
So too the 300 fight in the film bare-chested. In that sense, their oversized torsos resemble not only comic heroes, but something of the way that Greeks themselves saw their own warriors in pictures. And even the loose adaptation of events reminds me of Greek tragedy, in which an Electra, Iphigeneia or Helen in the hands of a Euripides is portrayed sometimes almost surrealistically, or at least far differently from the main narrative of the Trojan War, followed by the more standard Aeschylus, Sophocles and others.
Third, Snyder, Johnstad, and Miller have created a strange convention of digital backlot and computer animation, reminiscent of the comic book mix of Sin City. That too is sort of like the conventions of Attic tragedy in which myths were presented only through elaborate protocols that came at the expense of realism (three male actors on the stage, masks, dialogue in iambs, with elaborate choral meters, violence off stage, 1000-1600 lines long, etc.).
There is irony here. Oliver Stone's mega-production Alexander spent tens of millions in an effort to recapture the actual career of Alexander the Great, with top actors like Collin Farrel, Anthony Hopkins, and Angelina Joilie. But because this was a realist endeavor, we immediately were bothered by the Transylvanian accent of Olympias, Stone's predictable brushing aside of facts, along with the distortions, and the inordinate attention given to Alexander's supposed proclivities. But the "300" dispenses with realism at the very beginning, and thus shoulders no such burdens. If characters sometimes sound black-and-white as cut-out superheroes, it is not because they are badly-scripted Greeks, as was true in Stone's film, but because they reflect the parameters of the convention of graphic novels, comic books, and surrealistic cinematography. Also I liked the idea that Snyder et al. were more outsiders than Stone, and pulled something off far better with far less resources and connections. The acting proved excellent—again, ironic when the players are not marquee stars.
Fourth, but what was not conventionalized was the martial spirit of Sparta that comes through the film. Many of the most famous lines in the film come directly either from Herodotus or Plutarch's Moralia, and they capture well, in the historical sense, the collective Spartan martial ethic, honor, glory, and ancestor reverence (I say that as an admirer of democratic Thebes and its destruction of Sparta's system of Messenian helotage in 369 BC).
Why—beside the blood-spattering violence and often one-dimensional characterizations—will some critics not like this, despite the above caveats?
Ultimately the film takes a moral stance, Herodotean in nature: there is a difference, an unapologetic difference between free citizens who fight for eleutheria and imperial subjects who give obeisance. We are not left with the usual postmodern quandary 'who are the good guys' in a battle in which the lust for violence plagues both sides. In the end, the defending Spartans are better, not perfect, just better than the invading Persians, and that proves good enough in the end. And to suggest that ambiguously these days has perhaps become a revolutionary thing in itself.
03/06 02:55 PM
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