127 A.D.) spoke of the Spartan practice of eugenics in his writings: "If after examination the baby proved well-built and sturdy they instructed the father to bring it up, and assigned it one of the 9,000 lots of land. The official is inspecting the newborn to decide if it should be discarded. In the movie, we see a government official holding King Leonidas' (Gerard Butler) newborn son above a cliff. I made them as cruel as I thought a modern audience could stand."ĭid the Spartans really discard their unfit offspring? I couldn't show them being quite as cruel as they were. I didn't want to render Sparta in overly accurate terms, because ultimately I do want you to root for the Spartans.
It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. Frank Miller, author of the graphic novel 300, talked about the nature of the Spartans in an interview, "The Spartans were a paradoxical people. Many of the Greek soldiers, who fought with the Spartan elite at the Battle of Thermopylae, were forced to fight because they were slaves. Greeks, including the Spartans, conquered neighboring areas to acquire more land and to build their slave labor force. The Spartans were not as 'good' as the movie portrays them to be.
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