Sunday, March 11, 2007

300, The Real Story




The movie "300" is based on a Frank Miller comic book. It's grounded on fiction and not facts. It is not an actual historical portrayal. It is the creative fantasy of a comic book genius. The mere connection drawn by some Iranians and liberal lefties only emphasizes the problem with the deep disunity we're facing in our country; when it comes to the arts and literature: these are separate creative spheres that exist independently of politics and politicians

For the actual history I highly recommend Tom Holland’s “Persian fire : the first world empire and the battle for the West”.

A very good book not only on wars but also on persian empire. In a time when cultures of East and West seemed farther apart than ever, Holland concentrates on explaining the mighty Persian culture which, from the time of the victorious Greeks to our own day, was mocked, denigrated, and underestimated. He makes a fairly clear argument that this kind of cultural misapprehension, after the famous Greek victory, led to an alienation between East and West which had not really existed prior to the Persian invasions, and which affects our understandings even today. This book goes beyond these events, and covers much territory concerning the founding of the Persian Empire, and early Greek city-states, and the inevitable clash that resulted from their proximity.

In a world where the East rubs up against the West he can fill in the historical blanks that still bedevil us to this day. And today it still seems to me that we are living in the same battle of the past (East) versus the future (West). PERSIAN FIRE sets todays headlines, in some respects, against a 2500 year old backdrop. As we might watch the CBS news, the Athenians, in the shadow of their burned and gutted Acropolis, would watch the young buck playwright, Aeschylus, stage THE PERSIANS one year after the exhausted Greeks had won the war and returned to the abandoned Athens. Spartans, that weird and long-haired race of warriors, get their fair share of exposure but lose some of their mystique in Holland's re-telling of Thermopylae and the Spartan king's last stand.

He shows just why the Persian culture - in many ways, far superior to that of the more primitive Greeks - deserved respect for its own accomplishments, as well as how and why the Greeks came to blow up their honest victories and denigrate their Persian foes. All these points give PERSIAN FIRE a peculiarly modern resonance, as well as telling some of the greatest stories of antiquity with clarity and flair.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Serendip
I came here through KAMANGIR.NET and the conversation we had there. I read some of your current posts and some in your archive. The English you use is not fluent enough for me to understand and I should use DICs to communucate completely with the text and all of the details. I will check out your blog more often and work harder on my English!

Shimbalkhaan

SERENDIP said...

Dear anon: Look forward to your future visits. Not to worry about the English; Let me know if I can be of any help.