Something Comic Book Geeks and Historians Can All Agree On…
…is that the trailor for 300 looks frickin’ amazing.
For those who don’t know, the story is a retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 Spartans faught to the death the entire army of the Persian Empire. OK, they had a little help from some other Greek city states but most historians agree that the battle was decidely uneaven, roughly 7000 Greeks up against anywhere between 800,000 and 4 million Persians (accounts differ wildly, and by wildly, I mean they range into numbers that are mythic in dimension, if not outright silly). By the final battle, it was just the Spartans vs Xerxes and his entire army. Thing is, the Spartans didn’t give in. They faught and kept fighting, even after a hail of arrows (remeber that scene in Hero when the sky is black with arrows? That’s how Herodotus described it). By the end of the battle, the Spartans were dead but so were 50,000 Persians.
October 13th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
The numbers are absurd. How could they feed that many people? If you can’t feed them, you don’t have an army. Instead of tactics a few historians should consider logistics and the food production in the areas invaded.
The documented army of Ioann IV,[known incorrectly as Ivan the Terrible] was 3000 for all of the three Russias.
The Mongols could feed larger than normal groups because they rode only mares and milked them.
October 14th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
The wildly differing numbers come from the various historians taking into account the support personal as well. Which still assumes that there was enough people on th emove to form their own roving nation the size of Virginia. So yeah, a little hyperbole was invovled.