The meaning of 300: in the hands of filmmakers, the legendary Spartan stand at Thermopylae becomes pro-war political propaganda in the new film 300.

In a blood-spattered, gore-filled, nudity-laced, and unnecessarily eroticized grotesquerie, the Spartans as envisioned by master illustrator Frank Miller have now leapt onto movie screens around the country in the form of the film 300, the cinematic version of Miller's graphical novel of the same name. The movie tells the story of the epic Spartan defiance of the colossal Persian army at the "hot gates" of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., a battle of unparalleled heroism on the part of the Greek defenders, led by the Spartans, and one which has never ceased to resonate within subsequent Western culture.

Though long pregnant with meaning for all of Western civilization--Thermopylae was "the battle that changed the world" in the words of the subtitle to Greek scholar Paul Cartledge's recent book on the battle --never in American history have the epoch-making events at Thermopylae weighed so heavily as they do today. For Americans, with troops on the ground in the heart of the ancient Persian Empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with speculation that the war will spill over into the Persian homeland of Iran, history seems finally, in some way, to have ...