Oh, hi, hello there and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk About Myths, baby!

I am, as always, live and today I'm here with a bonus episode.

That's right, this is a bonus episode because I just love content and could not in good

conscience have a series covering Ancient Sparta without talking very specifically about

the movie 300.

Now I've mentioned it a lot throughout this series and I might have said this before, but

I think a lot of people are probably going to think that I'm like over-emphasizing the

impact of 300.

And most people in the world didn't get their knowledge of Sparta from a movie that is

so obviously stylized and based on a graphic novel that's equally is over the top in stylized.

But truthfully, this movie was influential in a way that no other movie featuring the

Ancient World has been.

Sparta has always been a place that different groups of people politically and otherwise were

interested in and chose to pick and choose what they wanted out of Sparta to fit their

narratives, but 300 made that far more intense and it helped to spawn like a whole generation

of ultra right wing conservatives and white supremacists.

As you heard in yesterday's conversation with Stephen Hodgkinson, imagery from 300 is

used by these sorts of people all the time in addition to the concepts that the movie

presents about Sparta.

It's fascinating, but it's also dark.

Unlike so many other vaguely silly movies about the Ancient World, this one has this sinister

side to it.

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