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My amigo Sean Meade ponders:

Notes: The Problem with Sparta

So here are some of the ideas and notes, for posterity.The Problem with Sparta (and Greece)

References
300 (original graphic novel by Frank Miller and better-known movie)
Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield
The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
A War Like No Other, Victor Davis Hanson
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Thomas Cahill

The fiction glorifies Sparta while the non-fiction is more critical than laudatory. I was struck by how much the fictional Sparta, in three stories I really love, did not match the history I’d been studying.

Did Pressfield make his story more palatable to his readership by soft-pedaling Helot slavery, radical conservatism and aristocracy, oligarchy and homosexuality and pederasty?

We moderns are very critical of the real, historical Sparta. Insofar as it stands in for Greece in the fiction above, it’s an inaccurate portrayal. To say nothing of all the problems with our view of the Golden Age of Athens…

Ah, the tension between history and myth. 

Admiration for ancient Sparta was imprinted into Western culture because Sparta’s Athenian apologists, including Xenophon but above all Plato, left behind a deep intellectual legacy that includes a romantic idealization of Sparta that contrasts sharply with the criticisms leveled by Thucydides against Athens in The Peloponnesian War. The Melian Dialogue remains a searing indictment against Athens 2,500 years later but no equivalent vignette tells the tale of the Helots living under the reign of terror of the Spartan Krypteia. Plato’s Republic upholds oligarchic authoritarianism inspired by Sparta as utopia while Athenian democracy is remembered partly for the political murder of Socrates and the folly of the expedition to Syracuse. Somehow, ancient Athens lost the historical P.R. war to a rival whose xenophobic, cruel, anti-intellectual and at times, genuinely creepy polis struck other Greeks as alien and disturbing, no matter how much Sparta’s superb prowess at arms might be applauded. 

The fact that the vast majority of the ancient classic texts were lost, or as Dave Schuler likes to note, very selectively preserved and edited – at times, invented – by later peoples with agendas, may account for some of the discrepancy.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

Long overdue yet exceedingly timely. From one of the great short stories of all time.

2081 Trailer from 2081 on Vimeo.

An important announcement from my colleague, Lexington Green:

Lexington Green – (1) RESTREPO Monday, 11/29/10 at 9PM ET/PT; (2) Maj.Gen. Scales on Small Unit Dominance

This is the television premier of this extraordinarily film. I wrote about seeing this film here.

Restrepo chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The movie focuses on a remote 15-man outpost, Restrepo, named after a platoon medic who was killed in action. It was considered one of the most dangerous postings in the U.S. military. This is an entirely experiential film: The cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats. The only goal is to make viewers feel as if they have just been through a 94-minute deployment. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you.

I highly recommend this film to all of our readers.

An information page for Restrepo is here, including video.

RESTREPO, an award winning documentary, was based on (or more precisely, closely related to) the book WAR by Sebastian Junger, which told the story of the war against the Taliban in the Korengal Valley, waged by the soldiers of the 2nd Platoon of Battle Company.

I previously reviewed WAR here and the movie RESTREPO here.

An excellent review at Chicago Boyz by my comrade Lex:

Restrepo

First, the cryptic title. It looks like an acronym, but it is in fact the last name of a young soldier killed in Afghanistan, in the fighting which is recounted in the film. His name was Juan S. Restrepo.. His comrades in arms called him “doc.” His name is pronounced with an accent on the second syllable, reh-STREP-po.

The film was made by the noted author Sebastian Junger, and the photographer Tim Hetherington. (Junger wrote a book entitled simply War about his experiences being embedded with the troops, which Zen reviewed here. James McCormick reviewed Junger’s book on CB, here.)

The movie covers the hard fighting endured by a platoon of American troops in a 15 month deployement to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. It intercuts footage of the troops in the Valley with interviews after they left Afghanistan. The overall feel of the film is grim. The sense projected by the movie is that the troops who were not physically wounded have been psychologically damaged by their exposure to combat. The movie makes clear that their goal became survival and leaving Afghanistan alive. Other than the platoon commander, who was making a superhuman effort to carry out a counterinsurgency program, there was no sense that the troops perceived any achievable mission to carry out.   

The movie depicts the troops as facing an insurmountable task, trying to conduct a counter-insurgency campaign where they are bottled up in firebases and cannot come out to provide security for the population. The Taliban rule the countryside. The Americans can foray out, and bring down heavy firepower when they encounter the Taliban, but the fundamental mismatch between what the troops have been asked to do and the means provided to do it is apparent throughout….

Read the rest here.