No real blogging today. I went to 300 last night, got to bed late, and now I'm scrambling.
I enjoyed the movie, incidentally, but it wasn't great. I'd give it a 6. Possibly the most violent thing I've seen (and I include The Passion in my grading). Two graphic sexual encounters as well.
I wouldn't recommend it for its historical value, incidentally. The Spartans killed the Persian emissaries and they relied on mystics to make decisions (hence they arrived late to Marathon a decade earlier, to their great shame), but the whole set up for the battle at Thermopylae was bogus. A confederation of nearly 6,000 Greeks battled the Persians. When Ephialtes showed the Persians how to get around the narrow pass, the Greeks knew they were doomed. It was then that Leonidas stayed behind with 300 Spartans and 700 Thebans.
Their efforts bought the rest of Greece valuable time, though. Athens was able to evacuate, for instance. The rest of Greece mobilized, and the Persians were eventually defeated. The relevance? The rest of European history. Instead of being an adjunct of one great Asian power after another, Europe stood on its own. It gave Rome room to grow, and Rome gave Christianity room to grow. We can't re-create historical consequences with any certainty, of course, but we know we owe a lot to the valiant stand at Thermopylae.
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An interesting item from my bank of material that I save for no-blogging days:
The early years of the mail-order catalogue business were heady indeed. From Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience:
Mr. Ward received hundreds of letters annually from men seeking wives and even a few from women seeking husbands. We are not surprised to find a lonely farmer proposing marriage to the "girl wearing hat number ______ on page 153 of your catalogue." . . . [One customer from the state of Washington wrote], "As you advertise everything for sale that a person wants, I thought I would write to you, as I am in need of a wife, and see what you could do for me."
