History Today How Accurate is Hoplite Warfare in the Movie 300

Welcome everyone to History Today. It's a podcast-style discussion of the way history makes its way into our lives. So this is going to be a pilot episode, but I'm very excited. It's going to be a chance for us to discuss media, different ways that we view history. So in this one, we're going to be discussing hoplites in battle through the lens of the movie 300. And I have a very special guest. It's going to be Dr. Roel Konandijk, who we've had on the show before, but I'll let him introduce himself once again. Hi, thank you very much for having me. My name is Roel Konandijk. I study Greek warfare. I have a PhD in Greek military history, specifically classical Greek tactical developments and tactical thought. Great. Yeah. So the movie 300 is something we've kind of discussed previously in a moments episode, but this one we're really honing in on just hoplites in battle. So the scene we're talking about, if you haven't seen it already, we'll be kind of playing it in the background here, but we're going to be going through the various stages. So the first one we're presented with is going to be the battle formation where the Spartans are drawn up in the hot gates. And we wanted to just real briefly touch on the historicity of what are they doing when they're starting to like shape up for battle. So in this case, we were kind of shown a generic portrayal of the deep phalanx formation with overlapping shields and leaders in the ranks. So can you touch on maybe how accurate this would be? Yeah. So, I mean, this is basically just the kind of formation that we picture, right? When we're thinking of the hoplite phalanx, the only problem is that our sources for this specific engagement, like this Herodotus's account of the Persian Wars, suggests that maybe the Spartans in this time weren't actually yet fighting in this kind of developed, sort of heavily regulated grid formation. So this is actually kind of anachronistic. We probably should be looking at this formation crystallizing in the decades that followed. Yeah, and that's the thing we see across almost all depictions of the hoplite formation. They kind of take it at its perhaps peak or most organized fashion and then project that across all of Greek warfare. So yeah, there would have been different maybe gaps in the formation or a little bit looser, not as tidy, especially with like the uniform cloaks and lambda shields as well. That's another thing that they've kind of cleaned up for us. Yes, so a lot of that just wasn't like, we don't have any attestation to that before the end of the 5th century. So there are several generations early with the uniform appearance of the Spartans. It's a funny thing. A lot of people obviously would comment on the shields. And I know that the director is, as already said, like the shields are not historically accurate. He doesn't care. He went for something that looks better on screen or not. But there are a lot of other ways in which the equipment is obviously not accurate. And one of the really simple things is the spearheads, which are diamond shaped, which should be leaf shaped. There is just no Greek spearhead like this. But also the whole idea of having a regular grid formation that consists entirely of hoplites. Like we know that in this period they would have had light armed troops still mixing with this formation, which would necessarily have been more open to allow them to use their weapons. So we're not talking about this sort of heavy closed shield wall that consists entirely of hoplites. So depending on the period, you'll have a different formation that's kind of getting together. But then either way, you have to get into combat with the enemy doing the same on the other side of the battlefield. So the next we move on here is going to be the approach itself. So in the film, it's going to be the Spartans holding their ground and then the enemy rushing towards them. So we're going to talk a bit about this stage of combat. So in this certain depiction, one side is stationary and the other side is moving forward. In certain defensive positions, this would have been true. But for most of kind of ancient combat, where you have to close ranks, both sides want to be moving forward just because there's a lot of psychological reasons for that. If you're stationary, your nerves are going to get to you and actually charging and getting into motion, yelling and doing all these active things is much better for your morale. So we can talk real briefly about how accurate is it for the Spartans to be standing still? And was that kind of applicable generally to hoplite warfare? Yeah, so I mean, this is obviously a special situation where the battle of Thermopylae, they're holding a position that is just a geographical bottleneck. So they probably would have been fairly stationary. And there are a couple of other examples of this kind of thing happening when hoplites are positioned on a hill or on a mountain pass or something like that, they would be holding their ground. But generally speaking, in battle, a hoplite formation is a very aggressive formation. It is specifically intended to bring a lot of men with big shields and heavy spears crashing down on the enemy. So the whole idea is that you don't just sort of stand there holding your ground, you'd be moving forward at the enemy. And as you got closer, you would be moving ever faster, you know, getting yourself worked up for this coming clash. And we also see that as well as kind of like a tactical idea as well to close the distance if you're facing off against Persians or others who have, you know, ranged capabilities and marathon closing the distance, Plataea as well, I believe. Yeah, so there's, I mean, there's obviously a rationale in it, which is the idea that if the Persians have a lot of archers, and they're relying on archery to soften up the enemy, then closing with them as quickly as possible is a way of taking the initiative from them, and essentially pitting them down. And so at least one scholar, Peter Prentice, argued that the Persian wars themselves were actually instrumental in creating phalanx warfare as we know it, because it was forcing the Greeks to think of a solution to this Persian threat. And basically, what they came up with is, what if we all get together as a heavy infantry and just charge at them and just take this fight to them? Because it's in that fight and marathon that we hear, according to Herodotus, that this is the first time that people ran all the way down across the field to the enemy, that they charged into the enemy en masse. And the idea is probably they did that because that was a very particular situation in which that was a requirement. And then discovering that that was really effective, they then started to apply that in their own combat as well. So you're saying whereas before the typical strategy might have been a bit looser order, skirmishers mixed in the mix, and they would have stayed back, approached, done a little bit of a soft engagement. But if you do that in the face of mass archery, you're just going to get picked apart. Yeah, absolutely. And the interesting thing is we see exactly this happening at the Battle of Plataea. So when you have the Athenians on one end of the line, they're charging into the Thebans, you have the Tegeans next to the Spartans who are charging into the Persian. But the Spartans themselves are very hesitant and very cautious, and they're not moving forward. And so they are taking up this sort of much more defensive and passive position that probably would have been standard in earlier Greek warfare, that was gradually being phased out in the light of the development of this more effective shock tactic of the hoplite phalanx, essentially. And the result of that is, Rutters describes in gruesome detail how they get completely torn apart by Persian arrow fire, until they finally decide, okay, guys, we just have to do this, we just have to charge them. But that is emphatically not what they were supposed to be doing, or what they were expecting to be doing. And it's in that battle as well that we are explicitly told that light-armed infantry is a part of their formation. So this is probably, the Spartans in particular are a bit behind the curve here, and they are specifically using these older tactics and giving us a glimpse of what battles would have looked like before the Persian Wars. Cool. So if we're saying here the idea during the Persian Wars might have been to just close the distance, then we do have indications that, okay, as you're making your approach, you jog, break into a run, then also you have to kind of psych yourself up. So we were talking before about, you know, maybe having a war song before as you're deploying, as you're in the ranks, and then later as you close the distance, you have this war cry. Can you touch a bit about that? Because in the film itself, in that particular scene, the Spartans are kind of held silent, they don't say too much, and then the Persians as well are kind of yelling a little bit, but you don't see any of the big war cries that you'd expect. Yeah, so it's an interesting way of depicting it, where the Spartans are obviously being portrayed here as being very disciplined and very stern and stoic about the whole thing. In the descriptions that survive, there's obviously always a lot of noise coming from these formations that are about to engage in battle. So the men are constantly talking to each other, trying to encourage each other, trying to drive each other to great deeds. They're constantly yelling at each other to, you know, match the leader, serve, you know, live up to your ideals, serve your state, whatever. And then at some point, somebody starts a song, which is called the Paean, which is a song to invoke the help of the gods, and they all sing it together, which obviously makes them feel like, you know, this cohesive whole. It makes them feel like they're in it all together. And then as you move forward, eventually somebody's going to pick up the war cry. Now, the Spartans don't necessarily do this because the Spartans, or at least in the Classical period, much later than this, they developed the level of discipline that allows them to march quietly into battle. But this is something that other Greeks definitely can't, sort of, don't have the training and the discipline to achieve. So they run into battle and they scream, and they scream a war cry that we know from the Greek sources because it is expressed in an onomatopoeic word. It is called alalatzaim, to go alalalala. So that is literally the scream that they would have uttered. You have to imagine there's something like alalalala like that. That's how they would sound when they were charged into battle. Yeah, and that's funny because that would have been probably pretty shocking in the modern theaters if you have these Greeks, cool epic formation, and they go alalalala. Yeah, it sounds a bit silly, but you can kind of imagine what it's like if there's like 8,000 of them doing it at once. That's not going to be so silly as one guy doing it over the internet. Yeah, and we were discussing also earlier how this is kind of a recurring feature across almost all of humans. It's kind of instinctive to yell. You yell when you're in pain. You yell when you're trying to psych yourself up, and so the other cultures had this type of apparatus in the works in their battles. So, for instance, like the Germanic tribes and adopted later, I believe, by the Romans, the late empire would have been the Beratists, which is essentially where you form up. But this is described kind of differently. I believe it's more like a thundering crashing of waves that slowly builds up over time, kind of a more guttural approach as opposed to the Greek one. So, that was kind of an interesting note. Yeah, and you'd expect like the Greeks to talk about their own war cry as a very manly and robust thing like that, like something that sounds like crashing waves and rolling thunder. But actually, I mean, they just, like I said, they just describe it with this onomatopoeic verb, which is something like that's what it sounds like. It's either alala or elele, which is the other form that we also hear about, which we also kind of have to imagine like like that. Yeah. So, it is much more like mutilation than it is like a raw scream or a roar. Got it. Okay, cool. So, this brings us ever closer to battle, which is kind of the meat of this discussion. So, the next one is, okay, you're running, you're screaming, and now finally you meet up and you close arms. And this is kind of the way most ancient battles have to be decided. It's going to be face to face here, assuming the enemy doesn't just turn around before. But yeah, in the depiction that we see in 300, you do have the traditional, you know, clashing of shields, which is what you see in every Hollywood film. The armies run and literally smash into each other. Most films at this point devolve into, okay, they've clashed shields and then all the heroes kind of find each other and do 1v1 action. 300 takes it a little bit different, where they do actually show the formations kind of physically confronting each other and not penetrating and just kind of holding the line. And then you get into this scene where they're essentially shoving and pushing at each other. And this is an attempt to be, you know, depicting the othismus, which in and of itself, we don't quite know what that means, although every time it's translated, I think, from Greek to English, it has to do with the push. But what that actually means, we don't quite know. So, maybe we can talk a bit about the othismus here. Yes. So, I mean, the initial engagement itself is like this headlong smash into each other. These formations are really sort of intermingling and people are being thrown around. We don't really have any description in detail of what that encounter would have looked like. But when you hear verbs being used that essentially express that the engagement is at spear point, we're probably not imagining them sort of literally physically crashing into each other. It's more about sort of poking at each other from a distance. So, presumably, we have to imagine that the charge, when the formations got closer together, would actually slow down again. And that instead of maintaining momentum and crashing into the enemy, you would have people sort of slowing down into a walk when they got within spear range and then starting to stab each other. Yeah. I was just going to note a couple of things. It's kind of like the idea where you have cavalry won't charge enemy formations if they're formed up, if they hold their ranks. I think the same kind of instinctual behavior kicks in for humans. You don't want to charge into a mass of spears. Yeah. I mean, you often see in both in this movie and in Alexander, for instance, where you have these massive pike formations and it's really beautifully depicted. And in both of these movies, it's very evocative. But you see people literally impaling themselves onto these spear points. And you have to wonder who would do such a thing. You wouldn't actually do that. You would rather turn back and stab the guy behind you than run into that spear point. So, you wouldn't actually do it. And so, there is that question of is it possible for humans to even engage in that kind of fighting? And then the next question is what happens after that? And that's where we get into that question of whether it's possible to have a literal Othismos, whether it's possible to have a whole formation, as the theory goes, the entire formation of Oplites joining together to shove the front line forward, to all get together to push physically against the enemy until one side or the other gives way and gets trampled and basically gets washed away by a sort of wave of enemies being pushed over. That is the theory. That is a very common theory and a very old theory of what Greek battles would have looked like. And it's derived from, as you said, from this word that occurs in a few battle descriptions, which is Othismos or forms of verb Otheo, which means push. So, there is in the Battle of Plataea even, there is a moment where Herodotus says, the fight went on for a long time until it came to Othismos, until it came to the pushing. And then the theory is that people say, oh, there is a point in battle at which the ranks close, everybody gets together and they physically shove and the rear ranks shove the front ranks and the front ranks shove the enemy and one side or the other is going to give. That's been the literal interpretation of that source and that appeared for the first time about a hundred, a little over a hundred years ago in scholarship. And since then has been really fairly dominant. Although over the last 20 years, it's been really heavily questioned for the simple reason that, you know, some people like to imagine this, other people say they can't imagine this. They just don't think that it's something that human beings would be willing to commit to. Because you get crushed, you get trampled, you get smashed together, you can't use your weapons, all of the heavy equipment that you're carrying is useless. You're essentially being, you know, reduced to an object, a block in a meat grinder. And there's not really any agency that you have or any ability that you have to influence the fighting. And not only does that seem sort of difficult to imagine for us, it also contradicts a lot of the things that we hear from the sources are actually going on in this contact. So, we do hear of pushing, but we also hear of spear fighting. We also hear of people dodging blows and getting out of the way. We also hear of them falling back and making other people sort of step forward and lose their balance. These kind of things all happen. So, they cannot possibly happen if everybody's pushing each other, everybody's shoving themselves together. So, there are reasons to suspect that maybe we shouldn't be reading that pushing literally. Maybe we should be looking at that in a sort of metaphorical sense that we use it now when we say a military push, like the Germans made a push in Ukraine or something like that. You know, we think of that in a sense of moving forward along a front. And possibly what we're seeing instead of like a physical shoving match is actually that certain parts of the line are making an effort to advance and the enemy is sort of not able to resist that because they're moving en masse and because they seem to have high morale, they have the spirit behind them, they are taking over in sort of the balance of attrition, they're sort of slowly breaking through. But I mean, it has to be said that there are some scholars now that are active that are trying to find middle ground between these two extremes. So, one that says it's a little shoving match, the other that says this is just metaphorical. The middle ground is that on the one hand, yes, I mean, just a mass shove that goes on for a very long time would be too exhausting, too impractical, it can't really be what happens. On the other hand, the shield that the Greeks are carrying seems to be specifically designed to give you breathing space while you're being pushed into a smaller area. So, it has this bowl shape that allows you to breathe behind your shield, even when you're being pushed. And secondly, it may not be that what happens constantly all along the line, but something that happens in specific places in particular moments. And it may be that the pushing should be interpreted specifically as a part of the battle that happens locally, or that happens at a certain moment when some of the men surge forward and the rest sort of follows along with them and starts to drive them forward hoping that this will be the decisive moment, and that that is the moment of the push or the pushing, could be literal, could be metaphorical. It's basically both, in which the enemy line is then sort of put under such pressure that it will eventually crumble. And now, I am on the side of the people who says that this is all, I really need to be taking this as a metaphor, this is not something that literally happens, because there are simply no descriptions that which should make us believe that it does, and no real reason to assume that the Greeks would be carrying sort of super long shields and heavy equipment if they were going to start just shoving each other mindlessly as a mass formation. But there is a lot of disagreement among scholars, and this is definitely not a controversy that's been decided yet. And that's a good way to put it there. So in the movie itself, we do have this initial phase, like you said, the Othismos, where you can see the Spartans getting pushed, and then eventually, you know, the formations, the heels are being pushed back, they're trying to dig in, which I think you had some comments on. Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting thing that they've made up. I mean, this is absolutely not attested in any source, this whole idea that they have to physically dig in their heels and shove back, like that is one of the ways in which we like to picture what this pushing might look like. But really, it's us sort of trying to add to sources that are blatantly just not telling us this. So that is perhaps one original model that we have in academia of, okay, the Othismos. But then there's obviously other ways that are even depicted in the movie of like, how do you best your enemy. So one of them is shoving, but in the movie, they're actually trying to strike at each other. And this is probably pretty well attested to the fact that the first front two ranks are engaging with their spears, overhand thrusts at whatever is kind of facing you from the enemy. So perhaps exposed heads, which is why you have a helmet, expose arms, legs, etc. But then one of the things that we do see is this kind of novel interpretation in the film where they combine both this kind of overhand thrusting, plus the Othismos pushing and what they create is this kind of repeated drill motion where the Spartans essentially will call out push, they fling the enemy back with a big push, they all thrust in unison, and then they block, and then they repeat this over and over. And that's how they gain ground. So maybe we can talk a bit now about kind of pre drilled motions and commanding combat. Yeah, so this is actually, this is kind of a complex question, because I mean, there's no question that at the time of the Persian Wars, they would not have been able to do anything like that. They wouldn't have had the kind of formation drill to do this. But even later on, you don't actually see this kind of like weapon katas, which is essentially what this is like these pre drilled motions that you can go through that your enemy doesn't really have an answer to, that you perform collectively in order to sort of make your formation as effective as possible. This is something that belongs in Lord of the Rings, it doesn't belong in a depiction of Greek warfare. There are certain commands that start occurring from the later classical period, in which an entire phalanx is required to do a specific thing simultaneously, like shoulder spears, level spears, these kind of commands exist for professional troops, so only for mercenaries and potentially Spartans, although we never hear of Spartans using them. So you have these kind of basic commands, but they occur outside of battle, they don't occur in the middle of the fighting. And in the fighting, as far as we can tell from depictions, both in tragedy and in historical sources, everybody was, it was every man for himself, like everybody was just trying to live. And so there are descriptions of how or assumptions of how the people who are fighting in the front lines will not have any sense of anything that's going on around them, they wouldn't be able to see or hear or be able to respond to the kind of things that were happening to their neighbours, because they were caught in this sort of extremely stressful situation, in which you get this concept that's known as tunnelling, where you basically only see, you're hyper-focused on the one thing that's going to keep you alive, which is the enemy spear going to hit me in the face, will I be able to ward it off? So you have this kind of situation, which is just highly unconducive to this kind of combat, like you're not going to be able to hear your commander say these kind of things. So there are very few occasions when commands are given in the heat of battle, but generally speaking, you will not be able to command a force that is engaged in close combat. Once it is engaged, it's pinned, it cannot move, it cannot do anything to wheel or affect its own situation until the fight that it is currently in has been resolved. And as a result of that, this whole image of, you know, Spartan officers shouting to their men to perform particular motions, that is just not historical. Alrighty, and there are, kind of spliced into these thin scenes, a couple little moments that we found were pretty interesting. So, okay, the Spartans are doing these, you know, repeated motions to push the enemy back, but then also, within those kind of scenes, they have a couple quick cuts of Spartans who kind of get a little bit more enraged, it would seem, and they step out of the ranks and they start slicing at the enemy, and then they come back into the ranks. So maybe we can talk real briefly about that. We'll be following up on it later when we talk about breaking formation and pursuit, but right now, maybe let's touch a little bit on this, like, Homeric form of stepping out and showing off a little bit. Yeah, this is actually a really interesting thing, because we would be inclined to think of this as being very inappropriate for a situation of balance battle, where you want to retain the order of formation. And there are indeed, from Herodotus already, people who are being censured for breaking formation, for stepping out of the line like that. On the other hand, it is specifically in these accounts of the battles of the Persian Wars that this is still clearly happening a lot. Herodotus has preserved several stories of warriors who are famously brave for stepping out of the line and engaging the enemy in single combat, who are, you know, specifically trying to tempt the enemy from breaking their formation to chase the other people back to their line. The Spartans at Thermopylae are said to have done some kind of hit-and-run tactics, where they send out a couple of men to engage the enemy and then withdraw to their own line, drawing Persians out to be impaled upon the Spartan line. So there are different situations in which this is actually very accurate and appropriate for specifically the battles of the Persian Wars. It's not until later that this becomes really unacceptable in a sort of regularized, collectivized balance warfare. Great. Well, let's start moving on. Now we've talked a bit about, like, the combat itself. We can start moving on to the advance and the breaking of formation and the pursuit. Okay, so we've said in combat itself, perhaps there's a bit of shoving, maybe it's more localized, and then there's the striking at the enemy from overhead, and then there's even stepping out of the ranks, trying to engage with small clusters of troops. So you have all that going on, but eventually, you know, human exhaustion is going to give in and one side starts to kind of lose out. So it's at this point that in the film they do show that where there's a turn in the battle where the Spartans hold, and then they start to make their advance. So then we're going to talk real briefly now about this ebb and flow in combat, where typically there wasn't as much of the ebb and flow. It's kind of you hold, and then once one side starts to lose energy or lose front ranks, and it gives ground, that pretty quickly snowballs into a route on that side. So let's talk real quickly about that. And then also in the scene itself, we do see some Spartans in the rear ranks kind of finishing off foes. So maybe we can talk about the advancing stage right now. Yeah, so I mean, this is the idea that after a battle that could last for a very long time, and would presumably have involved some sort of back and forth as these both lines trying to probe each other. And we're talking with several hours, one to two hours, you think? Yeah, I mean, we really have no idea. This is a problem that's never, it's never very specific in the sources, how long the melee lasts. And there are very sort of hugely widely ranging estimates, anything between 10 minutes and two hours. The idea being that we don't really know, because we don't really understand what happens. And if we don't understand what happens, we can't estimate how much of an endurance you would need in order to be able to last in that situation. So the people who are in favor of the idea that this is all mass shoving, they would say this battle has to be over in a very short time, because people just can't keep it up. Whereas people who say that there is a much more tentative, much more cautious engagement, which can be local and can be erratic and sporadic. Those people will say this battle could last for hours, you know, people could sort of really last hold on to this for a long time before there's any kind of decision. But when one side starts to give way, generally speaking, in Greek battles, that's the end, like they will not give way in a regular orderly fashion. When they see their friends on the left or right, running away, they will start running, the formation will break apart, and the side that is still holding together will be the victor. And then in the scene also, we can touch real briefly where they have the rear ranks of the Spartans kind of stepping over the Persians, and then you have guys almost on like cleanup duty, stabbing them with the butt spike of the spear. Yeah, this is something we have to assume would have happened. I mean, we don't really have specific descriptions of this. But we do have vase paintings of people finishing off the wounded or finishing off men lying on the ground. And they're usually just sort of, you know, they make the same motion that they do in the fighting, where they have an overhand thrust with their with the head of their spear. So they just point that at the ground, and they just go for it. So then in the film here, the Spartans are advancing. And then now as the Spartans, or sorry, as the Persians kind of get a little bit loose, the Spartans do break rank and engage in a pursuit. We can talk a bit about that, where this is perhaps your chance to stand out a bit more. I know you've talked or written a fair amount on like, the viability of pursuits. I think the classical interpretation is a Greeks generally didn't pursue very much, especially against other Greeks. So how accurate would this scene be for maybe this point in time? I mean, it's this is actually, actually one of the more accurate parts of the movie in some ways. I mean, obviously, the ludicrous feats of strength that are performed by these warriors are completely over the top. But the idea that they would chase their enemies as they ran away is absolutely accurate. I mean, this is the moment when a Greek battle is no longer hard, it's no longer a struggle between equal sides trying to figure out who's going to win. It is now a moment in which you can do damage to the enemy, you can harm his men, you can harm his resources, without necessarily running much risk yourself. And that's what you want. That's what you're in it for. That's why you took that risk in the first place. So this is the point at which you essentially go nuts and kill whoever you can. And this is the phase of battle that according to Greek battle accounts in the classical period frequently would go on until it was too dark to see. Like they would just keep killing anyone they found until they could no longer see where they're standing. So this is absolutely something that they would be doing for as long as possible, and as much as possible. However, I mean, the Spartans were renowned for not doing this very much and trying to retain their formation. And later sources argue that this was for moral reasons, because they thought it was wrong to kill men who had already been defeated and this kind of thing. But in practice, other sources say it's just for practical tactical reasons. You don't want to lose cohesion in case your enemy rallies, gets it together and overwhelms your scattered men. So you do have to run that. You do have to run that risk when you're pursuing that you lose formation, you lose cohesion. And if the enemy has some troops that are ready to fight, then you will actually end up losing a lot of men. This happens in the Persian Wars at one point where at Plataea, the Persians are broken and some Greek troops go and rush in in pursuit, but the enemy cavalry is not broken. And the cavalry see this sort of formation all pell-mell just charging down the field, and they just sort of rush in and kill like 700 of them. So there's a huge risk of being caught out of formation because you're pursuing, being caught into some sense of disorder and unable to defend yourself. And that is when you really have to be very careful. Okay, great. Yeah, so we've been through the whole story arc of the scene from the movie 300. Just to recap here, essentially what we have is in the opening battle formation itself, the Spartans here are depicted in a very structured, organized formation with very clean uniforms. And that is something you wouldn't see for 100 years or so, both in the organization of the formation itself, but then also in the equipment. They would have had very different equipment from man to man, and the uniformity of it is something that is anachronistic. Next, in the approach when both sides kind of attack each other, you would have expected it to be more loud than is depicted here, much more screaming from both sides and chanting. Then when you come to actual conflict itself, here they take the Othysmos far too literally in terms of the shoving, people digging in their heels. Not much of that is backed up in terms of the historical record and doesn't really seem to carry too much weight. The Othysmos perhaps being a more localized event and not necessarily something engaged at by the whole depth of the Hoplite formation. The other thing about combat that they do pretty well at least is going to be kind of the way they engage with each other in the sense that you have overhand thrust from the first two ranks, and then occasionally you'll have units coming out, breaking formation, dealing with the enemy and getting back into their ranks. Okay, that kind of makes sense, but then the synchronized attacks of the Spartans, that you just throw that out the door, that's pure Hollywood. Next move is going to be the portion of the battle where they move on to breaking formation and then the pursuit. We did say that this was relatively well done if you take away the slow motion and superhuman feats. The breaking formation is definitely something that they would have done in terms of the pursuit, keen on reaping the benefits of the easy part of the battle where you can maximize your slaying. But then also we did caveat this with the fact that the Spartans historically would have been a little bit more cautious in this phase because of the fact that they didn't want to be caught out in the open by an opponent that might rally and slaughter them, because of course, as we noted in the moments series, they had lots of concerns about their manpower and their citizenry. So they were perhaps a little bit more cautious in this aspect. So yeah, that's about it for the recap. What did you have to say? Yeah, I mean fundamentally it's what every part of this movie is just a hodgepodge of sources from across about a millennium of different times and authors. I mean, they really don't necessarily care that much for presenting an accurate picture here. Obviously, they're just presenting a picture that's as spectacular and as iconic as possible. And they clearly succeeded. I mean, this is a movie that's defined the way we perceive ancient Sparta, for worse, definitely for worse. But I'm not even going to say for better or worse. But it is something that we then have to deal with. Like as historians, we have to comment on this, because this is what people know. And this is what we have to discuss. Well, great, because that's kind of the whole purpose of this series that I'm trying to kickstart, which is, okay, how does the general populace see history in every day? And then this is our chance to kind of discuss it and give some context. So I think overall, this is a great format. I enjoy it. And I think we'll be able to host many more in the future, particularly on Sparta, or sorry, the movie 300. But then there's also a lot of other Greek warfare movies we'd like to discuss, Troy, potentially in the future. So definitely, if people could post in the comments below what kind of scenes or interpretations they'd like to see. And I would love to host those. And I'm sure, you know, we could bring you on again in the future. All right. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks, everyone. See ya.