The runaway blockbuster 300 has prompted renewed interest in the classics. The movie has it all ? heroism, sex, violence, good vs. evil ? who knew dead white men could be so interesting? The historical inaccuracies in the movie are legion, as in many historical films (let alone those based on a graphic novel). But if the movie motivates people to learn about the true story then I’m all in favor. And for those who want to see in it an allegory of the Iranian threat, just consider what Xerxes would have done if he had a nuclear weapon. “Hot gates” indeed.

One is attracted to the human drama of the story. A small band of fighters willingly sacrifice themselves against vastly superior forces to buy time so armies could assemble to defeat the enemy later. It is no mystery why the defense of the Alamo was soon dubbed “America’s Thermopylae.” In fact the first Alamo monument bore the inscription, “Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat - the Alamo had none.” Leave it to the Texans to one-up the ancients.

But the analogy is inexact, because of what the respective groups were defending. The heroes of 1836 were fighting for freedom. The Spartans fought to maintain their autocratic state. A better analogy is not the Alamo but Iwo Jima, from the Japanese point of view (also recently dramatized in Letters from Iwo Jima). Both groups of defenders, Spartan and Imperial Japanese, were prepared to die fighting the enemy ? but not for things we value.

Yes, we can admire them on the human level, for the bravery it took to fight against hopeless odds for the cause in which they believed. Courage, self-sacrifice, and indomitable spirit are qualities we like to see in our heroes.  But is that enough? Shouldn’t we take the cause into account too? Seriously, in the battle of Spartans vs. Persians, for whom do you root? Both were unsavory. You can relate the contest to Iran vs. Iraq in the 1980s ? you wish both sides well and give support to the weaker. Or the Soviet Union vs. Germany in World War II ? we backed Stalin for the same reasons the Athenians fought alongside the Spartans. For the moment, there was a common enemy.

Surely the Athenians did not see themselves as part of a common heritage with the Spartans, either politically or ethnically. The funeral oration of Pericles during the later Peloponnesian War is a laundry list of reasons why Athens represented a superior civilization to then-enemy Sparta. Throughout the Cold War, students of Thucydides pondered the parallels between the U.S./Soviet rivalry and that of Athens, a free-trading, democratic, pluralistic sea power, versus Sparta, an autarkic, totalitarian, xenophobic land power. Many noted uncomfortably that Sparta eventually won. The parallels run deep, and the analogy is well aligned; we can trace our democracy back to Athens in much the way the Soviet Union could trace its dictatorship back to Sparta.

The Spartans used the rallying cry of “Hellas for the Greeks” when it was convenient for them, but they were well known for only fighting when the interests of their city were at stake. Even Leonidas’s self sacrifice at Thermopylae was conditioned by an oracle’s vision that Sparta would either lose one of its kings or be destroyed. As well, Herodotus observes that Leonidas was motivated by “the wish to secure the whole glory for the Spartans.”

If you can’t quite get behind rooting for the Spartans, there were other heroes on the scene at Thermopylae, people the movie ignores. Herodotus tells us that when it became clear that the Greek defensive position had been flanked, Leonidas ordered the men from the other Greek states to leave, to prepare for the confrontation yet to come. But the 700 men of Thespiae, led by Demophilus, refused. They chose to stand with the three hundred Spartans, to fight beside them. “So they abode with the Spartans,” Herodotus wrote, “and died with them.”

Who were the Thespians? No, not actors ? hard to imagine seven hundred or even seventeen taking up arms these days. They came from Boeotia, near Mt. Helicon, a little more than midway between Thermopylae and Athens. Their polis was traditionally a democracy. The Thespian Hoplites were much more akin to the volunteer citizen soldiers long seen as the backbone of the American fighting forces. Unlike the Spartans, the Thespians did not spend their lives drilling and training for war while living off the sweat and toil of those the enslaved Helots. The Thespians were free men who lived freely, and defended their city because their conscience demanded it.

What little we know of Thespiae leads us to believe that life there was pleasant, and cultured. The chief god of their city was Eros, and the city’s statue of the love god was famous throughout Greece (so much so it was stolen twice by the Romans). Because of the p