Big Kahuna Boot wrote:
..yeah yeah Synbad, i know a wee bit about history too.. ..i'm well aware of the principles behind the 'agogi'.. ..i also know that they were a bunch of pedarasts (sp?) as well.. ..so we're hopefully not gonna wanna draw too many parrallels between them and our mob i hope.. ..and that's my point.. ..the analogy is nice, especially with the timing of frank miller's 300 hitting the dvd shelves.. ..of course hopefully folks aren't using it as an accurate historical reference cos it's more than a little ways off but that's prolly best suited for a discussion elsewhere..
.. ..regardless, us and them are indeed only interested in the best this much is true.. ..the difference is that they'd have never submitted to sub-par performance in the hope of getting the best.. ..which apparently is our safest avenue to getting the best.. ..and that's why the analogy is a little off.. ..although as far as an entertaining movie goes, hell yeah 300 rawks..
They didnt have the draft back then... and besides everybody knows that the Spartans were the Dorian descendants of Hercules.
With pedigree like that @#$%&! the draft!!!... everybody is a number 1 pick...
Yes agreed.. Frank Millers 300 is entertaining Hollywood (Loved the Ninja masked Immortals but Herodotus had them wearing tiaras.. and a veil that they used to cover their faces in the desert....i hate Holywood licence .
The probem with Ancient Sparta is that their attitude to excellence and inbreeding ended up weakening them.. as they began diminishing in numbers to a few hundred real Spartans and then the collapse of their dominance.
Stll pederatsy in the way some people would like to portray it is most likely wide of the mark if you understand Spartan law and minors.
However if they were talking about the Sacred Band of Thebans that might be an entirely different matter.(They ended up taking the Spartans to the cleaners)
I think there were a few single English Lords that wrote historical books about the Spartans that hypothesised on pederasty and the Spartans to make themselves feel alittle better,