The Three Hundred

I can never get over the huge capacity of the human race for absurdities. Speaking about the older Victoria buildings the other day I neglected another factor in the uglification of architecture in my time: the fact that with reinforced concrete just about any shape is possible. The result has been the kind of monstrosities designed by a countryman of mine, Frank Gehry. For some reason solutions to the constraints imposed by gravity, thrust and other factors involved domes, arches, vaulting, corbels and other strategems turned out to be beautiful as well as functional while the freedom of structure allowed by steel, glass and concrete only results in ugly self indulgence. But now the envirocultists are introducing a new distortion into the equation, the Green Building. Nowadays everybody has to pay homage to the envirocult. Never loath to embrace the latest Paris styles, San Francisco is getting a new Federal Building that forsakes the greenhouse gas emitting air conditioner, the electricity hungry elevator is only allowed to stop on every third floor, and the architect, one Thom Mayne is bewildered that people are so retro as to think the building is ugly. During a previous paroxycism of architectural lunacy the politicians in BC decided to ignore certain laws of condensation and evaporation when they made it mandatory for all new buildings to be as airtight as possible. This was part of an energy saving initiative called Powersmart. Who needs physics when you can think up a dumb name for a dumb program. Now, if you should go out on the town today you're sure of a big surprise. Brand new and nearly new buildings are often shrouded in tarps. This is because all the condensation has rotted the drywall and woodframe elements and made the buildings uninhabitable. They call them leaky condos, but that's a misnomer. A better tag would be condensominiums.
Herodotus is one of my favourite ancient authors and the first true historian. He has had a bit of a bad reputaion among modern historians who claim he made up many of the stories he relates in his History but his tall stories have a way of turning out to be true. Anyway, his book is primarily about the great Persian invasion of Greece, embellished by numerous digressions. A movie has now been made of one of the episodes in that history, the stand of the three hundred Spartan hoplites at Thermopylae against a vastly larger Persian army. I doubt if I'll go to the movie as it bears all the marks of a typically idiotic Hollywood travesty of history. Just telling the plain, unvarnished story in a telling way doesn't occur to them, and it would never occur to them to try to show what the culture was like. Because the culture of the Spartans was different. The Spartiate aristocracy was raised communally, innured to hardship and privation from childhood, and utterly devoted to war while they were supported by a vastly larger population of helots and perioikoi who had no status whatever. It is estimated that the male warrior population was a mere 3000 at the time of the invasion compared to a total population of about 60,000 in their area. The number of warriors was fairly static due in large measure to their custom of infanticide. Officially only deformed and unhealthy infants were "exposed,' as it was called but there was also a reluctance to have too many sons because that meant the estate that provided the money to keep the soldier equipped would have to be divided up into uneconomically small parcels.
The regimen prescribed by the Spartan system meant that their armies were feared throughout Greece, and considered unbeatable. They were the kind of soldiers that often did not have to fight because their opponents would run away rather than face them. They positively terrified the Persians who hadn't developed the kind of disciplined tactics used by Spartan armies. This is why Cyrus hired a later generation of Greek soldiers to help him overthrow his brother.
Thermopylae was a narrow gap between the mountains and the sea that was the easiest route to southern Greece, a perfect spot for a small disciplined force to oppose a larger force. Unable to push past the Spartans, the Persian general sent a scouting party into the hills and found a way around them. Caught in a trap, the Spartans refused an offer to surrender. This is where Herodotus' gift for storytelling is displayed at its best. A Greek and a Persian are standing somewhere nearby where they can see the Spartans before the final battle is commenced. The Persian is astonished at what the Spartans are doing: naked, they are doing up their hair...famous for their elaborate hairdos they wouldn't think of going to their deaths without their hair in a mess. The promotional still I saw in the paper showed a Spartan soldier with short hair which does not inspire me to see the movie and neither does the cartoonish look of some of the other photos.
It's often said that people never change but that's a drastic oversimplification. Cultural norms differ radically. For instance a news item in our paper reports indignantly that a violent rapist given an indefinite sentence 13 years ago has now been released. On the other side of the world in Iran or maybe Pakistan where sharia law is the standard it would have been the rape victims who were punished. In fact it takes a great effort to imagine how people of past epochs really thought but it's hard to understand one's own times without that kind of knowledge.
In the write-up the basic facts are there...the battle took place in 480BC between 300 Spartans and 'hordes of Persians' but the writer obviously can't take too seriously something that happened so long ago. The Spartans were "lean, mean, fighting machines" who "scored a moral victory." Somehow I get the impression that she can't get it through her head that they werre living, breathing men and that their "headstrong valour and unwavering discipline" were rather preposterous, like the "masochistic bozos" from the Jackass movies. Whatever they are. As for what kind of victory it was, the Spartans were wiped out because they Spartans simply didn't surrender, and the significance of their sacrifice was to delay the Persian army meeting up with the Persian navy. Athens subsequently defeated the Persian navy at Salamis which doomed the Persian invasion. The victory was that of Greek civilization based on laws and constitutions over oriental despotism. If it hadn't happened who knows what kind of a world this would be now.
Unlike what much of recent academic opinion would have it battles have immense historical consequences. It was after the Persian war, and thanks to the Greek victory that the great foundation builders of Western civilization flourished, including Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle and so many others.
Time to go, here comes my pint of porter.