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Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
Why does this ancient society capture the modern imagination?
There seems to be a thriving business in ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ (molon labe, in the Latin alphabet) merch — if you visit your online retailer of choice, you can get the phrase on stickers, hats, shirts, flags, keychains, sew-on patches, tie pins, pop sockets, license plate frames, and ammunition boxes. The modern popularity of the phrase almost certainly originates from the 2006 movie 300, a cartoonish adaptation of a comic book based on the events of the Persian Wars (the general approach of the film is to take the spiciest scenes from the ancient sources and turn them up to 11 with a bunch of naked ladies and monsters): They, too, repeated a pithy quote to summarize the glory of Thermopylae: “The Fame of Dead Men’s Deeds Lasts unto Eternity.” When the brutal Battle of Stalingrad started to turn against the Germans, Nazi leadership tried to inspire the troops by comparing them to the 300 Spartans.
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