Has anyone else noticed that there are two different versions of Nat's loincloth?

One looks more like a G-string.

That's more acceptable. I guess.

In reply to this comment by Fjnbk:
Not a half-naked man/ape thing in a loincloth anymore, but an eyeless, handless old man in a library!

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
If DLJ were savvy, they could start a dating service based on voting history.

Of course I wouldn't want to get matched up with Gollum.

Not a half-naked man/ape thing in a loincloth anymore, but an eyeless, handless old man in a library!

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
If DLJ were savvy, they could start a dating service based on voting history.

Of course I wouldn't want to get matched up with Gollum.

"Maybe one of these days Hollywood will get it right and do their research and use the facts, which are even more interesting than the half truths they sell to get the average person to go and see this garbage."

As skrob says its best to think of 300 as a stylized story the Greeks would have told among themselves and in that respect the film is extremely accurate.

Much has been made of how the Spartans don't wear any armor in the film, which is of course completely ahistorical. In a stylized account of Thermopylae, the near-naked bodies of the Spartans is entirely Greek. Were it not for US homophobia I'm sure the film-makers would've filmed the Spartans without their loincloths. In Greek art there is something called heroic nudity. All Greek men worked out nude, daily, as a community in preparation for when they would have to fight shoulder-to-shoulder together in the phalanx. This obsession with physical fitness caused them to idealize masculine beauty. As a result, much of their more stylized art depicts heroic men as being nude and buff as hell. Hercules, for example, frequently shows up just wearing his lion skin cloak. Were the Greeks to have had access to film, and decided to make a movie about Thermopylae, I am certain that the Spartans and other Greeks would have been depicted naked, just like in 300.

Another issue that is often raised is the depiction of Xerxes. No, he probably wasn't 10 feet tall and probably didn't have the voice of god. That however isn't the point. Xerxes was treated as god-king by his subjects and he ruled the largest, wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world. The Greeks were well aware of how powerful and impressive a guy he was. In fact, they frequently referred to Xerxes, and his descendants, simply as the King, as if the Persian Emperors were the only rulers of all that wasn't Greece. Given all of this, it is entirely appropriate for Xerxes to have the appearance of a god in the movie.

Another interesting thing they did with Xerxes was gold imagery. This goes back to Aeschylus's Persians where the imagery of wealth permeates the entire play, shifting in meaning to symbolize Persian wealth and power in the beginning of the play, to symbolizing Persian weakness and downfall. Ancient Greece was not a wealthy land by any measure. The great public works projects of Classical Athens were payed for by imperial tribute, not some inherent money-making ability of the Athenians. The Greeks, therefore, viewed extreme wealth with suspicion. They felt that a man that doesn't work for his living isn't fully a man. Wealth and leisure was therefore associated with effeminacy. Going back to 300, note how Xerxes wears golden chains over his body and has both golden nail polish and eye shadow. The effect the filmmakers were clearly trying to acheive was the association of gold with makeup, and therefore the feminine. Xerxes, despite his god-like stature, strikes the audience, with his makeup, as being much less manly than Leonidas. This is of course exactly how the Greeks viewed it.

I could go on, there are plenty of interesting examples of "Greekness" in 300. The point is that while 300 is not completely historical, it is very, very Greek. The filmmakers clearly did their research and read their classical texts.