Ya Just Can't Beat The Classics, Vol. XIV

LAST month sometime I was flipping channels while just about to crash, and I stumbled onto the last fifteen minutes of The History Channel's History of Sparta and Those Cute Leather Miniskirts Their Buffed and Oiled Half-Naked Warriors Wore which, I'm thinking, had been produced to coincide with the release of The 300, the remarkable piece of deafening cinematic drivel Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times called "the Citizen Kane of cinematic graphic novels", apparently because both movies are about the performance of symbolic oral sex.*

Note that, so far as we can tell, Roeper did not go outside and throw himself in front of a CTA train upon completing that sentence, which, for us, will forever mean there isn't enough public transportation in Chicago.

And I'm half-watching, half-falling asleep; they've made it to Thermopylae, the climax, if you will, and suddenly I see Professor Victor Davis Tiberius Drusus Germanicus Hanson. And not just that (he had, after all, penned the Introduction to the book, which is the Anna Karenina of comics); I hear him say:

(it would be a) terrible thing. The noise of people screaming, people defecating, people urinating, people falling down, people being trampled, spears breaking...

and I don't think I need to mention that about halfway through the thing I was wide awake, and reaching for the controls so I could record it just to get the quote.

And, okay, it's edited; they pull in a bunch of people with teaching positions and cut what is said to fit the way the story is to be told. And I don't really want to make too much of the fact that the man's a political lunatic; to me the salient curiosity of Victor Davis King Emmanuel Mmmbop Hanson is that he holds a university teaching position while publishing Simple Moral Lessons You Can Make Up From Military History over and over again. Still, it wasn't a voice-double making with the poo and pee comments, and while gore and mire are a very real part of the experience of war--even war as imagined by people whose sole experience of it comes from rewriting Herodotus, and who passed on the opportunity to foul their own skivvies when the chance came--well, urination? People urinating around me describes most of my Saturday nights from 1971-1977, and much of the rest of those weeks as well.

Anyway, I just rediscovered the thing on the DVR list, and watched it last night, and while Professor Hanson's comments, if any, on the fact that about a third of the Spartan lad's training was likely spent as a human scabbard for an older man's weapon, they did quote him on Bizarre Spartan marital customs:

So we do have incidents--very strange incidents--where men invite younger men, who they think are better than they are, to have relations with their wives...

Which, dammit, was never the story of a single one of my Saturday nights, but which, despite the general deflation of age, we will note that if you, a Professor of Ancient History, find this "very strange" you might wanna stick with the fecal material. Which, no doubt, you will.

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*Do I have to explain this?