Ryan M (not verified) says:

Before you criticize the way the movie displayed the Spartan culture, do your homework and reasearch how their culture worked. "And then you have the Nazi militaristic ethos as a subtext in an early sequence in which a Spartan baby is about to be tossed off a cliff when it is deemed unfit to grow up into a warrior. The well-known advice of a Spartan mother to her soldier-son—“Come home with your shield or on it”—is put into the mouth of Queen Gorgo to her own Thermopylae-bound husband, King Leonidas." If you had done your reasearch you would have found out that mothers and wives did not grieve their dead husbands and sons like the vast majority of civilizations throughout the times and to the present day, but rather feel a sense of pride for them knowing that they dies for their country as the Spartans were extremely nationalistic; also, sickly and babies that were undersized were thrown off Mount Taygetos also known as Apothetae, or as the Place of Rejection. The point of having those too events in the movie were to capture the essence of the brutal and militristic culture of the Spartans; so in that sense the director did a very well job of capturing the essence of their culture.

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