More on Movie Accents

Where were we? Oh.

Movie accents are indeed very tricky. The one historical epic that I thought got the tricky business of the subjective feel of accents in now dead languages was "Alexander the Great."
And critics roundly panned it for doing so. These were American critics, so I supposed they thought that everyone in the ancient world should sound like Johnny Carson, or Charlton Heston or something.

But consider: the Macedonians all had Irish accents, the Greeks all British accents, and Angelina Jolie an accent all of her own.

This makes sense: the Greeks, especially the Athenians, were the arbiters of all good taste in things linguistic and the modern British seem to feel the same way. The Macedonians were a mountaineer people who spoke Greek so poorly they could barely convince the Greeks they were speaking their language! At least according to the Greeks. And Queen Olympias, she of the really odd accent, was a foreigner to the Macedonians. She would have spoken Greek with a most peculiar accent.

So one thing Oliver Stone got right, was not appreciated by the American critics.

Turkey, Greece and the USA

Greece has traditionally been somewhat more anti-American than France. Now that the Greeks are facing the reality of having Turkey in the EU, without passports or borders needed, and with only the elite (and hypothetical) EU rapid deployment force to protect them, the Americans don't seem quite so bad after all.

Victor Davis Hanson, vacationing in Greece, has the observation.

Once more into the breach - '300'

My favorite classical historian has written an assessment of the historical reality behind '300.' He doesn't attempt to rehabilitate the Spartans specifically, but the wisdom of portraying the Greeks in general as 'good' while the Persians are 'bad.' Does a good job of it too.

Such openness was found nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean world. That
freedom of expression explains why we rightly consider the ancient Greeks as the founders of our present Western civilization — and, as millions of moviegoers seem to sense, far more like us than the enemy who ultimately failed to conquer them.

True. Though a major component of our civilization is actually Christianity, based on the sacred writings of enthusiastic members of the Persian Empire. Just pick you role-model and have at it.


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An Update on Salamis and the Spartans

Jack's comment about the Athenians had Spartan help at the battle is more accurate than my account that they were all alone. That'll teach me for relying on memory!

The Wikipedia article he cites seems to be accurate. In my defense I will say that the basic point is still clear - the ancient Greeks, or at least the Athenians and their pals, thought of it as an Athenian victory because the action took place partly to protect the evacuated population of Athens, the general in command was Athenian, and about half the navy was Athenian (180 by Herodotus' account). When you consider that the next largest contingent was 40 ships (from Corinth), and most sent fewer than 10, you can see how vital Athens was to the project.

Most of the states sending ships were either Athenian allies or from the Peloponnese, i.e. south of the Isthmus of Corinth. Most of Greece north of the Isthmus went over to the Persians. You will also notice that the Athenian commander and the Spartan commander almost came to blows over strategy, with the Athenian finally resorting to trickery to get the battle started. I have to admit that this last detail seems likely to be Athenian propaganda, but who knows?

Here's a paragraph from Victor Davis Hanson's article on the battle in the Reader's Companion to Military History (since I wrote about five short articles for the same book you could say that we are co-authors, along with about 160 others):

... Greeks rightly saw the victorious rowers of Salamis as proof of the skill and courage inherent within the nascent democratic citizenry of Athens. But in the years subsequent, reactionary philosophers took a dimmer view. Plato and Aristotle traced radical democracy, Athenian maritime imperialism, and the collapse of the traditional Greek values back to Salamis -- a victory that had given enormous prestige to the poor and ill-bred of the fleet, and therefore in their eyes had made the Greeks "worse as a people." Few Greeks, however, shared their jaded appraisal, and instead
rightly commemorated Salamis as the battle that had saved the West.

Which also happens to be Hanson's view oddly enough.

Thanks Jack!