Xerxes the Barbarian?
Tuesday March 20, 2007
Another sword-and-sandal epic is infuriating Zoroastrians. The box-office blockbuster "300," which depicts an episode in the Greco-Persian war, the Zoroastrian King Xerxes as a cruel Pagan megalomaniac. Objectors in the article decribe Xerxes and his fellow kings as "generous and tolerant to a fault," and although I wouldn't agree with that entirely (Xerxes did, after all, order a river whipped for taking out his bridge!), he probably wasn't as nuts as the movie portrays him. The last movie to raise Zoroastrian ire was the ill-fated "Alexander," about the conqueror-king who was primarily responsible for the Zoroastrian flight to India and still perceived as a villain in the Parsi community.
Comments
As is typical with these sort of articles, it doesn’t appear that the people upset actually watched the movie. Having seen it, I can say that it is recognizably exaggerated for both visual and dramatic reasons. It may have been further exaggerated by the filmmakers, but most of the movie was directly patterned on Frank Miller’s graphic novel. Basically, it is not meant to be accurate by any means, and the “Western historians” and filmmakers aren’t really at fault.
That said, wanting to call the Persains Zoroastrians instead is not intentionally mean, but does seem very ignorant. Perhaps calling them Hindoos would have been better. =P
Perhaps this wasn’t THAT Xerxes in 300? It was just a god-king with the same name.
DUH. Anyway, it’s fiction! It was just a story.
Didn’t we pagans tell that to the Christians who were pissed off by the Da Vinci Code?
I find the hoopla about the Zoroastrian King to be unwarranted. It is a fact that the personal bodyguard of the Spartan King did hold off the Persians until the combine city states could meet the Persians in open combat.and while Hollywood does its usually over the top story telling, I found the movie to be a good story in the telling.And like one write has said, much was said to the Christians who complained about the DaVinci Code, the same can be said to the Zoroastrians here.