Ah yes, good ol' "moron rube" fellas, whose entire understanding of their role models is based on Hollywood depictions. I was primed to agree with the article'

Ah yes, good ol' "moron rube" fellas, whose entire understanding of their role models is based on Hollywood depictions. I was primed to agree with the article's premises, until... > Leonidas’ 300 men made a brave stand in the mountains, and a superior Persian force wiped them out. You can see it like the Nazis did and the guys in the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ T-shirts do, as a glorious battle in which an honorable band of brothers sacrificed their lives for their principles. Or you can see it as a tragedy in which the leaders of an oligarchical, slave-dependent society threw away their finest soldiers’ lives, and for what? To briefly delay the Persian Army while failing to achieve their goal of protecting Athens and the rest of northern Greece from the Persian attack? ...is this really the moral of the story here? That the Spartans should've just surrendered? That the proper response to a superior force (of another oligarchical, slave-dependent society) wanting to subjugate you into said oligarchical, slave-dependent society is to... simply roll over and let it happen? That's the real irony here about the Moron Rubes. They envision themselves as Spartans defending Greece from the Persian onslaught, but they have much more in common with Ephialtes.