ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the problems of representing violence and doing justice to the victims of violence in a work set in the distant past. Historian Steven Hodkinson acted as consultant during the production of Kieron Gillen’s Three (2013–2014), which is set in 4th century B.C.E. Sparta. This ancient Greek city state is inseparably associated with violence due to its military reputation, with the story of the 300 Spartans facing impossible military odds at Thermopylae, while resisting the invading Persian Empire, being the most frequently retold episode in its history. Hodkinson’s career has been spent challenging the standard stereotypes of Spartan society, such as the violence inflicted on Spartan adolescents over the course of a punishing training regime; Sparta’s Greek neighbours in a campaign of invasive conquest; and subsequently on the conquered helot-class, who are compelled to ‘slave’ for their Spartan masters in order that the latter might be free to perfect their military skills. These fascinatingly aberrant aspects of Spartan society have dominated the analysis of Spartan history, crowding out evidence for more ‘standard’ Greek cultural activity, and are equally dominant in pop-culture representations, especially those which demonise the Spartans as the precursors of modern totalitarian regimes.
By setting his work more than a century after Thermopylae, in the period of Sparta’s decline, Gillen avoided the distorting lens of West versus East patriotism and left himself free to examine other kinds of violence in addition to those encountered on the battlefield. Gillen’s starting point was the desire to write a heroic myth for the helot-class, but he also wanted to avoid this demonisation of the Spartans. The historical consultancy process involved a continuous balancing of the most challenging recent academic reinterpretations against the expectations of the audience who, having learned about Sparta from pop culture representations such as Frank Miller’s 300 (1998) and its 2007 film-adaptation, might reject this new picture as false because it was too unfamiliar. This chapter explores the balancing act in relation to varying aspects of the representation of historical violence, from the details of armour and weaponry to the social behaviour of individual characters who both inflict and suffer violence.
