I’m a big fan of Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback on ESPN.com, but I’m mystified by his comments about movies depicting ancient history in this week’s edition (about half way down). For instance:

In the 2004 Brad Pitt demi-epic “Troy,” the fleet assembled by the Greek king Agamemnon to sail against Troy is depicted as hundreds of sail vessels stretching as far as the eye can see. This also is nonsense. Assuming it actually happened, the Trojan war is thought to have occurred about 700 years before Thermopylae. At that time it is likely there were no more than a few hundred thousand people living in Greece. A population of that size could not have built a fleet of hundreds of ships.

Well, yes…but what about Homer’s Catalogue of Ships in Book II of The Iliad? Homer lists 1,186 ships. The movie Troy took a lot of license with the Trojan cycle, but they should at least be applauded for getting that one right, not wrong.

Similarly, the new movie 300, based on Dark Knight Returns writer Frank Miller’s comic book treatment of the story of Thermopylae, shows tens of thousands of Persian troops, which Easterbrook pooh-poohs. Yet Herodotus, our main source for the history of the Persian Wars, and deliberately echoing the Catalogue of Ships, puts the army’s size at 1.7 million. Of course, this is exaggerated (even though, as our own VDH points out, the Persian Empire probably had a population of 50 million), but all the film-makers are doing is following traditional accounts. In fictionalized treatments, just what is so wrong with that?