(spoiler alert)
"We Spartans have descended from Hercules himself. Taught never to retreat, never to surrender. Taught that death in the battlefield is the greatest glory he could achieve in his life. Spartans: the finest soldiers the world has ever known.”.
Call me morbid, I don’t think death is the worst thing that could happen to a person. A life of emptiness, unfruitfulness is.
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As a young kid, reading about the Battle of Thermopylae churned something inside me about standing unmoved in the heat of things even if the odds are stacked against you. It’s not such an easy thing to do as compared to merely reading it and enjoying the story, yet, it appealed so strongly because I thought underdog stories like David and Goliath and the 300 Spartans were supercool!
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The tale of the 300 Spartans is intriguing. 300 against a million! Surely the only thing that kept them standing against such a vast foe was that there was a good chance of winning. No one runs to his death for nothing . But, how could victory be achieved in such a circumstance as this?
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Today, watching this great story, adapted into film made me see their victory wasn’t in killing all the million Persian soldiers (it wouldn’t have been a victory then). Their victory, their achievement came in the form of overcoming their fears, fighting to the very end and creating a legacy so great generations later would read and marvel about. Truly, they never died, because they were makers of history.
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The issue is not about merely dying (anyone can do that at anytime) so much as it is about what you live for. One’s willingness to buy a certain product can be seen in his willingness to sacrifice his valuables for it (a principle in Economics). If passion could be calculated, passion at its peak would be a person’s willingness to give up everything for something, in exchange with nothing.
What we need to know is, no matter who we are, where we’ll end up or what we'll have to do, the privilege of making a difference is available to all. Take for example, that scene where King Leonidas asked the Thespian soldiers “What is your profession?”
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Jobs like ‘blacksmith’ and ‘sculptor’ were their replies.
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Then, turning to his own 300 Spartan soldiers, he asked them the same question, with a booming voice,
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“What is your profession?”
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And all in unison, they roared their battle cry.
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“A new age has come, an age of freedom. And all will know that 300 Spartans gave their last breath to defend it.”
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We need the passion of suicide bombers.
