Now it wasn’t much of a pass—the grubby pawprints and eccentric circles saw to that—but it was a pass, and Metamorphosis had the summer holidays before him to come to terms with that. And was it any wonder then that soon enough Metamorphosis passed on to that Great Geometrical Solid in the sky where he could sit at the right hand of Euclid and they could jointly ponder for eternity just exactly where it was that it all went so terribly wrong.
 

Passing stranger, go tell the Spartans, that here, obedient to our orders, we lie.
    Amongst my very favourite movies of the time was 300 Spartans, which was no masterpiece  by any means but it did manage to be a fairly accurate and rollicking depiction of the events surrounding and during the battle of Thermopylae. Admittedly, Richard Egan played Leonidas but the rest of the cast (Ralph Richardson, David Farrar as Xerxes, Donald Houston) was pretty good and it bothered with all the Greek god nonsense that would indeed have been the driving forces behind the events, at least in the minds of those ancients. Although a Hollywood project, the film was made at Thermopylae and with Greek government funding and shows very plainly how it was torn between those two forces.
    It wasn’t great, but two scenes are unforgettable. One is where Leonidas confronts Xerxes for some heroic banter before the battle. Xerxes points out his million strong army and his opponent’s mere 300 (plus a few other small armies that history has forgotten) and Leonidas politely tells him to get stuffed.
“Our arrows will blot out the sun!” Xerxes shrieks.
“Then we will fight in the shade,” Leonidas replies coolly.
The film is full of such accidental humour.
    When they discover that they have been betrayed and are doomed, Leonidas tells them: “Enjoy your breakfast, men, for tonight we shall dine in Hades.” Apparently, he actually said it although, since there were no survivors, it’s hard to tell how we know that.
    The other scene is the last one, when the few survivors of the 300 huddle defensively and are indeed felled by a storm of arrows. They finish up a little heap of metal litter is an otherwise pleasant landscape, and their ignominious end so becomes tragically heroic.