Leonidas and the Education of the Young

Thermopylae

There was a movie doing the rounds a couple of years ago on the Battle of Thermopylae.  When the movie was first released I was told quite authoritatively by a couple of our young people that the movie was based on the graphic novel “300”, to which I said it was based on the account in Herodotus. 

One of our young people immediately referred to it as a Greek myth¸ to which I retorted that it was an historical account.  I was then informed that it was based on the graphic novel which may have been based on Herodotus, but the power of the imagery came from the graphic novel. 

Good grief!  Graphic novels are the basis of their knowledge.  Oh, the ignorance of our techie generation with its diluted second hand culture and second hand rendering of the classics!  It is somewhat akin to the “Classic Comic” book of my childhood that substituted for the real thing, a sort of dumbed down version of a Reader’s Digest novel on the theme, but probably not even that.  The graphic novel 300 probably drew more from Google and Wikipedia than from Herodotus. 

The Church Historian Edward Rochie Hardy was correct when he said, “Read two ancient classics for every contemporary book you read,” but today they only read second hand stories in graphic novels, a sort of pale Classic Comic generation with all the substance of whip cream.