Round One in the Clash of Civilizations

You'd be hard-pressed to find a poet less likely to engage in what the kiddies now call "historical relativism" than Robert Graves, he of I, Claudius fame. (Martin Amis, who knew Graves a little and even vacationed as a boy at the grand old man's house in Spain, said he was the Platonic ideal of what a poet should look, act and sound like. The anti-Larkin, in other words.) 

However, whenever I read a story about the glorious "Western" victory over Persia at Marathon, or the not-so-ignominious Western defeat in the sequel at Thermopylae, I recall Graves' poem, "The Persian Version":

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon. As for the Greek theatrical tradition Which represents that summer's expedition Not as a mere reconnaisance in force By three brigades of foot and one of horse (Their left flank covered by some obsolete Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet) But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt To conquer Greece - they treat it with contempt; And only incidentally refute Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute The Persian monarch and the Persian nation Won by this salutary demonstration: Despite a strong defence and adverse weather All arms combined magnificently together.

Here is Brendan Boyle writing in the New York Sun on a new book about Spartan Freedom (caps in the original) versus Persian Slavery (ditto):

Mr. Cartledge is right to find something worthy in the Spartans' commitment, but for this to be the battle that "changed the world," these Spartans need to have been defending a way of life that can be said to belong to the world that inherited the Greeks. But by and large, Spartan "Freedom" has not belonged to this world. For this we should be grateful. Mr. Cartledge calls Sparta a "unique culture and society." "Unique" goes a bit easy on a society that was organized, in Mr. Cartledge's words, "as a kind of standing army," an army that helped Sparta satisfy its own imperial ambitions but, more importantly, keep a local, non-Spartan population in perpetual servitude. Unique, too, in its decision to remove each male child, at age seven, from his home and station him in a public dormitory-cumbarracks that served as a schoolhouse. It must have been in one of these barracks that the famous Spartan youth, who had stolen a fox and concealed it inside his tunic lest the theft be discovered by his superiors, stood silently and answered his superior's questions while the fox gnawed away at his intestines.

 A new film called 300 (the number of Spartans fending off 100,000 Persians), based on Frank Miller's graphic novel about Thermopylae, banks on a kind of Sin City-meets-Gladiator approach to portraying one of the most glorious asymmetric wars in martial history. And here's the trailer for that: