I have absolutely no interest in seeing 300, which sounds like am oversized video game pretending to be a film about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E. But it gives me a chance to play William Safire and talk about the origin of one of my favorite words, so I won’t slag it too harshly.
As you know, Thermopylae was the battle in which a relative handful of Spartans led by King Leonidas held off a vastly larger force of Persian warriors under the command of King Xerxes, who was continuing the war of conquest launched by his father, Darius, who had dreamt of adding the quarrelsome city-states of Greece to the Persian Empire. Though the Spartan force (bolstered with a few hundred Thespians) was ultimately wiped out, the Persians sustained heavy losses and were delayed long enough to permit the Athenians to rally their defenses, and the Persian force was subsequently wiped out at the Battle of Salamis.
The warrior-state of Sparta occupied the center of a plain called Laconia, in the oddly shaped southern peninsula called the Peloponesse. (The name continues to this day as the prefecture of Lakonia.) The Spartans were reputed to be people of few words, with a taste for dour witticisms. Thus, when a Spartan warrior learned from a scout that the Persians had enough spears to darken the sun, he remarked: “Good, we’ll be able to fight in the shade.” You would have to search through literature to the early 1300s and Grettir’s Saga to find a man of action with a bleaker sense of humor.
In honor of the Spartan style, the word laconic remains in the English language to describe someone with a terse way of speaking. Terse, and with a sense of humor that can be scarier than chest-thumping bluster. Think of Dirty Harry snarling “Go ahead, make my day,” and you’ll realize just how durable that style can be.
