The 300 was also the king’s private guard during the battle of Thermopylae. In the movie that would have been the Captain Artemis, Dilios, and Stelios, the Spartans warriors who talked most during the film besides Leonidas. He had three men that could pick 100 men that they feel could serve the king well at any moment when the king gave the order. The way Leonida’s three hundred man Spartan army was selected was accurate. This is talked about in Jean Ducat’s Spartan Education and in Plutarch’s On Sparta.
So the beginning of the movie is a little more accurate that the rest but it is hard to tell if Leonidas himself killed a Laconian Wolf. They have to kill a large animal at some point for two reasons first because they lived in the wild for years by themselves so it was their food and second killing a Laconian Wolf was a big game kill that got a Spartan male a lot of respect since hunting was a virtuous hobby in Sparta. Then they were eventually whipped to prove they had the endurance to survive though battles and they did have to kill a large animal at some point. Then they were taken away from their parents for about a decade by the ephors, the religious advisers of the king, to learn fighting tactics under an adviser called a paidonomos. They did have to initially learn basic sparring moves and basic grammar education from their fathers until age seven. The agoge that was shown in the movie was that intense. This is something Xenophon talks about in the Constitution of the Laecadomians and Plutarch comments on it in his account of Spartan kings in the Penguin book On Sparta. Taygetus in the Peloponnese around Sparta were babies that were believed to not be fill for Sparta's society and the agoge, their education system, perished at the base of the mountain. Sadly and unfortunately, people like Ephialtes would have been killed at birth because of their deformity at birth, like Leonidas alluded to when he first met Ephialtes. Just to dovetail off the answers of the saved forum “How historically accurate is the film 300?” below, I will comment on some correct aspects of the Spartan culture displayed in the movie since I have studied Sparta a lot as a graduate student.
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