![]() ![]() Just as important, this custom of painting letters on shields seems to have post-dated the Battle of Thermopylae by roughly half a century. ![]() They’re currently on display in the Archaeological Museum of Sparta if anyone wanted to bother looking. We know this because we have recovered miniature shields that were left as votive offerings. We have much more evidence that the Spartans decorated their shields with geometric patterns, grinning gorgons, and parading animals. And we have only one piece of evidence that the Spartans ever practiced this lettering custom (a throwaway fragment from the Athenian comedian Eupolis). Greek heavy infantry supplied their own shields, and decorated them as they liked. While this was sometimes true, it wasn’t consistently so. Miller, likewise no historian, had fallen prey to the popular notion that Greeks painted their shields with the first letter of their city-states (alpha, “Α,” for Athens, for example). Snyder included Spartan shields bearing the lambda in 300, faithfully following the 1998 Frank Miller graphic novel. ![]()
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