Artistically, 300 is quite powerful, but some of the content is problematic. The movie doesn't really make it clear that although, yes, there were 301 Spartans (300 plus the king), behind those soldiers were about 7,000 other Greeks allied to Sparta. It's also impossible to know exactly what the battle of Thermopylae was like, but we do know it would have been a very untypical Greek battle because of the terrain: there was a narrow passage next to the sea, only wide enough for two chariots. For two days Xerxes, the king of Persia, hurled his best troops at the Spartans, but because the front was so narrow only a few could reach the fighting.
We see the Spartans fighting monsters, obviously a fantasy - and the rhinoceros and war elephants don't seem very likely either. But the most controversial aspect of the film is the portrayal of the Persians. They look a bit like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The real emperor Xerxes was not a 10ft-tall god-king with multiple piercings. I can understand why the Iranians are upset about this. However, I think they're wrong to assume that the film-makers are making a comment on the Middle East, simply because it takes a very long time to develop a movie.
Few cultures have celebrated the naked male body in the way the Greeks did. But the Spartan king Leonidas refers to the Greeks as "boy lovers", suggesting they are decadent. The irony is that the Spartans were literally boy lovers: they incorporated a form of pederasty into their educational system, as a way of turning a boy into a warrior.
I did enjoy 300. While it makes no pretence to veracity, it gripped me and kept me entertained.
· Paul Cartledge is a professor of Greek history at Cambridge and the author of Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World. 300 is on general release.