Three #5

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

There was only ever one way this could end: a bloodbath.  Even without the momentum of Three's narrative symmetry with 300 and its inevitable Spartan slaughter at the hands of the Persian army, the single-minded pursuit of three slaves by a full Spartan military force led by a king would have guaranteed their eventual execution.  Messene was only ever a pipedream.

Pinned in the narrow goat path, Klaros, newly dressed in Arimnestos' armor, defends the entrance.  And by a combination of his fine fighting skills and his strategic position, the Spartans can't make much headway.  Funneled nearly into a single line, obstructed by the fresh bodies of those fallen before them, and unable to find their footing uphill on the gore-slicked rocks, Kleomenes' troops suffer swift casualties.  In a last knowingly futile attempt to save their lives, Klaros challenges Kleomenes to single combat.  And, though he accepts, the Spartan king chooses Tyrtaios as his champion.  When Klaros kills his second-in-command, his friend, and his lover, their fates are sealed.

With Klaros wounded, Terpander, with his intestines lately wrapped in place, takes his turn in the armor.  A storyteller.  The defiant instigator of the entire affair.  And he serves the Spartans a further defiant truth and another challenge on behalf of the helot ancestors.  His bravado is winning, and effective.

If Three disappoints in anything, it's that Klaros' history, how he came to feign infirmity, is much as we thought and Terpander guessed, and Gillen leaves no room for mystery.  But Klaros was better as an unknown, even had he remained so as the series ended.  His tale is shameful—collaboration with the Spartans against the newly liberated Messenians and a impious desecration of a sacred grove—but ultimately quite pedestrian, though I suppose that could be the point.

Sparta may still stand, if weakly, but Spartan idealism has eroded away.  Warrior honor has given way to Kleomenes' shrewd pragmatism, one that denies Klaros a fight.  But it's her own clever deception that preserves Damar's life, substituting the facially mutilated corpse of Arimnestos as the third helot, allowing her to slip away to Messene, the fox who escaped the Spartan net.  Her future, a quiet idyllic freedom, a culmination of Terpander and Klaros' dream, is satisfying, but it is the series' final scene—aged and alone, Agesilaos lounging on an Egyptian riverbank, the excitement of the pharoah for an old man—that more soundly strikes Three's themes.  This is the end, the last days.  For Sparta, for its imagination.

Three #4

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

The shadow of Frank Miller's 300 continues to hang in provocative, nuanced, and ironic juxtaposition over Gillen's Three, many of 300's narrative turns being echoing or inverted.  The legendary glory of Leonidas' three hundred warriors—no doubt hyperbolized, but inextricably woven into the tapestry of Spartan self-idealization—is here diminished by the same force being mobilized against three helots rather than tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Persians under Xerxes.  There is no victory, for instance, in the slaughter of three unarmed slaves, not even those they hunt, who by dire happenstance cross the path of the vengeful and punishing Spartan force under Kleomenes.  Yet, this is what Sparta commands.  The treachery of Ephialtes in showing the Persians the Anopaea Pass, a hidden goat trail to the rear of the Greek forces at Thermopylae, is mirrored in Aristodemos' deception of the three fugitives, trapping them in an obscure (and blocked) goat-path through the mountains.  It's all part of Gillen's tiered attempt to re-frame the Spartan mythos in more human terms.  No longer the valiant underdogs, they—like their fifth-century Persian counterparts—are now the seemingly unstoppable military machine bearing down on their overmatched quarry.

Three #4 makes some bold (and genuinely unexpected) narrative choices.  It gives voice to its readers' suspicions—or mine, at least—about Klaros' history from the clever Terpander:  "Those who seem like they can not fight no longer disturb the masters.  The Krypteia only cull the strong, after all.  Why not be a live wolf wrapped up in wool?" (Three #4: 7).  Klaros doesn't confirm Terpander's hypothesis, and given Gillen's propensity to misdirect, I wouldn't be surprised to find both us and Terpander mistaken.  By the final splash of the issue, as Klaros emerges from the narrow rock pass in full Spartan armor, the possibility that he may, in fact, not be a helot at all is tantalizing.  And it's not even the most startling character moment and plot twist in the issue!

For a story as deeply rooted and interested in historical plausibility as Three, Gillen admirably avoids stiff exposition.  Instead, he organizes his history around a series of social interactions precipitated by the helot murder of the ephor.  Information, for its part, is collected in the interview with Professor Stephen Hodkinson as a kind of academic epilogue.  There's some unfortunate mutual back-patting between the two, but the conversation elucidates both the history and Gillen's strategies in representing it.

Three #3

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

Perhaps the greatest virtue of Gillen's Three is that it contextualizes the Spartan warrior ethos within the social mosaic of ancient Greece.  The citizen body, diminished by the mid-4th century B.C.E. to fewer than a thousand (as Gillen and his historical consultant Stephen Hodkinson discuss in the issue's closing interview), comprised such a small portion of the total social and economic population of Lakonia despite their overwhelming cultural and political sovereignty in the histories of the period.  Three is the story of Sparta in decay, and to isolate any of the series' characters as a protagonist somewhat limits this perspective and the series' strengths.

And so the chase begins.  It is a merciless one for everyone.  Kleomenes and his forces are as ruthless to the imperious Arimnestos for his escape as they are to helot tracker Alopex in their threats against his family.  But under these threats, Alopex proves to be a skilled and insightful tracker.

Klaros is Three's best, though perhaps only, mystery.  Pretending for years to be hobbled and weak, he emerges in the fight against Eurytos as a skilled swordsman and again on the bridge across the Eurotas as particularly adept as single combat.  Self-named for the Stenyklaros Plain in northern Messenia on which Spartan Aeimnestos and his three hundred soldiers were rumored to have been slaughtered to a man, his history with and desire for subversion makes him valuable if entirely foreign to his fellow fugitives.  Despite Damar's insistence and Terpander's prodding, Klaros remains evasive about his past and his identity.

Three #3's other stand-out is Arimnestos' chilling mother Gyrtias, prouder of her champion chariot horses than her "trembler" son.  Arimnestos may be easily the most despicable character Three offers among a full cast of killers made hard and ferocious by the principles of their polis, but he's not wrong about his fellow Spartans.  They, those who fled Thebes and failed at Leuktra, are not different from him; they are hypocrites, but they were not alone.  Infuriated both by the death of his father at the hand of helots and his social ostracism as a "trembler" by his own state, Arimnestos too begins a hunt for revenge with a Skirites scout named Aristodemos to guide him.

Three #2

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

One hundred years gone from Sparta's triumphal defeat at Thermopylae, a stand that entrenched them as one of Greece's strongest city-states, and Sparta has changed.  Leuktra stands foremost in their memory, the ignominious loss to Thebes despite near equal forces and a king to command them.  Even the stories they tell are changing: Lycurgus' fable of the hound and the house dog no longer allows for the house dog.  As Tyrtaios remarks to Kleomenes, son of Kleombrotus, "When you were young, Sparta ruled Greece.  We could afford to think less of ourselves" (Three #2: 14).

Despite the helots Terpander, Damar and Klaros being the titular "three" and presumably the central figures in Gillen's historical chase thriller, Kleomenes is thus far his best character achievement.  He is the other king of Sparta—beside Agesilaos, always on campaign in North Africa and the Near East—and son of the disgraced Kleombrotus, who died mysteriously in prison, reportedly a suicide.  He, it seems, alone sees the irony in his given task: the march of three hundred Spartan hippeis in pursuit of three fugitive slaves, an irony made more visible and consequential by Gillen's strongly implicit analogy to Miller's classic 300.

"Then let this bloody farce begin."  (21)

Three doesn't shy away from the violent and bloody truth of survival.  His characters—to a man—are killers.  Klaros may be the most accomplished with a sword, but Terpander seems to take a vengeful and sadistic glee in turning the tables on the Spartan ephor and his guard.  The Spartan state wields fear against its subjected populations with a heavy hand.  It is a world that sees no value in the house hound, only the hunter.  It is a world made less for glory than survival.

So far Three is more a portrait of an historical moment, a society in the inevitable ebb of history caught between the traditions that once made them great and the demands of an evolving world, than it is a story proper.  And it's so compelling and rich as such that it doesn't feel any poorer for its sluggish narrative start.  But even so, by the end of Three #2, that stands to change and the manhunt for the three surviving helots begins in earnest.

Three #1

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

Gillen is remarkably forthright about his new series.  In many ways Three is his answer to Frank Miller's 300, his highly influential and heavily mythologized account of Greek resistance against the Persian forces at Thermopylae.  For Miller, who's almost always more interested in mythology than history, legend than realism, the story—whatever the historical truth—is more interesting.  Miller writes Sparta more or less as the Spartans would see themselves.  It is, in other words, the Spartan fantasy.  300 easily and willingly accepts the invisibility of the other Greek states, Spartan slaves, and Thermopylae's historical embeddedness amid other military efforts which cumulatively led to the eventual rebuff of Xerxes' forces.  Gillen wants to tell another story.

Terpander:  "I know stories.  I know history.  I know where one starts and another begins." (Three #1: 20)

Just over a hundred years after the Battle of Thermopylae, the naval battles of Artemisium and Salamis—all in 480 B.C.E.—and the Battle of Plataea the next year, the defeat which finally precipitated a complete Persian withdrawal from Greece, Gillen's story begins.  Three helots—crippled Klaros, Damar, and slick-tongued city-slave Terpander—working on a farm in the Laconian countryside find themselves compelled hosts to Spartan ephor Eurytos and his haughty son Arimnestos.  Because of Terpander's loose tongue, defiant wit, and an excess of undiluted wine, his story—a prickly reminder of Sparta's costly helot revolts and the loss of fertile Messenia—insults their guests and incites a slaughter.  Eurytos is unamused by Terpander's antics and gives him a painful, bloody reminder that for every successful helot revolt over their Spartan rulers there are thousands helot massacres, and he will add one to that number.

By his own admission, Gillen's tale is, as much as possible, relentlessly historical.  Despite the scholarly difficulty in reconstructing Spartan history—which makes it "awkward academically speaking"—Three is a relatively remarkable feat of historically credible storytelling.

Kelly's artwork is heavy and thick but fantastically kinetic, particularly the issue's final full-page illustration—a dynamic slaughter around the unmoving, seated ephor.  But the finest visual presentation is the gorgeous cover art, designed by colorist Jordie Bellaire.  It's a glowing, evocative homage to Greek vase painting and a stunning tribute to the elegance of Greek armor design.