There's a lot of historians complaining about the historical inaccuracies in the new movie adaptation of Frank Miller's 300. Now, I haven't seen the movie yet, but I did read the comic a long time ago. I remember at the time thinking that the comic wasn't particularly interested in epistemology...but I also remember thinking that was the point. 300 isn't historically accurate because it isn't really about history. It's a comic book. If you want history, open a textbook. 300 is about ideas and a conflict of ideologies thinly (perhaps too thinly) veiled with historical avatars. Maybe Miller would have been better off skipping the reimagining of a once well-known historical event.
It seems to me that there is probably little coincidence that this movie follows not only the production of Miller's Sin City (as well as the heavy influence of his Dark Knight Returns on Batman Begins), but also on the heels of The Lord of the Rings. After all, if you splice together the Battle at Helm's Deep and the march on the gates of Mordor, you get something that looks very much like the Battle of Thermopylae with a happy, deus ex machina ending. Both are set up as battles that cannot be won, with Men of the West confronting an invasion force of insurmountable numbers...largely as a delaying tactic. Both are battles in which the Men of the West accept their likely destruction, and choose to fight evil to their own death. Indeed, Miller's Spartans are a lot like Tolkien's imaginary Anglo-Saxon-Nordic warriors (and both are also a lot like most noble warrior castes throughout world literature and history).
But Tolkien can dodge the history bullet because historians have a notably difficult time arguing what orcs really looked like or how elves trained their children to fight.
Which, of course, Miller must have realized...which leads us to another question: why bother writing historical fiction at all?
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