In 300: Rise of the Empire, the story from the first movie 300 continues on as we watch Xerxes, the god king, successfully kills all of the 300 Spartans in Thermopylae. We’re then introduced to the new protagonist, an Athenian general and statesman called Themistocles. He successfully rouses Athens to stand against Persia, despite their vastly numerical advantage, and leads several successful naval battles against the Persians.

This feat brings him under the gaze of Artemesia, Xerxes’s brilliant female naval commander, who sends an emissary to Themistocles requesting for a parley aboard her ship. Once there, Artemesia seduces him and two has sex before she springs her offer to him of joining the Persians as her second-in-command.  Themistocles rejects her citing his love for Athens as his only reason.

The movie ends with the Athenians defeating the Persian navy with the timely arrival of the Spartans and other Greek city-states. Branching away from that narrative now, had the movie gone on longer, we’d learn that a few years after the united Greece’s victory against Xerxes, Themistocles gets ostracized by the Athenians, supposedly for his perceived arrogance from defeating the Persians. Or perhaps it was due to his fellow men’s jealousy of his prestige and power.  To add fuel to the fire, the Spartans implicated him in the treasonous plot of their general, Pausanias, who was accused of conspiring with the Persians.

Seeing no other recourse, Themistocles went into exile and ends up being employed by Artaxerxes I, the Persian king and son of Xerxes. Imagine that! Being employed by the son of the king you once did battle with. Makes you wonder right? What if Themistocles was better off accepting Artemesia’s offer of joining the Persians early on. After all, the pair of them made a wonderful and yet bizarre combination. From their interactions with one another you can sense they had a connection, that they understood a lot of things in each other that can only be experienced by people in their station.