Touraj Daryaee, now Baskerville Professor of Iranian History and the Persian World at the University of California, Irvine, criticized the film's use of classical sources, writing: Some passages from the Classical authors Aeschylus, Diodorus, Herodotus and Plutarch are split over the movie to give it an authentic flavor.
In an interview 300 writer Frank Miller said, "The inaccuracies, almost all of them, are intentional.