Xenophon - The Persian Expedition

EVERY schoolboy used to know how ten thousand Greeks found themselves in the heart of the Persian empire a thousand miles from Greece, with half their leaders arrested by the Persians, and with a Persian army at hand, and how Xenophon the Athenian took charge and brought them safely home over rivers and mountains, through terrible winter and equally terrible barbarian foes, and it was a dull schoolboy indeed who did not thrill at the sound heard one day by Xenophon from the rear of the column as he laboured up yet another mountain against, as he thought, yet another hostile tribe - The sea, the sea. But the book itself was also an expedition not without hardships, for it was generally the first contact with a Greek author, and in the toils of syntax and the weariness of unknown words not all enjoyed the journey or indeed ever reached the end. Time has changed all that. Now that every schoolboy knows other things, he and all of us can, with the aid of translations we were once forbidden, learn a great deal about the world of the Greeks, and if one is minded to learn, the Persian Expedition, the so-called Anabasis, of Xenophon is an excellent book with which to begin.

Ex oriente lux. One sees better what the Greeks were in seeing what they were not. On every page of the Anabasis the contrast between Greek and barbarian is sharply drawn the barbarian world vast and diverse, feudal and ancient or tribal and savage, the Greek world compact and united by the sea, and, despite variety, essentially one in its approach to life. The Greek was pre-eminently a political animal, and the Ten Thousand are all the Greeks in miniature. When they are left leaderless, the crisis is not resolved by authority or seniority. They assemble and debate,. Arguments and the art of words prevail. The army is really a polity on the move. Let barbarians fall to the ground in submission to whoever wins the contest for the crown. The Greeks will give their allegiance to the man whose reason, not his blood, proves his fitness to lead. Not of course that the barbarians are not in themselves interesting. So much of Greek history is concerned with Greek relations, in war and peace, with the ruling power of Asia, that the inside view afforded by the Anabasis is uniquely precious. Further, the expansion of Hellenism was at the expense of the truly barbarian peoples of the sort that the Ten Thousand met on the southern shore of the Black Sea and in Thrace, and there is no better picture of the colonies of the Greek world than in the fifth and sixth books of the Anabasis. There we see Xenophon planning to found amongst barbarian peoples a city which would trade in cereals and slaves with Old Greece, the merchant ships already sailing up and down the periphery of the Greek world, and all that was needed for enduring prosperity was women who could be bought or snatched from barbarian tribes, just as long ago the noble Ionian founders of Miletus had snatched the Carian women. Where else in Greek literature can one gain comparable insight into the Greek penetration of barbary? But, above all, the Ten Thousand themselves engage the attention, and teach us what ordinary Greeks were like. Their piety, for instance, is typical. As Xenophon was addressing the assembly of the army at dawn the day after the arrest of the generals, someone sneezed, and when the soldiers heard it, they all with one accord fell on their knees and worshipped the god who had given this sign. Or again, in the sixth book, Xenophon who was clearly most attentive to all the claims of religion sought a sign from heaven in the entrails of animals that he might lead out the army to get supplies. For some days he sacrificed to no avail, and the Greeks had no food. But the army as a whole accepted it all. The will of the gods would prevail and signs must be sought and obeyed.