
Donald Lateiner |
Review of Robin Waterfield, Xenophon's
Retreat: Greece, Persia and the End of the Golden Age.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 248. ISBN
978-0-674-02356-7. |
The prolific Robin
Waterfield has translated several ancient Greek prose authors,
including Herodotus, Plato, and Plutarch. He has also written books
of his own on the once wildly popular, nearly unreadable Lebanese
poet Kahlil Gibran, and on hypnosis, and a children's fantasy game
book.[1]
He has produced an accessible history of Athens[2]
as well as a translation for the "Oxford World Classics" series of
Xenophon's Anabasis,[3]
or The March Inland, a disturbing adventure of many otherwise
unemployed Hellenic mercenaries. These fellows chose to enlist under
the Persian pretender Cyrus when he attempted to unseat his brother,
King Artaxerxes in 401 BCE, after the Peloponnesian War.
Waterfield's translation has scholarly notes by Tim Rood, himself
the author of a book on a related topic of Rezeption.[4]
Professional soldiers were a leading export of post-war Greece
(80-1), seen by Isocrates (On the Peace 44-6), for example,
as vagabonds, deserters, and criminal predators--except when he was
in his frequent, albeit schizoid, crusader mode.
Waterfield has
translated and published many other works of Greek literature,
including texts by Euripides[5]
and the prolific and creative essayist Xenophon.[6]
A somewhat pedestrian writer, the ex-pat Athenian, pro-Spartan
Xenophon produced arguably the first proto-novel (didactic,
however)--the Cyropaedia, proto-biography (moralistic,
however)--the Agesilaus, and proto-historical sequel (to
Thucydides, however unsubtle)--the Hellenika. But only the
Anabasis, with its first eyewitness, "you are there"
participant's account of a campaign has won nearly unqualified, even
"gee whiz," admiration. This rather disingenuous memoir (aren't they
all?) is Xenophon's greatest and most enduring contribution to
literature--no apologies necessary. Waterfield here explores a
crucial hinge in Western history, before and after the battle of
Cunaxa (401 BCE), a moment between the ruinous imperial periods of
dominance of Athens and Sparta and the emergence of other cities and
other ways to organize fractious inhabitants around the Aegean pond
(e.g. Epaminondas' Thebes and several experimental federations).
This text necessarily reprises much of Xenophon's original narrative
but it also supplies a companion to it, for the reader who can't get
enough of the journey from hell. The book throws us in medias
res, the battle itself, near a village identified only by
Plutarch as Cunaxa.
Ten thousand or so
unemployed mercenaries, many of them survivors of the long
Peloponnesian War (431-404), had no compelling reason not to accept
pay to overthrow one foreign, oppressive "barbarian" autocrat and
install another. This was Europe's biggest band of killers-for-pay
yet to frighten civilians. After a ray of light appeared at the end
of the tunnel near the Tigris, the tunnel caved in on them, or they
found out that the light was installed on a powerful Persian engine
that ran rapidly over them. Their Pyrrhic victory, well before
Pyrrhus' birth, left the Cyreans in control of the field of battle.
Without their commander, however, and their very raison d'être,
namely Cyrus the foolhardy, the next step became unclear. Young
Cyrus had lost his head in the battle and more literally afterwards,
along with his hands, to the eunuch Masabates, but the latter later
paid dearly for this gruesome, loyal service to his king.
In the aftermath,
the stymied Greek generals attended a parley with the Persian
enemy's commanders. They were there summarily arrested as
trespassers on the King's territory, which they truly were. In
desperation, the orphaned soldiers elected new commanders, among
them a bourgeois Athenian who first pops into the story very
modestly, Xenophon. The Hellenes afterwards cajole, lie, rob, and
fight their way north and west through mountains in winter and
rivers in spate towards what they hope will be friendlier territory.
It was a great escape, as long as these desperate thugs were not
robbing and pillaging your town. Unpleasant incidents initiated by
both sides occurred in all phases of the journey: pre-Cunaxa, while
the Greeks pushed on their doomed way to fight for a charismatic but
foolhardy prince of the Persian line, one unwilling to remain a mere
satrap, his brother's subordinate. Post-Cunaxa, the Hellenes were
trying to extricate themselves from predictably hostile locals and
Persia's armed forces.
Their heartwarming
(if you like marauding Greeks), against-all-odds trek through a
passel of Persian provinces (Matiene, Armenia, Cappadocia, Phrygia,
the Hellespont) inspired both fourth-century pamphleteers, notably
the reactionary Athenian crank Isocrates, and generations of
imperialists, ancient and modern. The buccaneers' cry from Mount
Theches of "Thalatta, Thalatta" warms the heart when we favor
the struggling Greek underdogs, but their later brigandage on the
south coast of the Black Sea forced even their partisan, quondam
hegemon, and glorifier, Xenophon, to despair of uniting Greeks
for common goals.
Xenophon (ca.
430-350), the adventurous proto-journalist, and the footloose
groupie of the professedly apolitical Socrates, both records and
exemplifies a retreat from the profound engagement in civic affairs
that Pericles had lauded in the famous "Funeral Oration" recorded or
invented by Thucydides. The present volume's Chapter 10 explores
that disengagement of the man "who commanded the Cyreans"(Xenophon's
oddly self-effacing anonymous description of himself in his
Hellenika, the extant history of the Greek world after
Thucydides' text breaks off). Waterfield now covers more ground in
fewer pages than Xenophon could, taking readers from the Cyreans'
arrival at their destination, the port of Byzantium, up to the death
of Alexander in June 323 at Babylon. Xenophon, after his return to
the Balkan peninsula, fought against his natal city in the
Corinthian War and therefore became persona non grata to his
once fellow Athenians.
His person was so
grata to the Lacedaemonians, however, that they gave him a roomy
hunting estate in the territory of their frequent enemies, the
Eleians, at Scillus, about two miles from Olympia. Here he built a
mini-temple, dedicated to Artemis and not yet identified by
topographers. He tells readers that he explicitly modeled it on
Ephesus' much grander structure. (This earlier temple is not to be
confused with the similarly constructed but later world wonder, built
long after the one that Xenophon knew had burned down in 356, set alight
by a moronic publicity seeker whose name I know--but with justified
spite will not record.) He lived the near-to-Arcadian pastoral
lifestyle in the western Peloponnese. Farming, hunting, and writing
a variety of works in a kind of archaic and deracinated limbo or
fantasyland kept him busy. His wife, Philesia (the name is not
provided by Xenophon), some slaves (treated well, compared to Roman
or American slaves, in the Jeffersonian manner), and his two sons
completed the ménage. Gryllus, one of these sons, died fighting for
Athens in a skirmish connected with the indecisive battle of
Mantinea in 362. This is the point on the endless historical
continuum at which Xenophon breaks off his Hellenika
narrative, in disgust and probably depression. He did not return to
Athens, as he could have; the detachment of exile apparently now
suited him fine.
His plain piety,
often expressed with some relish for the punishments met by less
god-fearing types, was a throwback, perhaps a misunderstanding of
Socrates' weird brand of religious devotion. He records, and
Waterfield reports (122), a rare example of an ominous sneeze, an
unsurprisingly ignored branch of Greek divination. More amusingly,
Xenophon had consulted "his guru" Socrates about joining the Cyrus
Scheme to Overthrow the Persian Monarchy. Although told what to ask
the Oracle at Delphi, Xenophon asked a different question to forfend
an answer that might keep him from signing on. (Greeks knew how to
manipulate their divine communications.) Waterfield, like his Attic
mentor, holds a dim view of Athenian democracy (50): unsatisfactory
legal system, society in which everything and anything was
permissible, a rabble-run mode of mischief that undermined the
traditions that had made great the violet-crowned city, etc. Perhaps
Waterfield has read too much Xenophon. He employs some inexact
terminology such as "the Thirty Tyrants," a moniker better reserved
for the mid-third century CE of Roman history, not one that the
Athenians themselves applied to the post-Peloponnesian War oligarchy
of the Thirty.
Waterfield organizes
material and writes lucidly (not something one can assume of
academics or former academics. In fact, he has taught courses to
promote these esoteric skills.) He has intelligent pages (102-11) on
the difficult logistics of the expeditionary force and its large
baggage train of pack animals and carts as well as camp followers
running a market in captured live stock--human and quadruped. He
even approaches the difficult and smelly topic of army latrines
(111), briefly. In addition, he drove through Iraq in 2004,
following as much of the Ten Thousand's route "as geopolitical
circumstances and time made feasible" (xiii). That could be many
miles or only a few, but few ancient historians have driven much
beyond Sart, modern Sardis.[7]
Waterfield again reaches the day of the battle and begins the long
slog back, around, up and down valleys and mountains, etc. on the
way to Hellas (111-2). We live with the unhappy Cyreans for just
over a year (March 401-ca. April 400).
Waterfield, as noted
above, starts with the battle itself, then works backwards and
finally forwards from it. No one can point to the unmarked site now
called Cunaxa. It lay near the Euphrates, not far north of Babylon
(Map A unfortunately shows only the former, Map C only the latter).
The Coalition soldiers bivouacking there today are in or near Diyala
Province. Waterfield estimates the size of the defending imperial
army as 45,000, quite enough to instill a reasonable fear in Cyrus'
invaders--who numbered closer to 13,000, when one does the
arithmetic. Waterfield reviews what we know of Greek battle tactics
to explain hoplite warfare. He credits the Persians' victory to a
feint by Tissaphernes, Cyrus' sly rival, the satrap loyal to the
long-reigning Shah Artaxerxes II (404-359). One may still appreciate
this regional governor's idealized portrait head on a beautiful coin
in the British Museum (178). The King of Kings' minions cut off that
handsome head when the Spartan King Agesilaus was later playing
strategic footsie in Asia Minor with the Persians. As usual, ancient
historians inadequately describe (and even here perhaps did not
know) how the battle unfolded. Only one side produced a serious account, as
far as we know. The Greek physician to the Persian court, Douris of
Samos, produced another account, but our unreliable fragments of it
help little. Traces of his sensational slant endure in Plutarch's
life of Artaxerxes, including an unappetizing account of
Cyrus' mother destroying her rival, Stateira, her son's mistress and
wife. She used a knife smeared on one side with poison during a
fancy dinner of bird.
Cyrus the much
Younger (only 23 at death), became overconfident as his troops
advanced, threw himself into the mêlée,
as ancient commanders often did, but with too few bodyguards, and
died for his impetuosity. Terminal for him, but, as the Spartan
Clearchus saw, likely to be terminal also for his under- and
infrequently paid employees as well. They became trapped deep in an
Iraqi quagmire, without air support or any other, to extricate them
from the swamps, deserts, hills, and other convenient locales for
ambush in inhospitable Mesopotamia and Anatolia. They had to make
tough decisions for self-preservation, like abandoning their
acquired human booty to starve, freeze, or be captured by even more
barbarous Carduchian masters, as they struggled to traverse
mountains in winter. They had to slit the throat of one
prisoner-guide to ensure the dependability of another. They had to
seize a headman's son as a hostage to ensure accurate intelligence
in Armenia. Not only is war hell, but so is getting home without a
ticket, without a map, without a compass--in the midst of
populations that have no reason whatsoever to like or trust you.
Xenophon does not whitewash the Ten Thousand's brutal rape of the
peoples in their erratic path (see maps; add question marks).
Waterfield then
analyzes the peculiar relationship of Greeks and Persians. This
began with the Persians' conquest of Lydian Croesus and ended two
and one-quarter centuries later with the Macedonian conquest of the
Persian Empire. Herodotus attributed virtues, as well as vices, to
the Persians and their Achaemenid rulers for 200 years--the previous
Cyrus, Dareios, Xerxes, etc. Their Herodotean reputation as
"straight shooters" fell with their military fortunes. The Cyreans'
limited but real success opened the floodgates of harebrained
schemes of Hellenic looting and perhaps conquest. Philip planned and
Alexander executed that so-called war of revenge and mercenary
dismemberment of a vast, and not particularly onerous, imperial
system.
Xenophon was a
hero-worshipper. Socrates was the hero of his youth. Cyrus the
Rebel, more or less his age-peer, is admired for his gardening, his
drinking, his courage as a soldier, and his mental vigor. He was
honest, loyal to Greeks, manly, generous, and thoughtful, a real boy
scout except that he wanted to depose (probably kill) his elder
brother, the King of Persia, who ruled from 404 to 359, a notable
feat amidst autocratic intrigues at the Persian courts. That he
spoke Greek was another plus for a Hellenic hero-hunter. Agesilaus,
the gimpy king of Sparta, replaced the would-be king of Persia as
the object of Xenophon's fetishism. The fictionalized elder Cyrus is
the heroic focus of his essay on a utopian monarchy, and the list goes on.
Waterfield likes Xenophon but appreciates his weaknesses in
judgments positive and negative. The Anabasis is replete with
covert polemic against Xenophon's predecessor commanders and his
rivals on the march home: their management styles and skills, their
gross tactical errors, their fundamental character flaws. No band of
heroes.
Readers will enjoy
Waterfield's breezy style and occasional puns, such as his title and
this sentence: "They managed to save some of the baggage--including
one of Cyrus' concubines, a Milesian woman …" (19). His erudition
and enthusiasm for a difficult trip are impressive, even if he
travelled by Land Rover in the present century. He tracked a march
in which men walked approximately 3,000 miles, many of them
difficult. Waterfield draws deft portraits of Xenophon's fellow
leaders. The determined Spartan Clearchus might have been afflicted
by PTSD after the Peloponnesian War. Others, such as Xenias and
Pasion, earned Xenophon's disapproval: they signed up but soon
deserted. (Who got the last laugh on that choice?)
He neatly compares
the Cyreans, deprived of their Persian commander, to "a freshly
decapitated chicken, poised to skitter aimlessly for a while,
haemorrhaging men, before collapsing dead" (112). Waterfield
intelligently says of the magnitude of the Cyrean force that: "By
sheer chance, the mercenary army was exactly the right size: a
smaller force might have been overcome by one of the many opponents
they faced; a larger force would have been less mobile, and harder
put to find sufficient provisions" (144). The army was a quasi-city
on the move, an observation (148) that has antecedents in Nicias'
speech to the even more debilitated Athenians trapped in Sicily and
in Homer's bivouac before Troy, where the Achaean forces have
established a home away from home but run the risk of being pushed
into the Aegean Sea and annihilated. Waterfield compares this army
to a living organism (162) with all the needs and ills, mental and
physical, that the metaphor implies. The Cyreans suffered their
worst losses of the expedition when close to home in Bithynia; they
had brought retaliation on themselves by their lawless plundering.
They alienated nearly every Greek and barbarian community they
descended on. If Xenophon had not been one of them, I imagine that
he would have found this plague of human locusts entirely
reprehensible. Does such real hardship as they had previously
suffered make their sometimes unnecessary plundering acceptable? No.
Waterfield, seduced
as so many historians are, by the importance of what he has chosen
to find important, admits that the writer Xenophon is neither a
radical nor a profound philosopher. Indeed, he is more devoted to
Greek so-called common sense, and thus Xenophon's Socrates comes across as
more a cracker barrel philosopher than the nuanced font of all
logic, eristics, aesthetics, and ethics. Xenophon's profound
devotion to the Greek flavor of manly self-control seems "strikingly
obvious" (188). No matter, not everyone can be Plato, although I
dispute that Xenophon was any kind of philosopher. Or even scholar
(197).
More stimulating is
Waterfield's notion that Xenophon was disillusioned three times
over. First, the dismal epilogue of disintegration after the most
exciting adventure of his life disillusioned him. Second, his
admired Spartans' botch of their internal cohesion and their Aegean
mastery disappointed him, occurring so soon after they started to
spend the gold which that pinnacle of power presented to them.
Third, the fourth-century divisive Greeks' failure to profit from
their futile if fascinating former mistakes soured him. Xenophon was
a product of the fifth century; if he distrusted and disbelieved
Pericles, he at least imbibed a pre-Socratic form of patriotism that
could not delight in the race to the bottom that concluded, after
his death, with the self-elevation of the successful brawler and
arriviste Phillip II of Macedon.
It puzzled me to
read (47) that Socrates was a transitional figure who infected
Xenophon. Xenophon allegedly saw his army's experience as "reflecting a general
retreat from the supposed certainties of the fifth century to the
relativism of the fourth." Socrates himself, however, reacted to and
attacked the mature relativism of the fifth century associated with
Sophists such as Protagoras and Gorgias, so these alleged earlier
fifth-century certainties may prove to be paper tigers. Waterfield's
comparison of Xenophon's narrative to the archetypal journey of the
Odyssey is another unwelcome stretch (129)--but then
everything, even the Wizard of Oz, has been compared to the
Odyssey. (This poor joke turned up serious hits on the World
Wide Web.)
A timeline, three
maps, footnotes, an immense, carefully annotated bibliography, and
an index enrich this engaging study. In addition, twenty-six
photographs, many of them snapped by the author, reveal largely
unchanged Anatolian landscapes that Xenophon experienced under less
favorable circumstances. Other illustrations include images from
ancient vases, reliefs, and coins. One welcomes the Greek carved
images on Persian-minted coins of the satraps Tissaphernes,
Pharnabazos, and Tiribazos--even though the artists idealized their
visages. These coins paid Greek mercenaries to kill or frighten
other potential rival Greek fighters on Anatolian soil.
I am grateful that
Waterfield does not claim (197) that Xenophon's Cunaxa
"changed the world for ever." That overreaching cliché, tedious in
itself, might apply to the example set by the Cyreans' journey. The
last chapter discusses the battle's and the retreat's "legacy." Even
stolid Xenophon quotes a Greek claiming that the Greeks enjoyed
laughing down the Great King (Anab. 2.4.4). Another chortled
that the women in the Cyreans' train could have defeated that
monarch and his soldiers (6.1.13). Such boasting comes naturally to
bitter men. It was a charming surprise to read that nearly a
millennium later Eunapius claimed that, "Alexander the Great would
never have become 'Great' without Xenophon" (211, touting the
"philosophers' interest"). Even a veteran modern historian of
antiquity would probably never have noted that compliment, or
relevant Xenophontine references buried in the poetry of Louis
MacNeice and the prose of Italo Calvino. Xenophon's literary
achievement preserved the vagabonding Greeks' achievement of
survival. Further, it made dubious claims of Panhellenic aggression
sound more defensible, even morally edifying.
This book of popular
history (in a most positive sense of that word) achieves its aims:
to explore aspects of the battle and the nearly three-thousand-mile
journey that Xenophon does not describe, to provide an historical
context for the expedition itself, and to evaluate its ancient
author. Less successful, perhaps because less fully argued and
inadequately illustrated, is the forced analogy between the "before
and after" for this semi-organized, semi-anarchic clutch of men.
Waterfield also presses too far the contrast between the deep values
of the optimistic fifth-century and the shallow materialism of the
cynical fourth (see, e.g., xii).
Xenophon's character
(in two senses of the word), both self-effacing and eager to show
readers how effective and popular this bourgeois had become among
mutinous roughnecks, comes through better in the Anabasis
in any other
text. In the fierce snow and cold of an endlessly repeated bivouac
somewhere in Anatolia, on a winter morning, with frostbite, hunger,
and snow blindness afflicting the troops, Xenophon emerges. Naked/in
his underwear (so he says! Translators of gymnos prefer
"lightly clad"), Xenophon (says Xenophon) "bravely rose and began to
chop firewood with his ax. Others took over from him..." (Anab.
4.4). Alternately astute and cunning, Xenophon surmounts every
obstacle to the admiration of his and others' infantry companies.
His grizzled men were the product of a crisis, an aberration of
aggregation, not an enduring cross-section of ancient Greek manhood.
Ohio Wesleyan University
dglatein@owu.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Respectively,
Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran (NY: St.
Martin's, 1998), Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis
(London: Macmillan, 2002), and Steve Jackson and Ian
Livingstone Present Rebel Planet (Harmondsworth: Puffin,
1985).
[2] Athens: A
History, from Ancient Ideal to Modern City (NY: Basic
Books, 2004).
[3] The
Expedition of Cyrus (Oxford: OUP, 2005).
[4] The Sea! The
Sea!: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination
(NY: Overlook Press, 2005).
[5] Euripides:
Orestes and Other Plays and Euripides: Herakles and
Other Plays (Oxford: OUP, 2001, 2003).
[6]
Conversations of Socrates, rev. ed. (NY: Penguin, 1990),
Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (NY: Penguin,
1998).
[7] John Prevas
recently did, though, and records the story for an even more
popular audience in his Xenophon's March: Into the Lair of
the Persian Lion (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2002).
|