Anabasis
I love looking at the Landmark editions, but I'm not so great at actually reading them, unless they are Herodotus. But my sister was here over winter break and she inspired me to pick up something more serious than I've been reading lately, and so I have now read the Anabasis. I enjoyed it a lot, too! I'm not that great at reading about warfare, because I find it tedious, but reading about soldiers stuck in enemy territory and trying to get home is much more interesting.
So here's the background: It's 401 BC, and Xenophon, a young and elite Athenian, decides to go along with a company of 10,000 Greek mercenaries to the Persian Empire. He's not actually in the military, but his friend says 'if you get in good with Cyrus, you'll be in great shape for a career!' and so he goes along. Cyrus is challenging his older brother Artaxerxes for the Persian throne, and he's promised good pay to these mercenaries, who find him to be a pretty good boss. So they march deep into Persian territory, nearly to Babylon, where they engage with the forces of Artaxerxes -- and Cyrus is promptly killed.
So now they're stuck in Persia, a thousand miles from home. Tissaphernes, a Persian satrap, promises them safe conduct, and then murders a lot of the leadership. Xenophon and two other men are elected to lead the company, and they proceed to get their 10,000 men (plus camp followers and all sorts of others) to march through desert and mountain, harassed all the way by enemies, until they get to the Black Sea (this is the famous part where they all cry "The sea! The sea!" -- they're joyful because now they're in Greek colony territory, and maybe they can get ships to take them home).
Their problems are by no means over, because even Greek towns aren't thrilled to have thousands of soldiers march in looking for food. And they discover what winter really means and why Thracians wear long cloaks and closed shoes. And when they do get to the Hellespont, there's a blockage of fifty triremes, so they wind up signing on to fight for a Thracian warlord, Seuthes. At around this point Xenophon goes home, and the soldiers, now about half the original numbers, are eventually absorbed into a larger army under a Spartan general.
This was really interesting to read, and is the earliest 'survival of a soldier' account we have, so I guess Xenophon invented a genre! It's fascinating to see how important it was to keep tight military discipline; on the occasions when that breaks down, it's not just chaos, it's deadly too. At the same time, the Greek method seems to have been to vote on what to do. Over and over, when faced with a problem, people make suggestions and then the soldiers vote. They don't just trust one leader to do all the thinking for them.
Xenophon shows himself as a leader concerned for his soldiers, and gives himself some great speeches, which may make the reader feel understandably skeptical. He's not always popular, though, and sometimes everybody wants to kill him, so he has to do some quick talking.
It's an exciting story, written in a direct manner, so quite fun to read. It's also had a large influence on history and literature! Lots of people have used Xenophon as an inspiration for a story about people trapped in enemy territory. Possibly the most famous one is the strange and goofy 70s book/movie The Warriors, in which a ragtag gang has to make its way through New York City to its home territory of Coney Island.
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