Darius and Parysatis had two sons, of whom Artaxerxes was the elder and Cyrus the younger, and when Darius was ill and suspected that he was dying, he wanted them both by his side . . .
XENOPHON ’s Expedition of Cyrus starts with the beguiling simplicity of a fairy tale. The story Xenophon unfolds is itself beautifully simple—and the most exciting adventure to survive from the ancient world. Xenophon tells the story of a young Persian prince, Cyrus, who rose in revolt in 401 BC against his brother Artaxerxes, the king of Persia, and gathered a large army—among them about thirteen thousand Greek soldiers, including Xenophon himself. Cyrus marched from Sardis (in what is now western Turkey) to Mesopotamia. To the north of Babylon, he finally encountered the royal army and died in an impetuous attack on his brother. The Greek mercenaries in his army were left stranded in the desert a thousand miles from home. When the Persians demanded that they hand over their weapons, the Greeks refused and set off northwards on their long march home. For some days they were shadowed by a section of the Persian army. Their generals were then invited to a conference with the Persians, and seized and killed. It was at this moment of crisis that Xenophon himself rose to prominence. He inspired the despondent Greek soldiers and led them through the mountains of Kurdistan and the snowy Armenian plateau to the sight of ‘The sea! The sea!’, and then along the coast of the Black Sea to the fringes of the Greek world.
The march of Cyrus’ Greek troops—known to posterity as the Ten Thousand—has long been admired. The Greek biographer Plutarch tells the story that Mark Antony, during his own disastrous retreat from Parthia in 36 BC, ‘would often cry out loud “Oh, the Ten Thousand!”, in awe at Xenophon’s men, whose march back from Babylon to the sea had been even longer and who had won their way to safety fighting far greater numbers of enemies’ (Antony 45.12). John Macdonald Kinneir, an early nineteenth-century explorer who travelled through much of the same terrain, thought that the achievement of the Ten Thousand was ‘unparalleled in the annals of war’ and ‘a memorable example of what skill and resolution are able to effect’,1 while a modern archaeologist who also crossed the same formidable mountain passes—‘in the comfort of a modern Land Rover on a modern road from Bitlis to Erzerum in summer’—has written of ‘the almost incredible discipline, high morale and almost superhuman powers of endurance of this force’.2
The Expedition of Cyrus (Greek Anabasis Kyrou—literally Cyrus’ March Up Country) has been admired as much as the march it describes. Xenophon wrote an extraordinarily wide variety of works besides The Expedition of Cyrus: the Cyropaedia, a pseudo-historical account of the upbringing and leadership of the founder of the Persian empire, Cyrus the Great, after whom the prince Xenophon served was named; the Hellenica, a work on contemporary Greek history; the Apology, a version of the defence speech of his one-time mentor Socrates, as well as other philosophical conversations involving Socrates (Memorabilia, Symposium) and the poet Simonides (Hiero) ;the treatises On Hunting and On Horsemanship, and others on household management (the Oeconomicus, another Socratic work), military leadership (the Cavalry Commander) and politics (the Constitution of the Spartans) ;an encomium of the Spartan king Agesilaus; and an economic pamphlet (Ways and Means). At some periods of history his more didactic and philosophical works have been more popular, but for the last two centuries The Expedition of Cyrus has generally been regarded as his masterpiece. It can be enjoyed in its own right as a gripping narrative that offers a glimpse of Greek soldiers encountering a foreign world—hunting gazelle in the desert, stumbling on the almost deserted cities of Nimrud and Nineveh, confronting wild mountain tribes who block their way by rolling rocks down steep slopes, sheltering against the harsh Armenian winter in underground homes while restoring their spirits with the local ‘barley wine’. Xenophon’s narrative also offers a unique insight into the character of a Greek army on the march. We see at first hand the soldiers at leisure, holding athletic competitions amongst themselves. We meet a world marked by the particular forms of Greek religion: vows and sacrifices are frequently made to the gods, seers are constantly consulted, a sneeze is thought to be a favourable omen. This world permeated by the divine is also a world permeated by the particular forms of Greek political life. The propitious sneeze occurs at a meeting where the troops elect their own generals and debate what steps they should take next. The troops manage to create among themselves a sense of common purpose and a readiness to accept discipline, but that hard-won sense of unity comes increasingly to be threatened by internal tensions as they draw nearer to Greece itself. The life of the Greek cities from which these soldiers came was marked by a similar blend of co-operation and rivalry.
Xenophon’s account tells us much about the character of Greek soldiers and of Greek political life, but it also offers insight into a broader human experience. The sense that Xenophon’s narrative is somehow archetypal was well expressed by the French critic and philosopher Hippolyte Taine. Taine found that, just as he first learnt what a battle was like when he read Stendhal’s account of the battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma, so too he felt when he read the retreat of the Ten Thousand that he was ‘learning for the first time what the march of an army is’.3
The Expedition of Cyrus has had an extraordinary afterlife. Xenophon himself was much admired in antiquity. The second-century AD historian Arrian drew from Xenophon the title of his Expedition of Alexander (Anabasis Alexandrou) ; he also imitated Xenophon by writing philosophical memoirs and a work on hunting. Rhetoricians praised the grace and purity of Xenophon’s style (it earned him the names ‘the Attic Muse’ and ‘the Attic bee’—bees were proverbial for elegance) while many other writers of prose history and fiction copied it.
The fame of Xenophon’s account in the modern world comes in large part from its use as a school text. Xenophon’s fairly simple style had always made him a suitable author for beginners in Greek to read, but it was the greater formalization of examinations in the nineteenth century that led to The Expedition of Cyrus becoming entrenched as the school text. In a lecture delivered in the 1850s, John Henry Newman imagined a university interview in which a tutor tests a dim pupil on a single word—’anabasis’. The choice of the Anabasis for this mock-interview allows Newman to have some fun at the poor candidate’s expense (‘now where was Sardis? [Candidate.] In Asia Minor? . . . no . . . it’s an island . . . a pause, then. . .Sardinia’), but it is still a revealing comment on the position Xenophon’s text had gained within the Victorian educational system.4
For many schoolchildren, the way The Expedition of Cyrus was taught made their lessons in Greek uncomfortable. The folklorist Andrew Lang recalled how ‘ten lines of Xenophon, narrating how he marched so many parasangs and took breakfast, do not amount to more than a very unrefreshing sip of Greek. Nobody even tells the boys who Xenophon was, what he did there, and what it was all about. . . . The boys straggle along with Xenophon, knowing not whence or whither.’5 Nonetheless, the school editions that proliferated to help hapless schoolchildren through Xenophon’s text could come to be endowed with the charm of nostalgia. A character in one of George Gissing’s novels recalls ‘the little Oxford edition which I used at school, with its boyish sign-manual on the fly-leaf, its blots and underlinings and marginal scrawls ... a school-book, which, even as a school-book, was my great delight’. He remembers The Expedition of Cyrus as ‘an admirable work of art, unique in its combination of concise and rapid narrative with colour and picturesqueness’: ‘Were this the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to learn the language in order to read it.’6
At the same time as The Expedition of Cyrus established itself in schools, the wild areas through which the Ten Thousand had passed started to be explored by European travellers. Travel writers would often recount dangers similar to the ones that the Ten Thousand had surmounted, and observe with a patronizing fascination how oriental customs had not changed since Xenophon’s day. On one page alone, John Macdonald Kinneir noted that the habit of holding a black cloth before the eyes against the glare of the snow was ‘still practised in Armenia and Koordistan’; that the villages in Armenia were ‘still built in exactly the same manner’; that cattle, men, women, and children ‘all live in the same apartment in this country at the present day’; and that wheat and barley were ‘still cultivated’. Only one thing had changed: Kinneir was struck by Xenophon’s description of barley wine, but he ‘could never discover any liquor of this kind whilst in Armenia’.7
Another sign of the growing fame of Xenophon’s story was that its Greek title, ‘anabasis’, came to be applied to other long marches. Deutsche Anabasis 1918 was the title of a short memoir by a German soldier describing a retreat inland through the Balkans at the end of the First World War. He drew attention to many parallels with the retreat of the Ten Thousand, and concluded with an appeal for the Germans to take heart and prove themselves worthy of the German name: ‘Anabasis means ascent. If German hearts are again strengthened and raised to Duty, Faith, and Honour, then from the collapse the German people will have another great Anabasis: Escape, Ascent, Resurrection!’8 At that same time the appeal of Xenophon’s story was also seen in the ‘Anabasis’ of the Czech Legion in Siberia—an army that had been fighting behind Russian lines against the Austro-Hungarian empire, and then, when it found itself stranded after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, refused a Russian command to disarm and set off towards Vladivostok with the plan of joining the newly formed Czech national army fighting on the Western Front. This Czech Anabasis even had some practical benefits: the achievement was used to promote the Czech claim for a nation state. Xenophon was used to support another battle for freedom at the climax of the evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940, when The Times ran a lead editorial headed ‘ANABASIS’. Here the retreat to Dunkirk was aligned with the retreat of the Ten Thousand, and it was claimed that ‘British soldiers look on blue water as did the Greek army of XENOPHON, whose cry of θ
λαττα, θλαττα! was the climax of the Anabasis, and marked the successful completion of the most famous march of the ancient world’.9 The myth of the Anabasis lives on in the personal narratives of participants in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. One of the first such accounts was entitled The March Up, and said to be ‘inspired by the classic story of the Anabasis’ 10
The heading of the Times editorial reflects the particular appeal of one section of the Ten Thousand’s long trek—the march to the sea. ‘Anabasis’ means a march up country, away from the coast, but at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation the word was used of a retreat to the sea. The achievement of the Greeks in adversity was far more glamorous than Cyrus’ fratricidal ambitions. And no scene in the Greeks’ long march to the sea was more appealing than the climax evoked that day in June 1940—the scene where the Greeks reach a mountain from which they catch sight of the Black Sea:
When the first men got there, a huge cry went up. This made Xenophon and the rearguard think that the van too was under attack from another enemy force . . . But the cry kept getting louder and nearer, as each successive rank that came up began to sprint towards the ever-increasing numbers of those who were shouting out. The more men who reached the front, the louder the cry became, until it was apparent to Xenophon that something of special significance was happening. He mounted a horse, took Lycius and the cavalry, and rode to lend assistance; and before long they could make out that the soldiers were shouting ‘The sea! The sea!’ and passing the word along.
That shout of ‘The sea! The sea!’ (‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’) has become proverbial (it is the only phrase from Xenophon in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations). It gives a ringing start to the second cycle of Heinrich Heine’s North Sea poems: ‘Thalatta! Thalatta! | Greetings to you, o eternal sea! | Greetings to you ten-thousandfold.’ It is evoked towards the start of one of the most renowned twentieth-century novels, James Joyce’s Ulysses, when Buck Mulligan looks out over Dublin Bay: ‘Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta!’ And it has been quoted by writers as diverse as Shelley, Louis MacNeice, and William Carlos Williams, and quoted, too, in many less illustrious works—in poems and articles in Victorian periodicals, in popular romantic novels, in works of travel and adventure. It has been as readily transformed into a symbol of national freedom and of triumph over adversity (as at the time of the retreat to Dunkirk) as into an emblem of the romantic longing for a return to the primal sea.11
It is the apparent simplicity of Xenophon’s narrative as it builds up to the climactic shout of ‘The sea! The sea!’ that has made that shout so appealing to readers of The Expedition of Cyrus. It is dangerous, however, to succumb too readily to the impression of simplicity created by Xenophon’s account. T. E. Lawrence—who saw parallels between himself and Xenophon—knew better when he told George Bernard Shaw that he found The Expedition of Cyrus ‘charming’—but also ‘cunningly full of writing tricks’ and even ‘pretentiously simple’.12 Much as Lawrence’s own Seven Pillars of Wisdom was written at a time when the consequences of his military campaigns in the Middle East during the First World War were controversial, so too Xenophon’s Expedition of Cyrus was written at a time when the exploits of the Ten Thousand and his own role during their retreat were open to debate. To appreciate why he wrote his account as he did we must look in more detail at the goals he had in writing about his adventures in Asia. Like Andrew Lang, we must ask who Xenophon was, what he did there, and what it was all about.
Xenophon
Xenophon was born, probably in the early 420s BC, to a wealthy Athenian family. Little is known either about his father Gryllus, who does not seem to have achieved political prominence at Athens, or about Xenophon’s own early life. We do know, however, that Xenophon was among the well-off young men who associated with the philosopher Socrates, and it is likely that he remained in Athens during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants (404–403 BC), the junta imposed by the Spartans after Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War, and that he fought against the exiled democrats as a cavalryman.
The Expedition of Cyrus is the main source of our knowledge of Xenophon’s life, but it covers only his two exceptional years of service with the Ten Thousand—and it reveals only how Xenophon wanted his role to be perceived. Even so, the account is selective. Xenophon says very little about his experiences during the march up country and the early stages of the retreat. It is only after their generals have been treacherously slain by the Persians that he comes to the fore in the narrative. He reports how he stirred up the dejected soldiers and was elected one of the two commanders of the rearguard. He continued to provide moral and strategic leadership during the march to the sea: as the army encountered one difficulty after another, he would devise ways for the army to get through. Xenophon presents himself as a model leader: accessible, sharing the toils of the common troops, keeping the tired soldiers on the move, even taking the initiative in chopping up firewood. After the Greeks’ arrival in Byzantium, he led the remaining troops during a winter’s campaigning for the Thracian dynast Seuthes and then into service with the Spartans in Asia as they embarked on a campaign against the Persians (399 BC).
Xenophon also included in The Expedition of Cyrus one flashback to his earlier life and one section looking ahead to his later life. The flashback—inserted at the point when Xenophon first rouses up the spirits of the dejected soldiers—tells how he had been invited by Proxenus, a Boeotian guest-friend (xenos), to join Cyrus. Modern scholars tend to suppose that his reasons for accepting the invitation were his distaste for the restored democracy at Athens and his desire for an exciting adventure. What Xenophon himself says is that his ambition was to become a friend (philos) of Cyrus. The Greek term implies that he wanted to enter into a relationship with the Persian prince defined by an ethic of equality and reciprocity, not by service for cash: he insists that he had come along ‘not as a general, nor as a company commander, nor as a soldier’ (3.1.4)—that is, not in one of the positions whose differing rates of pay he has earlier recorded.
Xenophon also reports that he consulted Socrates about his proposed expedition with Cyrus (3.1.5–7). Socrates told him to consult the Delphic oracle to see whether or not he should go, since he ‘thought that friendship with Cyrus might well be actionable in the eyes of the Athenian authorities, because Cyrus was widely believed to have wholeheartedly supported the Spartans in their military operations against the Athenians’. But instead of posing the question Socrates had suggested, Xenophon asked for the names of gods to whom he should sacrifice in order to achieve a successful return.
Socrates’ advice hints that following Cyrus would prove dangerous to Xenophon, and so it turned out. At various points in the march along the Black Sea coast and after the arrival at Byzantium, Xenophon reports that he wanted to return home to Athens, but towards the end of the work he looks ahead to the event that prevented his return—a decree of exile: ‘Xenophon . . . made no secret of the fact that he was getting ready to go home—for there was no sign yet in Athens of any proposal that he should be officially banished’ (7.7.57). It is not, however, certain that it was serving with Cyrus that led to Xenophon’s exile, as Socrates had feared. The date and circumstances of his exile remain controversial. It may be that it was not so much joining Cyrus’ army as marching against Artaxerxes that got Xenophon into trouble. Marching against Artaxerxes could have been held against Xenophon during the early stages of the Corinthian War in Greece (395–387 BC), when the Persians were subsidizing the anti-Spartan coalition, or even before that, when Athens was looking to win Persian help. There remains a third possibility. Xenophon went on to serve with the Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia and to accompany him on his return to Greece in 394 BC. It may have been Xenophon’s presence with Agesilaus at the battle of Coronea in that same year, when the Athenians were part of the anti-Spartan coalition, that led to his exile.13
What happened to Xenophon after his exile emerges from a flash forward placed in The Expedition of Cyrus at the point where the Greeks have reached Cerasus on the Black Sea coast (5.3). At Cerasus it was decided to divide up among the troops the money received from the sale of prisoners captured during the retreat, to set aside a tithe for Apollo and Artemis of Ephesus, and to give this sacred money to the generals for safe keeping. Xenophon then reveals that after his exile he was settled by the Spartans at Scillus, not far from the great panhellenic sanctuary of Olympia, and that with his own portion of the tithe he bought a piece of land for Artemis, built a temple, and founded a festival in her honour.
Many readers have admired the brief vignette Xenophon presents of his life at Scillus: neighbours would come to the festival and feast on the sacrificial victims and on the other goods that the goddess provided, and the young men—Xenophon’s sons among them—would hunt stags and boars. But there also seems to be a hint of nostalgia in Xenophon’s description of his country estate. The description is cast in the Greek imperfect tense. This verbal form could denote recurrent action, but it could also mean that Xenophon was describing a way of life that he was no longer in a position to enjoy. And that suspicion is reinforced by the nostalgic way in which he quotes the inscription he set up at the sanctuary of Artemis. The inscription proclaimed that the possessor of the sacred land should offer a tithe each year to the goddess and keep the temple in good repair, and ‘neglect of these duties will not go unnoticed by the goddess’ (5.3.13).
If there is an elegiac tone in the Scillus description, an explanation lies readily to hand. Xenophon was forced to leave his estate at Scillus at some point after the Spartan defeat at Leuctra in 371 BC. According to some ancient sources, he spent the rest of his life in Corinth, but later in antiquity, at least, the locals at Scillus claimed that Xenophon was buried there. There is no evidence that he ever returned to Athens, though a decree rescinding his exile is attested and his son Gryllus was killed fighting for the Athenian cavalry at the battle of Mantinea in 362 BC. Xenophon himself probably died in the late 350s BC.
Xenophon the man has been admired as much as his works. The eighteenth-century translator Edward Spelman saw him as a ‘universal Man’ whose various works show that he ‘possess’d, in a Sovereign Degree, the Art of Government’, and that he was ‘a compleat General’, ‘an entertaining, an instructive, and a faithful Historian’, ‘an Orator’, ‘a Sportsman’, ‘a Friend and a Philosopher’—and ‘all of them, that he was a good Man’.14 This universal man could also resemble a familiar national stereotype—or so a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement thought in 1930: ‘Xenophon’s Anabasis, made a chopping-block for generations of schoolboys, has served to conceal from many people a noble character—soldier, country gentleman, philosopher, sportsman, in whom, risking a charge of smugness, we may venture to claim a resemblance to a not uncommon English type.’ The book under review, appropriately, was entitled Sport in Classic Times. 15
Not everyone has been so willing to be accused of smugness. Indeed, since the second half of the nineteenth century there has been a strong reaction against idealizations of Xenophon. A common assumption has been that all of his writings are narrowly self-serving. In the case of The Expedition of Cyrus, it has been supposed that he was looking to defend himself against charges brought against his leadership during the retreat.16 The image of Xenophon that emerges from his narrative can appear too good to be true: as Italo Calvino wrote, ‘on occasions Xenophon appears to be one of those heroes from children’s comics, who in every episode appear to survive against impossible odds’.17 Hence the suspicion that Xenophon was trying to manipulate his fellow Athenians, who had exiled him; or the remnants of the Ten Thousand, who had found his leadership a bit rough; or the Spartans, who had difficult dealings with Xenophon and the Ten Thousand on their arrival at Byzantium. Another suggestion is that Xenophon wrote his memoir in order to demonstrate the weakness of the Persian empire and so encourage the Greeks at large to attack the Persians. But even advocates of this view have accused Xenophon of advertising his own military credentials for leadership of a panhellenic expedition.18
Crucial to determining Xenophon’s purpose in writing The Expedition of Cyrus is discovering the date at which he composed the work. Dates have been proposed ranging from the 390s BC, very soon after the events described (it’s so ‘fresh’), to the late 360s or even 35os BC (old men forget the odd river or two).19 The problem is that there is very little evidence within the text that helps determine the date it was written. And in the absence of any such firm data arguments about its date of composition tend to be connected with views about the audience the work was addressed to. Critics who think that Xenophon was promoting a panhellenic expedition often date the work to the early 360s BC, a time when Athens and Sparta were cooperating against Thebes and keen to dissociate the new Arcadian confederacy from Thebes, and when Thebes was looking to Persia for help. It has also been proposed that the work was written in two parts, with the first part written as a protest against the King’s Peace of 386 BC and the second part written to bolster the tottering power of Sparta.20 The nostalgic tone of the Scillus digression does perhaps make a date in the 360s BC the most likely, but this dating does not in itself offer a firm clue as to Xenophon’s intentions in writing his account.
Two pieces of ancient evidence may offer a clue to Xenophon’s aims. The Byzantine lexicographer Stephanus gives four extremely short citations from another Anabasis written by one of the Ten Thousand’s generals, Sophaenetus of Stymphalus. The fragments themselves tell us almost nothing about Sophaenetus’ work. But it has been argued that Sophaenetus’ account was a source for the fourth-century BC historian Ephorus, and through Ephorus for the epitome found in the history of the first-century BC Sicilian Diodorus, where Xenophon is first mentioned, not in the retreat to the sea, but only when the army is in Thrace. Perhaps Xenophon was responding to an earlier account in which his own role had been undervalued.21 It is dangerous, however, to argue that a work about which we know a lot was written in response to a work about which we know very little. It may be noted that no other general in Diodorus plays the role of saviour that Xenophon allots himself—and it is likely in any case that most of Diodorus’ account stems from Xenophon’s own memoir. It is even possible that Sophaenetus did not write an Anabasis at all. It is disturbing that the work is attested only at so late a date. The citations may derive from oral narratives that were preserved in military handbooks. Or perhaps the account of Sophaenetus was a later fiction—a rhetorical exercise produced at a time when Xenophon was an established classic. What better persona to adopt for a rewriting of The Expedition of Cyrus than that of the oldest general—who is presented by Xenophon as overly cautious and tactically weak?22
The other piece of ancient evidence is perhaps the oddest passage in the whole of Xenophon—his summary of Cyrus’ expedition in the Hellenica: ‘How Cyrus collected an army and marched up country against his brother, and how the battle happened, and how he died, and how afterwards the Greeks came through in safety to the sea—this has been written by Themistogenes of Syracuse’ (3.1.2). Why refer to the obscure Themistogenes rather than to his own work? Perhaps because Xenophon published The Expedition of Cyrus under the pseudonym of Themistogenes—an inference that was already made in antiquity by Plutarch (On the Fame of Athens 345 E), who saw the pseudonym as a device used by Xenophon to make his rosy account of his own actions more acceptable.
Some aspects of Xenophon’s self-presentation do not fit well the specific target audiences that have been proposed for The Expedition of Cyrus. If Xenophon was wanting to win a recall to Athens, for instance, it is odd that he stresses how he considered not returning to Athens at all: at one point he planned to found a city on the coast of the Black Sea, and later he was tempted by Seuthes’ offer of some strongholds on the Thracian coast. He also makes no secret of his service with Sparta. And he even says that his friend Proxenus wooed him to go on the expedition by describing Cyrus as ‘more important to him than his homeland’.
On the other hand, it would be a pity to return to the image of Xenophon as country squire, the retired general fondly writing his memoirs. Xenophon was a strikingly innovative writer—one of the great generic experimenters of antiquity. The Expedition of Cyrus itself can claim to be the first known military memoir, but it is also a work that eludes easy classification. It has no formal prologue. Parts of it have contact with geography and ethnography. And while much of it is written from Xenophon’s perspective, it is not formally a memoir at all: Xenophon conceals his authorship by using third-person forms to refer to his own actions during the retreat. Xenophon the man is no easier to pin down than Xenophon the writer. Supposedly a model of conventional Greek values, Xenophon was willing to abandon Athens in favour of Athens’ great enemy, Sparta. Even before that he had been willing to abandon Greece in favour of a Persian prince. How had it come about that this aristocratic Athenian was drawn to serve with a barbarian in a battle for the vast Persian empire?
Cyrus
Cyrus first came into contact with the Greek world in 407 BC, when he was appointed by his father, Darius II, to a special command in western Asia Minor. His arrival proved to be the turning point in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). At the start of the war, the two protagonists, Athens and Sparta, had both sought help from Persia, but the Persians had been reluctant to intervene. The Persians took more interest in the war after the Athenian defeat in Sicily (413 BC). But at first the satrap Tissaphernes was content to play the two sides off against each other. It was only with the arrival of Cyrus that the Persians began supporting one side wholeheartedly: Persian gold financed the Spartan fleet and won the war for Sparta.
As well as a new policy, Cyrus brought with him a new and more charismatic style of leadership. He told the Spartan admiral Lysander that if he used up the money the king had sent for the Spartans he would finance them from his own resources—and that if he used those up too he would even cut up his gold and silver throne (Hellenica 153). Cyrus also overturned Greek assumptions about oriental effeminacy. In his Oeconomicus, Xenophon tells the story that when Lysander met Cyrus at his ‘paradise’ at Sardis (the Persian term includes both gardens and hunting grounds) he noticed that Cyrus was wearing fine clothes, jewellery, and perfume—and was then astonished to discover that this seemingly soft prince had laid out his own garden and planted some of the trees himself (4.20–5).
Cyrus’ keen support for Sparta may have been prompted by his own dynastic ambitions: the Spartans repaid him for his support by backing his bid to overthrow his brother Artaxerxes. Xenophon does not expressly mention this official Spartan support in The Expedition of Cyrus .He does allude to it, however, in the Hellenica, his history of contemporary Greek affairs (3.1.1), and even in The Expedition of Cyrus he mentions the progress and arrival of ships sent by the Spartans (1.2.21, 1.4.2). It is also possible that Clearchus, the exiled Spartan general who Xenophon says was the only one of the generals who knew that Cyrus was planning to attack the king, was acting with the support of the Spartan authorities.
The Spartans’ victory in the Peloponnesian War made them willing to help Cyrus when the request came. Cyrus may also have been encouraged to strike when he did by a revolt against Persian rule in Egypt. But why did Cyrus rebel against Artaxerxes in the first place? Unlike some other sources, Xenophon does not mention any dispute about the inheritance of the Persian throne itself. The story Xenophon presents is a story about suspicion. When Darius fell ill, he summoned Cyrus back home. When Darius died and Artaxerxes became king, Tissaphernes spread allegations that Cyrus was plotting against his brother, and Artaxerxes had Cyrus arrested. His fear turned out to be self-fulfilling: as soon as Cyrus’ mother won him his release, Cyrus resolved never to put himself in his brother’s power again and began to make preparations for his great march inland.
Xenophon’s account of the origins of the quarrel between the two brothers prepares for the stress on suspicion found later in the work. He brings out later the mutual suspicion between the Greek and Persian armies after Cyrus’ death, and also the tensions that arose between the Ten Thousand and the Greek cities along the Black Sea coast confronted by their sudden arrival. An atmosphere of uncertainty also pervades the account of the Ten Thousand’s dealings with the Spartans after their arrival at Byzantium.
A sense of the fraternal hatred underlying Cyrus’ ambitions does emerge at some points in Xenophon’s account. During the march towards Babylon, when the royal army has still not appeared and Cyrus is asked if he thinks his brother will fight him, Cyrus replies: ‘If he really is the son of Darius and Parysatis, if he really is my brother, I won’t gain this empire without a fight’ (1.7.9). In the battle that soon follows, Cyrus launches a direct assault on his brother with the words ‘I see him!’ (1.8.26). Cyrus’ brazen acknowledgement of his fratricidal desires has something of the chilling quality of Eteocles’ decision to fight his brother Polynices in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. But while the later historian Diodorus of Sicily made a passing comparison between Cyrus’ fight with his brother and the tragic fratricide of Oedipus’ sons (14.23.6), Xenophon’s account does not focus the reader’s attention on the moral problems of fratricide.
The prize at stake in Cyrus’ impetuous attack on his brother is best revealed by some words of encouragement that Cyrus delivers to the Greek soldiers: ‘My father’s empire extends south to a region where men cannot live because of the heat and north to a region where they cannot live because of the cold. All the territories between these two extremes are governed by my brother’s friends, but if I’m victorious, I am bound to put my friends in charge of them’ (1.7.6–7). Those words—for all their hyperbole—capture well the Greeks’ perception of the vast extent of the Persian empire—the largest empire known to the Greeks up to that time.
The Persian empire had expanded rapidly under the rule of Cyrus the Great (559–530 BC). He defeated the Medes and Lydians, conquered Babylon, and expanded Persian rule in the east towards modern Afghanistan. His conquest of the Lydians brought under his sway the Greek cities in Asia Minor which had been subjected by the Lydian king Croesus. Cyrus’ son Cambyses extended the empire further by conquering Egypt in 525 BC. Cambyses’ death was followed by some political disorder which was resolved when Darius seized power and founded the Achaemenid dynasty (Darius sought to connect his own family with Cyrus’ by claiming a common ancestor, Achaemenes). Darius’ reign saw the first major clashes between Greeks and Persians. The Greek cities in Ionia revolted from Persian rule in 499 BC. They received help from Athens, and in the course of one expedition inland the residential parts of the satrapal capital Sardis were burnt. Darius sought revenge by sending an expedition against mainland Greece, but his army was defeated by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 BC. His son Xerxes sent a larger expedition ten years later which was defeated at sea at Salamis (480 BC) and on land at Plataea (479 BC). The Persians made no more attempts against mainland Greece but they retained control of the Greek cities in Asia Minor.
The promises Cyrus made to his Greek followers came to nothing when he was killed at Cunaxa. Xenophon seems to put some of the blame on Cyrus’ own rashness in the heat of battle. More controversial is an incident at the start of the battle. Cyrus’ Greek hoplites (heavily armed troops) were positioned on the right of the battle line, next to the Euphrates and well away from the Persian king who was in the centre of the royal army outflanking the left wing of Cyrus’ army. Cyrus ordered the Greek general Clearchus to lead the Greeks across the battlefield directly against the king, but Clearchus refused, afraid that they would be encircled. Already in antiquity he was criticized for his refusal (Plutarch, Artaxerxes 8.3–7)—but many have thought his caution justified.
It is tempting to speculate on what would have happened had Cyrus won the day at Cunaxa. The historian J. B. Bury presented an alarming picture of what the dynamic Cyrus would have been able to achieve: ‘Perhaps the stubborn stupidity of Clearchus on the field of Cunaxa . . . saved Hellas from becoming a Persian satrapy’—but thanks to Cyrus’ death Greece was ‘little affected by the languid interventions of Artaxerxes’.23 Bury’s speculation is tainted both by the lingering appeal of orientalism and by his reliance on Xenophon’s characterization of Cyrus. The image of Persia as weak and effeminate derives from contemporary Greek sources driven more by ideology than by reality, and the praise Xenophon heaps on Cyrus in his obituary notice is no more reliable.
The problem with Xenophon’s panegyric of Cyrus is that it justifies his own decision to leave Greece and follow Cyrus. There is a strong element of apology in the claim that ‘of all the successors of Cyrus the Elder, no Persian was a more natural ruler and none more deserved to rule’ (1.9.1). Xenophon substantiates this claim by stressing Cyrus’ skill at handling horses and at archery and javelin—traditional Persian pursuits—and his maintenance of order through harsh punishments (‘one could often see, by the side of busy roads, people who had lost feet, hands, or eyes’). He also praises Cyrus’ generosity and fair-mindedness in distributing gifts—a practice that struck several other Greek observers of the Persian monarchy: ‘No single individual, in my opinion, ever received more gifts than he did . . . but he gave them away again, chiefly to his friends, taking into consideration each individual’s character.’ Xenophon praised Cyrus further in his Oeconomicus, where he makes Socrates claim that vast numbers of people deserted from the king to Cyrus but that no one deserted from Cyrus to the king—a claim that is not borne out by The Expedition of Cyrus. In fact, one of the reasons for Cyrus’ failure was that he did not receive the backing of the Persian nobility.
There may be more than meets the eye to Xenophon’s obituary of Cyrus. The traditional aspects of the Persian education, according to Herodotus, were learning to ride, to shoot, and to tell the truth (1.136). Xenophon, as we have seen, attributes to Cyrus the first two qualities—but not truth-telling. And in his narrative it emerges that Cyrus first told the Greek soldiers that he was planning to lead them against the Pisidians, a troublesome mountain tribe in Asia Minor, and later, when it became clear that the Pisidians could not be his aim, that he was leading them against a rebel on the Euphrates. It was only when the Greeks had gone too far to turn back that he revealed that he was leading them to Babylon. Cyrus is presented as a clever manipulator.
Xenophon’s portrayal of a manipulative Cyrus may also have an apologetic aspect. He states that the real object of Cyrus’ expedition was known to only one of the Greeks—the general Clearchus. Diodorus, by contrast, says that all the generals knew that Cyrus was leading the Greeks against the king. Xenophon could be offering a defence of his conduct to the Athenians, who may have exiled him for marching against Artaxerxes. But Xenophon was not in any case one of the original generals—and it may be true that Clearchus was the only Greek in Cyrus’ confidence. There is a certain plausibility to Xenophon’s shrewd account. Cyrus’ manipulation is more than matched by the manipulation of Clearchus himself, who pretends to have the Greeks’ welfare at heart while all the time serving his own and Cyrus’ interests.
A different image of Cyrus is found in a passage interpolated in Xenophon’s Hellenica (2.1.8–9) and perhaps derived from the sensational Persica (Persian Affairs) of the Greek doctor Ctesias. This passage claims that Cyrus once killed two of his cousins because they did not push their hands through the korē (a kind of long sleeve) when they met him—an honour normally reserved for the king alone; and that Cyrus’ father feigned illness and summoned him back to court because of this ruthless act of violence. The Cyrus Xenophon presents also assumes the prerogatives of the Persian king, but he does not behave with conspicuous villainy. It is not necessarily the case, however, that the image of Cyrus as a reckless murderer is more true to the real Cyrus than Xenophon’s largely flattering picture. Ctesias—who was present with the Persian king at the battle of Cunaxa—had as good a reason to damn Cyrus as Xenophon had to praise him. The real Cyrus remains impossible to recapture.
While it seems fruitless to speculate on what would have happened to the Greek world had Cyrus defeated his brother, Cyrus’ expedition did turn out to have important and unexpected consequences for relations between Greece and Persia. Seventy years later the Persian empire fell to the invasion of Alexander the Great, and when later Greek writers looked back to explain Alexander’s success they tended to start by praising the remarkable achievements of the Greek soldiers Cyrus had enlisted—the famous Ten Thousand.
The Ten Thousand
The title of Xenophon’s work, The Expedition of Cyrus, applies properly only to the first of its seven books. It is at the end of the first book that Cyrus is defeated at the battle of Cunaxa. His Greek mercenaries are victorious in their part of the field, however, and the rest of the work traces their fortunes after they have been left stranded by Cyrus’ death.
The fourth-century BC Athenian orator Isocrates used the performance of the Ten Thousand at the battle of Cunaxa as proof of the weakness of the Persian empire: ‘Everyone agrees that they won as complete a victory in battle over all the forces of the king as if they had come to blows with their womenfolk, but that at the very moment when they seemed to be masters of the field they failed of success, owing to the impetuosity of Cyrus’ (5.90). More commonly, it was what happened after the battle that was taken as proof of Persian weakness: Polybius, the second-century BC historian of the rise of Rome, claimed that the origin of Alexander’s war against Persia lay in ‘the retreat of the Greeks under Xenophon from the upper satrapies, in which, though they traversed the whole of Asia, a hostile country, none of the barbarians ventured to face them’ (3.6.10).
The achievements of Cyrus’ Greek mercenaries were not uncontroversial. In another work, the Panegyricus (composed in 380 BC), Isocrates referred to these soldiers as ‘six thousand Greeks who were not picked troops, but men who, owing to circumstances, were unable to live in their own countries’ (4.146). It suited Isocrates’ purpose to lower both the number and the social standing of the troops who accompanied Cyrus: by stating that they were fewer than they in fact were and by stressing their lowly status, he could make their achievement in escaping from Mesopotamia more striking and the weakness of Persia more blatant. But Isocrates’ comments also reflect a growing anxiety about the use of mercenaries in the fourth century BC. Mercenaries became more important as campaigns became longer, as military skills became more specialized, and as the system of alliances fostered by the bipolar world of the fifth century started to fall apart. At the same time, the use of mercenaries was lamented by political thinkers who thought that their growing importance marked a decline from the old polis morality under which cities were defended by their own citizens, not by paid troops.
Xenophon himself was alive to the potential hostility aroused by mercenary service. As we have seen, he was keen to define his own position in the army in terms of the ethic of reciprocity: he went to Asia to become Cyrus’ friend, not for the sake of the cash payments received by the ordinary soldiers. But it is not just his own service with Cyrus that he defends. When he relates how he considered founding a city on the shores of the Black Sea, he makes a broader claim about the motivations of Cyrus’ Greek soldiers. He explains that most of the troops wanted to return home rather than settle by the Black Sea, as they ‘had set sail and undertaken this mercenary service not because they were hard up, but because they had heard of Cyrus’ magnanimity’ (6.4.8). Xenophon seems here to be responding to the attacks made on the Ten Thousand by Isocrates (and doubtless by others).24
How plausible is Xenophon’s defence of the quality of the Ten Thousand? The size and timing of Cyrus’ expedition make it tempting to assume that he was able to enlist so many Greek mercenaries because the long and destructive Peloponnesian War had recently ended. Was Cyrus exploiting a sudden availability of soldiers from cities afflicted by the war? Almost two-thirds of his hoplites came from the relatively poor regions of Arcadia and Achaea in the Peloponnese. Xenophon does not, however, specifically state why many of the troops decided to serve with Cyrus. There were troops who were escaping trouble at home: the Spartan Dracontius ‘had been banished from his home while still a boy for having accidentally stabbed another boy with his dagger and killed him’ (4.8.25). Another Spartan who could not have considered returning home was the exiled general Clearchus—but he was long dead by the time the army reached the Black Sea. Xenophon’s comment about the motivation of the troops who sailed out to join Cyrus must be an over simplification. There were in any case many members of the Ten Thousand who came originally from mainland Greece, but who were already serving as mercenaries in Asia Minor when Cyrus recruited them. These troops were following a long tradition of mercenary service in Asia Minor. The sixth-century Lesbian poet Alcaeus refers to his brother serving in Asia, and sizeable forces are attested in Persian service in the fifth century (in 440 BC the Samians were provided with seven hundred Greek mercenaries by the satrap Pissuthnes).
Even the troops who were enlisted in Asia Minor may not have been driven to mercenary service by extreme poverty or by the effects of the Peloponnesian War. Arcadia and Achaea had not been hit particularly hard by the war, and Arcadians were famous for mercenary service even before Cyrus’ expedition. It has been estimated that at least 8 per cent of the adult male population of Arcadia was serving with Cyrus.25 This proportion does not reflect a sudden crisis at the end of the fifth century, but a conscious decision by families within Arcadia to raise sons in the expectation that some of them would go abroad to serve as mercenaries.
The conditions of service also suggest that the mercenaries were not driven by extreme poverty. A recent study concludes that ‘the hoplites who took service with Cyrus were in large part from the hoplite class in their own community, trained as hoplites at home and probably able to supply their own equipment’.26 Many of them were also wealthy enough to bring servants with them to carry their equipment. The rate of pay was not particularly high by comparison with the known rates of pay for other types of employment, though pay was at least given for each day of service. The troops also had to buy food for themselves and for their servants from local villages or from the merchants who accompanied the expedition. They were sometimes allowed to plunder slaves as well as other goods, and one or two of them enjoyed windfalls—the seer Silanus, who was rewarded by Cyrus for a correct prophecy with a gift of 3,000 darics, or the general Timasion, who acquired an expensive Persian carpet.
Xenophon’s claim that the troops who sailed out were eager to return home is not borne out by his narrative. Some—like the wealthy Silanus—certainly did want to return home. Others slipped away from the army but not necessarily in order to go home. The majority of the survivors were happy to join the Spartans at the end of the expedition—to resume a career of mercenary service in Asia Minor.
Why did Cyrus decide to hire so many Greek hoplites (10,600 in all) for his great march up country? Early in The Expedition of Cyrus, Xenophon illustrates the advantages of hoplites in a striking scene that the American historian V. D. Hanson chose as the epigraph of his 2001 bestseller Why the West has Won. Cyrus wants to display his troops before the wife of the ruler of Cilicia. He holds a review in the plain and orders the Greeks to form up as if for battle. The hoplites line up, each equipped with a spear for thrusting, a sword, a round wooden shield faced with bronze, a bronze helmet, greaves, and body-covering. As Cyrus inspects the Greeks, he stops his chariot in the middle of their line and orders the whole line to advance with weapons raised for battle. The trumpet sounds, and the Greeks raise their spears and advance. They quicken their pace and start shouting, and then keep on running towards the assembled crowd. Cyrus’ other troops are all afraid, and the wife of the Cilician ruler even flees in her covered carriage. Finally the Greeks return to their tents, laughing. The scene is a paradigmatic display of hoplite warfare. The troops are on level ground—classic hoplite terrain. As they cross the plain, the troops maintain cohesion as they shout and charge in line—a terrifying spectacle for troops who are more lightly armed.
The display the Greeks put on for Cyrus is not a demonstration of every aspect of hoplite warfare. The authors of The March Up (the account of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, mentioned earlier) praise the Ten Thousand as ‘tough characters bound by an unflinching warrior code’ who ‘hacked their way through every army that challenged them’; in the Roman army, by contrast, ‘manoeuver replaced the headlong charge’.27 This historical overview does not do justice to Xenophon’s text. Throughout their retreat the Ten Thousand proved able to adapt to the difficult terrain that confronted them. At one point they organized small mobile units to fill gaps as the line contracted and expanded. On another occasion they formed in columns rather than in a broad line, and spaced out the columns to outflank the enemy and to cope with the roughness of the ground.
The image of the Ten Thousand hacking their way through hostile armies also ignores the presence of many non-hoplites in their number. In addition to the hoplites, Cyrus hired 2,300 of the lightly armed troops known as peltasts. Peltasts carried light, crescent-shaped wicker shields, long javelins, and short swords. They tended to come from mountainous areas on the fringes of the Greek world, and were far more mobile than hoplites in mountainous terrain. Another sign of the variety of troops within the Ten Thousand are the two hundred Cretan archers whom Clearchus hired on Cyrus’ behalf. The value of variety was further shown when a volunteer force of slingers was constituted from the Rhodian contingent in the army. Throughout the retreat, it was ‘the integrated operation of the different elements in the expedition’—together with the skill with which they were deployed—that enabled the Ten Thousand to fight through to the sea.28
Xenophon often alludes to the Ten Thousand as ‘the Greeks’, but it emerges at some moments in his account that there were non-Greeks (‘barbarians’, to use the Greek term) among them. Among the troops enlisted by Clearchus, for instance, were eight hundred Thracian peltasts. Three hundred of this troop deserted to the king soon after the battle of Cunaxa and so did not take part in the retreat to the sea, but a stirring vignette soon before the army arrives at the sea makes it clear that the Ten Thousand contained other non-Greeks apart from those Thracians. The army finds itself confronted by a deep ravine with hostile troops on the opposite bank. They can see no way forward—until a peltast who had once been a slave at Athens approaches Xenophon and says that he can recognize the language the men across the ravine are talking: ‘I think . . . that this is my native land’ (4.8.4). This peltast has come home to the land of his fellow Macronians. He is able to negotiate a safe passage for the army, but what happened to him afterwards Xenophon does not reveal.
It is not just the non-Greek element among the Ten Thousand that Xenophon tends to neglect. He also pays little attention to the camp followers—who included many women. The only women who appear as individuals are two bedmates of Cyrus who are taken prisoner at the battle of Cunaxa when Cyrus’ camp falls into the king’s hands (one of them manages to escape, naked, back to the Greeks). Elsewhere Xenophon mentions how some soldiers sneak gifts for a good-looking boy or woman, how the women join in the cry at a favourable sacrifice, and how some of the tribesmen along the Black Sea want to have sex with the women—in public.29
Xenophon’s stress on the Greekness of the army and his neglect of the camp followers is ideological. At stake in the experience of the stranded soldiers is the sense of what it is to be a Greek. At a meeting of the surviving officers after the murder of five of the generals, a man named Apollonides, who speaks in the Boeotian dialect, insists that they must try to win the favour of the king. When Xenophon breaks in and calls him ‘an embarrassment not just to his homeland but to the whole of Greece’, he is told that this man ‘doesn’t belong in Boeotia or anywhere in Greece’, since ‘he has both ears pierced, Lydian-style’—and ‘this was true’ (3.1.30–1). Apollonides is then driven away from the meeting. As with the Macronian peltast, Xenophon does not tell what happened to Apollonides afterwards. He has served his role—as a scapegoat who serves to unify the remaining officers and to define the masculinity of the Greeks by contrast with the supposedly effeminate Lydians.
Xenophon’s representation of the Ten Thousand has often been seen as having a practical aim. As we have seen, their performance at Cunaxa and during the retreat was thought in the Greek world to have shown the weakness of Persia and to have paved the way for the conquests of Alexander. Xenophon himself was aware that the performance of the Ten Thousand could be used to highlight the possibility of an attack on Persia. In his Hellenica he claims that the Spartan admiral Lysander and the ambitious tyrant Jason of Pherae drew inspiration from their achievements (3.4.2, 6.1.12). Did he write The Expedition of Cyrus to promote a different sort of expedition—a united Greek expedition against the old enemy?30
There is much in Xenophon’s account that could be taken to support a grand panhellenic scheme. The military skill of the Greek mercenaries is stressed. They are unbeaten at Cunaxa, they refuse to submit to the king’s demand that they hand over their weapons, they overcome all the obstacles that lie in their way, they get through to the sea. At one point Isocrates’ claim that the Greeks’ victory at Cunaxa was as easy as if it had been a battle against women is given a slight twist: at a banquet amongst the Paphlagonians, one of the army’s slave-girls does a dance with a light shield, and ‘the Paphlagonians asked whether the women fought alongside them, and the Greeks said that these were the very women who had put the king to flight from his camp’ (6.1.13). Many of the speeches inserted by Xenophon—including some spoken by Xenophon himself—contain appeals to the Greek spirit and to the memory of earlier Greek victories against Persia. In one of his speeches Xenophon even raises the possibility that the army could settle in Mesopotamia and live independently of Persian rule—but he goes onto warn:
I’m afraid that once we’ve become accustomed to a life of idleness and luxury, and to the company of Median and Persian women and girls, who are tall and beautiful, we’ll become as oblivious of our homeward journey as the lotus-eaters were. So I think it right and proper that our main efforts should be put towards getting back to Greece and our families, so that we can prove to the Greeks that their poverty is self-inflicted. They could bring here those who are now living a hard life there and watch them prosper. (3.2.25–6)
The opposition between poor, virtuous Greeks and luxurious, decadent easterners is found in contemporary panhellenic discourse. But Xenophon is not actively promoting a scheme of colonization in Mesopotamia: he is warning of the danger that the Greeks, too, could be softened by the abundant natural resources of the region. Underlying his warning is the concept of environmental determinism elaborated in Herodotus and in the Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places.
Crucial to the issue of Xenophon’s attitude towards panhellenism is his presentation of the workings of the Ten Thousand as a political unit. Cyrus’ Greek mercenaries have often been celebrated as a walking city, a polis on the march. Hippolyte Taine saw the army as a ‘sort of Athens wandering in the middle of Asia’.31 Edward Gibbon was similarly effusive: ‘Instead of tamely resigning themselves to the secret deliberations and private views of a single person, the united councils of the Greeks were inspired by the generous enthusiasm of a popular assembly: where the mind of each citizen is filled with the love of glory, the pride of freedom, and the contempt of death.’32This united and democratic force would seem to have the right qualities for an assault on Persia. Was Xenophon presenting a model of the type of army required to fulfil the panhellenic dream?
Xenophon does not consistently portray the army as a polis on the march. The Ten Thousand were not originally a united force, but a collection of smaller units. Cyrus carefully tried to avoid suspicion by raising small groups in different areas. His garrison commanders in Asia Minor hired troops as if for use against the satrap Tissaphernes, who was contesting with Cyrus control over the Ionian cities. Clearchus raised troops in the Thracian Chersonese, while another section came from Thessaly. During the march with Cyrus, there were tensions among the leaders of the different contingents—above all, Clearchus and Meno—as they vied to win Cyrus’ favour. The first assembly held by the army increased those tensions as many troops decided to desert their original leaders and serve under Clearchus. Nor is Xenophon uncritical of the way the large military assemblies formed decisions: at this first assembly Clearchus used deceit to persuade the army to carry on with Cyrus.
It is after the death of the generals that the political capabilities of the army are seen in their best light. Xenophon uses speech to good effect to persuade the troops that their position is not hopeless, and the army elects new generals to replace the ones who have been lost. Xenophon claims, however, that it was thanks to his own insistence and encouragement that the remaining captains and generals decided to convene a meeting of the whole army. And no further meetings take place as the army fights its way to the coast. Strategic and tactical decisions are made by the generals.
The Ten Thousand most resemble a walking city when they arrive at the Black Sea coast and start negotiating with the Greek cities and the tribes along the coast. But the picture Xenophon paints of this walking city is far from positive. The appeals to Greek identity made in speeches stand in tension with the army’s increasingly difficult dealings with the Greek cities along the coast and with the imperial power of Sparta. Near the city of Cerasus some of the troops attack some local traders, kill their envoys, and pursue into the sea a market official and some of the other local Greeks. Those who cannot swim drown. Free of the danger of the interior, the soldiers give in to greed and indiscipline. At one point they even decide to elect a single leader because they think it will lead to swifter decision-making—and to more profit for themselves. They also quarrel among themselves: an Arcadian group splits off from the main army and has to be rescued by Xenophon. The position does not improve when the Spartans are persuaded by the local Persian satrap to transport the army across the Bosporus: the Ten Thousand are only prevented from sacking Byzantium by a cunning speech from Xenophon, and then Xenophon himself falls under suspicion and narrowly escapes arrest and execution at the Spartans’ hands.
The increasing pessimism of the final books of The Expedition of Cyrus militates against simple interpretations of the text as a panhellenic tract. Xenophon’s romantic adventure story turns out to be a powerfully analytical work. Xenophon explores how order is created in the army—and how that order disintegrates. His analysis of the fragility of the attempt to create order recalls the concerns of some of his other works: the Hellenica closes with Greece in a worse state of confusion than ever before, and the Cyropaedia and the Constitution of the Spartans both end with controversial codas which trace the decline of once solid social institutions.
The Expedition of Cyrus does not sit altogether well with the triumphalist readings that have been thrust on the exploits of the Ten Thousand. A rather different approach is suggested in a short essay on The Expedition of Cyrus by Italo Calvino. Calvino stresses not the triumph of the Greeks’ arrival at the sea, but their sense of isolation when they are stranded far from home. When they agreed to serve with Cyrus they had not imagined that they would ever find themselves cut off so far from the sea. Somehow they have to find a way out even if it means harming people who have done them no wrong. Isolated in an alien landscape, this ancient army becomes, in Calvino’s vision, an emblem of modernity:
The Greek army, creeping through the mountain heights and fjords amidst constant ambushes and attacks, no longer able to distinguish just to what extent it is a victim or an oppressor, and surrounded even in the most chilling massacres of its men by the supreme hostility of indifference or fortune, inspires in the reader an almost symbolic anguish which perhaps only we today can understand.33