THE PERSIAN EXPEDITION
ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE
XENOPHON was an Athenian country gentleman born in the early 420s BC. He may have helped to publish Thucydides’ History and certainly wrote his own Hellenica, also known as A History of My Times, as a continuation of it. By his own (probably reliable) account he was a fine officer and outstanding leader, but his admiration for Sparta and devotion to Socrates, among other causes, led to his banishment. He was given an estate at Scillus, near Olympia, and settled down to enjoy the life of a landed aristocrat under Spartan protection, and it was during this period that he began to write histories, biographies, memoirs and specialist treatises. Events forced him to move to Corinth in 371, but he was allowed to return to Athens in 365, where he lived until his death in the late 350s.
REX WARNER was a Professor of the University of Connecticut from 1964 until his retirement in 1974. He was born in 1905 and went to Wadham College, Oxford, where he gained a ‘first’ in Classical Moderations, and took a degree in English Literature. He taught in Egypt and England, and was Director of the British Institute, Athens, from 1945 to 1947. He wrote poems, novels and critical essays, worked on films and broadcasting, and translated many works, of which Xenophon’s History of my Times, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and Plutarch’s Lives (under the title Fall of the Roman Republic) and Moral Essays have been published in Penguin Classics. Rex Warner died in 1986.
GEORGE CAWKWELL is a Fellow Emeritus of University College, Oxford. He has specialized in the history of Greece from the sixth to the fourth century BC.
THE PERSIAN EXPEDITION
TRANSLATED BY
REX WARNER
With an Introdudion
and Notes by
GEORGE CAWKWELL
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1949
Reprinted with Introduction and Notes by G. Cawkwell, 1972
25
Translation copyright 1949 by Rex Warner
Introduction and Notes copyright © George Cawkwell, 1972
All rights reserved
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9780141909387
| CONTENTS | |
| INTRODUCTION | |
| TRANSLATOR’S NOTE | |
| MAP | |
| 1 | THE KING’S MESSENGER |
| 2 | THE GREEKS JOIN ARIAEUS |
| 3 | THE GREEKS SIGN A TREATY WITH TISSAPHERNES |
| 4 | THE MARCH BEGINS WITH MUTUAL SUSPICION |
| 5 | TISSAPHERNES’ TREACHERY |
| 6 | CHARACTERS OF THE FIVE GENERALS |
| 1 | XENOPHON TAKES THE INITIATIVE |
| 2 | THE COUNCIL OF WAR |
| 3 | THE GREEKS SUFFER FROM SLINGS AND ARROWS |
| 4 | TISSAPHERNES STILL IN PURSUIT |
| 5 | BETWEEN THE TIGRIS AND THE MOUNTAINS |
Byzantium, Thrace and Asia Minor
| GLOSSARY OF NAMES |
| INDEX |
INTRODUCTION
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.
It would be otiose to say more. The Anabasis contains such varied matter that again and again one’s interest is aroused. In the hands of the gifted teacher it can be a most useful instrument, but even without such guidance the attentive reader cannot fail to understand the Greeks better by the time he returns with Xenophon to Ionia. Nor is he likely to have found the long journey tedious.
The story begins in spring 401 B.C. Greece is at last free from the long agony of the Peloponnesian War. The Athenian empire is ended. The Spartans have liberated Greece and are firmly in control. The young prince, Cyrus, brother of the newly acceded Artaxerxes II, is bent on seizing the throne for himself, and he is not without friends. Sparta, who owes to him and his subsidies her ultimate success in the war, can be counted on and there are a multitude of individuals who are looking for employment or hoping for rich reward at his hands. The long march and the short life of Cyrus come to an abrupt halt on the battlefield of Cunaxa not far from Babylon in September 401, and the Greeks in Cyrus’ army are faced with submitting to the King or marching home. They choose the latter, and braving Kurds and the fearsome rigours of winter in the Armenian highlands return in summer 400 to the Hellespont, only to find that Sparta has no use or indeed liking for them, and another bitter winter has to be passed in Thrace before a change of Spartan policy finds them employment in spring 399 helping to defend the liberty of the Greeks of Asia. One of them was a young man from Athens called Xenophon.
Of the life of Xenophon we know very little beyond what we can glean from his own writings.1 He was born in the early years of the Peloponnesian War into the wealthy class of the Knights, whose devotion to the democracy was always suspect, and in his teens he must have been much stirred by the ruinous failure of the Sicilian expedition followed shortly by the brief but violent oligarchic revolution of 411, which showed how greatly dissatisfied men of Xenophon’s kind were with the operation of democracy. Nor in the sequel was there anything to endear to him the Athenian way of life. Dissuaded from coming to terms with Sparta after the great naval victory of Cyzicus (410), the people continued on their dizzy course, exiling their ablest statesman and soldier, Alcibiades, for whom Xenophon in his History of Greece (I.4.13 f.) was to indicate sympathy, and condemning to death by illegal process, despite the opposition of Xenophon’s master Socrates, all the generals who had just won the victory of Arginusae (406), Xenophon again showing his sympathies by the space he accorded to their defence (H.G.I.7.16f.). To a man of such persuasion, the defeat of Aegospotami (405), the sufferings brought by the Spartan blockade of Athens, and finally unconditional surrender (404) must have been the nemesis of folly, and Xenophon, who had probably, to judge by the detail of his account of a cavalry action in Ionia in 410 (H.G.I.2.If.), already played his part in the cavalry in the war, may have joined those Knights who supported the so-called Thirty, harsh rulers in harsh times. Whatever he thought in 403 of the death throes of this revolution, Xenophon could have felt no enthusiasm for staying on in Athens after the restoration. The Knights shared in the common pardon, but remained suspect (H.G.111.1.4.) It was time for a young man with a taste for war and a distaste for democracy to be off. When in early 401 he was invited by Proxenus the Boeotian to join him in the army of Cyrus, Xenophon, pious man that he was, put a leading question to the Delphic oracle and went (III.1.4f.). He had hopes of Cyrus but no hopes of Athens. He would rather live anywhere else, even in a colony far from Greece (V.6.15f.).
For what he did from spring 401 when he set off from Sardis under Cyrus, until spring 399 when he joined the Spartan army under Thibron in Ionia, the Anabasis provides his full account, but apart from what he tells us in the fifth book (ch. 3) about his return to Greece in 394 with Agesilaus, who broke the resistance of the Boeotian army at Coronea on the highway south, and his settlement on an estate at Scillus near Olympia by favour of the Spartans, we have to guess his movements for thirty years from the vividness of parts of his History of Greece which betokens eye-witness. Guesses remain guesses, but it is likely enough that he was continuously in Spartan service from 399 to 394, and at first still commanding the remnants of the Ten Thousand (cf. H.G.III.2.7). He did not immediately meet with Spartan approval. The ill repute which had preceded the Ten Thousand in their return march secured them less than a welcome for heroes, and Xenophon as their commander was held responsible. Thibron indeed, before he took him into his service, had even been reported as intending to have him executed (VII.6.43f.), and suspicions of Xenophon died hard. When Thibron was recalled and exiled for allowing his army to plunder his allies, Spartans did not have to wonder which part of his army could be to blame (H.G.III. 1.8, & 2.7), but Xenophon found the new commander Dercyllidas more congenial, and when in spring 396 King Agesilaus arrived with a new army Xenophon’s troubles were over. To Agesilaus, would-be leader of a new crusade of Greece against Persia and of a new Anabasis, Xenophon promptly accorded his life-long admiration, receiving in return the honour of a lifelong intimacy. The friendship in fact shaped the rest of Xenophon’s life. There had been a black moment in 400/399 when Xenophon had even thought of going home to Athens (VII.7.57), but that course was no longer open to him by the time Agesilaus came on the scene; he had by then been exiled from Athens2 and so depended wholly on the Spartans who ruled Greece. Agesilaus did not fail friends. Xenophon was given the estate at Scillus and established as one of the ‘best men’, as the Greeks put it, of the Peloponnese. As such, he did his stint of military service – the precision of his account of various campaigns would later attest it – but after the King’s Peace (386) he could settle down to enjoy the idyllic life he touches on in the third chapter of Book V, the life of the landed aristocrat – festivals, hospitality, hunting, and, what he does not mention there, freedom from ‘troublesome demagogues’ (H.G.V.2.7). Like the typical Peloponnesian gentleman, he looked to Sparta as the inspiration of the good life, and sent his sons there for the best education that he deemed Greece could offer; he visited the city at its chief festivals; he was entertained by Agesilaus, meeting in his company along with other aristocratic clients from all over the Peloponnese the leading Spartans. At the Olympic festival, he was well placed to return hospitality, and we may picture him and his guests nodding sage approval of the Panhellenic speeches, of which Isocrates’ Panegyric (380) is the most notable instance. Altogether it was a time of happiness, and of leisure to reflect and to begin to write. Tasks were not lacking – the completion of Thucydides’ Histories (H.G.I-II.3.10), a Xenophontic contribution, drawing on his memories and his reading, to the ever-growing Socratic literature (the so-called Memorabilia), a delineation of virtue as embodied in the person of the founder of the Persian Empire (the Education of Cyrus). Xenophon must have been as busy as he was happy.
The catastrophic defeat of Sparta at Leuctra (371) changed all that. The whole Peloponnese was in ferment, and in 370 the Eleans seized Scillus. Xenophon was ejected from his estate and went to Corinth, where he lived for the rest of his life, as we learn from Diogenes Laertius (2.56), a most significant fact. He had. long been free to go home,3 but he declined to do so. Although, once Athens allied with the Sparta he admired against the Thebes he detested as the wrecker of the Peloponnese, his attitude softened to his native city (in 355 he even wrote a treatise (the Revenues) on how to cure Athens’ economic woes), the memories of his youth, the quiet pleasures of his middle age, and above all his devotion to Sparta and Agesilaus combined to keep him in the Peloponnese. So it was at Corinth that he wrote the rest of his History of Greece and much else, including perhaps the Anabasis – over thirty years after the death of Cyrus.
The date at which Xenophon composed the Anabasis is disputed, but most scholars would agree that it was not written before the mid 370s and not a few would put it in the early 360s. In speaking of Scillus Xenophon did so as if it was all in the past, which suggests a date after 370, but even if this was merely a stylistic device his allusion to his sons hunting demands a late date. Xenophon had no sons when he joined Cyrus (VII.6.34) and probably did not marry until he returned to Greece in 394; his sons would not have been old enough to hunt before the mid 370s; one would hardly have a boy of much less than sixteen hunting wild boar, and in fact elsewhere Xenophon says as much (Art of Hunting 2.1). So a date of 375 at the earliest is inevitable. Nor is this so surprising when one remembers that both the chief histories of Alexander were written by members of his army some forty or more years after his death. In fact a considerable lapse of time is needed for Xenophon’s literary development, and the Anabasis is unlikely to be his earliest work. It is hard to believe that a man who had already written the Anabasis could then have painted the idealized picture of royal virtue, which is the Education of Cyrus. Xenophon himself felt the need of a postscript to this work and in the eighth chapter of the eighth book, written after 362, bitterly denounced Persian perfidy. Time was needed to harden Xenophon’s attitude to Persia and somewhat to transmute, as we shall see, the events of 401, and it seems better therefore to put the Anabasis after the main body of the Education of Cyrus. Our book is not the work of a young man fresh from the wars.4
Nor was he first in the field. Leaving aside his own reference to the account of one Themistogenes of Syracuse (H.G.III.1.2), which is generally agreed to be a pseudonym for himself, we know of two other accounts. Ctesias of Cnidus, the Greek doctor who spent a number of years at the Persian court and indeed was in attendance on Artaxerxes on the battlefield of Cunaxa, wrote a history of Persia down to 397 in twenty-three books. The work exists only in epitome and in fragments,-but probably Plutarch used it largely for the early part of his Life of Artaxerxes. It was published before the Anabasis, for Xenophon alludes to it (I.8.26f.). The other account was written by one Sophaenetus, a much more shadowy figure, and poses a serious problem. Only four small fragments remain and on the strength of them alone, one can say no more than that his account was in places both similar to that of Xenophon and different. But in the fourteenth book of Diodorus Siculus’ history written in the first century B.C. there is an account which differs in detail from that of Xenophon, and, since it is sure that in this part of his work Diodorus was merely making an epitome of the great fourth-century historian Ephorus, whose Universal History is now lost, a startling fact emerges. When Ephorus wrote his account of the march of the Ten Thousand from Cunaxa to the Hellespont, he drew largely on a source which not only differed in detail from the Anabasis of Xenophon but also led him to assign to Xenophon so minor a part that when Diodorus came to make his epitome of Ephorus the very name of Xenophon was not even mentioned. Evidently someone did not share Xenophon’s estimate of himself. It may have been Ephorus himself, but it seems more likely that it was this mysterious source. Was it Sophaenetus? Many have supposed so, and though this is a mere guess it may not be a bad one. We know of an account by Sophaenetus, and accounts must not be ‘multiplied beyond necessity’. So Sophaenetus let it be, and, since one of the original generals of Cyrus’ Greeks was Sophaenetus of Stymphalus in Arcadia, it would appear likely that the general and the writer were one and that Xenophon was not the only one of the generals to write his account. Xenophon was the youngest, Sophaenetus the oldest (VI.5.13). So presumably his Anabasis in which Xenophon figured so little was published first. Did Xenophon receive it unmoved? Or did he write his Anabasis partly in reply?
Apologia is plain enough. Isocrates in his Panegyric (§146) had described the Ten Thousand disparagingly as men ‘too base to be able to make a living in their countries’, a view which their conduct, once they got clear of the danger of the Persian attack, must have made widely shared. Xenophon will have none of it (VI.4.8). According to him the motives of ‘the majority of the soldiers’ were far from base, and in the sixth book he makes the Arcadians principally to blame for acts of indiscipline. But suspicions lingered on. He had even been described, most damningly to Spartan ears, as ‘too friendly with the men’, and as courting popularity by ‘playing the demagogue’ (VII.6.4). So he may well have been seeking to bury once and for all the charges made long ago against his conduct and his character. But there may be more than this.
From the start of Book III Xenophon’s name occurs about two hundred and thirty times. He delivers over twenty speeches, and he leaves us in no doubt whom he considers the true saviour of the Ten Thousand. For instance, in his account of the dawn assembly in the second chapter of Book III the speeches of Chirisophus and Cleanor occupy a page of Greek text; the speech of Xenophon occupies five pages and contains sage proposals for the conduct of the march which are immediately ratified, and the assembly concludes with further words from Xenophon giving instructions for the army to move in hollow square and appointing which general should go in the van and which should share with himself the hazardous task of guarding the rear. All this may be an accurate record of what happened, but it is easy to conceive that another general might not have the same balance in his narrative. It is notable that in Diodorus’ account of the replacement of the generals (XIV.27.1) the army ‘chose several generals but accorded the leadership of the whole army to one man, Chirisophus the Spartan’. This may be due to confusion in Ephorus’ mind with the debate about having a single commander in Book VI (1. 19–33), but at least it indicates that in Ephorus’ account, and therefore perhaps in Sophaenetus’, Chirisophus played the part played in Xenophon’s account by Xenophon himself. Nor is the Anabasis lacking in hints to support such a view. Although often one would not suspect that Xenophon was not the complete equal of Chirisophus, the latter who seems to have been in charge at the dawn assembly (III.2.33, cp. 3.3) is twice found bluntly ordering Xenophon (III.4.38, IV.6.19). So the hypothesis may be proposed that Xenophon read in the work of Sophaenetus an account which he thought very much failed to do justice to himself and that it was this in part which moved him to write.
A question presents itself. Is the Anabasis of Xenophon not truthful and reliable? It may have its limitations: for instance, his account of the battle of Cunaxa simply will not do; again, he may have been less detached about the plan to found a colony than he labours to make clear that he was. But are we to reject the one full, eye–witness account we have in favour of the skeleton of someone else’s? This is a question that cannot be satisfactorily answered in brief. The answer depends on one’s estimate both of the judgement of Ephorus and of the method of Xenophon. Here it will have to suffice to say that the discovery of the fragments of the History of Greece by the so-called Oxyrhynchus Historian has damaged beyond repair Xenophon’s reputation for accuracy, and that, as Xenophon’s credit has dropped, Ephorus’ has as sharply risen. If Ephorus with his knowledge of the literature of the first half of the fourth century preferred to follow Sophaenetus rather than Xenophon, his judgement may be no less respectable here than when he preferred elsewhere to follow the Oxyrhynchus historian rather than Xenophon. Nor is this necessarily to accuse Xenophon of downright dishonesty. Old men forget. Time can engender queer omissions and even queerer distortions. So if we doubt whether Xenophon was as important as he thought he had been we are not charging him with conscious falsehood. (But we may suspect equivocation. Granted that there was initially division of command (VI.1.17), Chirisophus may have been accorded the position of seniority which Clearchus had attained and which Cyrus’ order before the battle to him rather than to all the generals implies (I.8.12f.). Now in Xenophon’s speech which closed the dawn assembly he assigned the generals posts in the hollow square thus: ‘If anyone has a better suggestion to make, let us adopt it. If not, then I propose that Chirisophus should lead since he is also a Spartan. Two generals, the oldest ones, should look after the flanks; and the youngest of us, Timasion and myself, should be responsible for the rear.’ At first glance, he seems to be talking merely about leading the van, but he may also be acknowledging Chirisophus as primus inter pares.)
If what Sophaenetus had to record of Chirisophus was not to Xenophon’s taste, one wonders what Sophaenetus had to say of Xenophon himself and his share in, the command. Perhaps very little, but one passage invites speculation. In the Armenian highlands the headman of a village was suspected of leading the Ten Thousand where there were no villages; Chirisophus hit the man but neglected to tie him up, and he ran away leaving the army without a guide. Xenophon remarks (IV.6.3) : “This affair – ill-treating the guide and then not taking adequate precautions – was the only occasion on the march when Chirisophus and Xenophon fell out.’ (Translation can hardly do justice to the effect of the Greek particles, which emphasize the uniqueness of ‘this affair’.) One wonders who had asserted the contrary. Was it Sophaenetus? One can easily imagine that another general might take a quite different view about the tensions between Chirisophus in the van and Xenophon commanding the rear-guard (III.4.38f., IV.1.19). In Xenophon’s view Chirisophus had been difficult to get on with as he plainly implied in the debate about command in Book VI (1.26–29), and Xenophon did not formally notice Chirisophus’ death, let alone accord him the sort of obituary he had accorded Clearchus; a passing allusion sufficed (VI.4.11); Chirisophus was neither considerable nor amiable. Perhaps Sophaenetus had taken a different view of the extent and the cause of the trouble, and in this way too provoked Xenophon to set down his own version.
In the lapse of time Xenophon might have come to esteem his own part more highly than did his contemporaries. But is there not a solid framework of fact in the book? Did Xenophon not compose his work on the basis of a diary? It is widely presumed that he did. Although he could hardly have kept a diary posted day by day, there were rest-periods, and although it is hard to imagine his carrying writing materials over such terrain even if he had taken them as far as Cunaxa, it is harder still to believe that such abundance of details could have been kept so long in the head. How otherwise than with a diary could Xenophon have kept those distances in parasangs? But perhaps this presumption is wrong-headed. Anyone who wanted to write an account of a march through the Persian Empire had to hand an invaluable aid in the twenty-third book of Ctesias’ History of Persia, which provided, for some routes certainly and perhaps for all, an account of ‘the number of stages, days, and parasangs’.5 It is notable that, generally speaking, Xenophon gave distances in parasangs only for the subjected areas of the Persian Empire. When the army moved into Kurdistan such measures were forgotten, but were promptly revived when it reached Armenia. Perhaps Ctesias, not a diary, was behind all this. Again, many of the geographic notes with which Xenophon sprinkled his narrative are of a form common, from Herodotus onwards, to the literature of itineraries and geographical description. Xenophon may have chosen to make notes of this form in his diary: it is equally possible that he drew them from Ctesias. So there was a framework for memory to fill in. Why postulate a diary? We must never forget that in ancient Greece memory had to play a much larger part than with us who have ample reference works ready to hand, and that in consequence memories were very highly developed. Nor did Xenophon display elsewhere any lack of confidence in his own power to remember. The largest part of his History of Greece was written, so the present writer believes, at a very great interval after the events described, and essentially as memoirs, unaided by research or methodical assemblage of materials; hence omissions, inaccuracies, unevenness, inconsistency of method. Xenophon indeed possessed a lively memory, but as many who are similarly endowed will grant liveliness does not necessarily guarantee accuracy. Thus it would seem that omissions in the Anabasis are quite as likely to arise from a failure of memory as from an irregularly posted diary. To take a test case, he has omitted to mention the crossing of the Lesser Zab, no mere rivulet and, though it is at its lowest in the late summer, contributing in October, when Xenophon crossed it, about 13 per cent of the water of the Tigris. It was noticeable. Is it more likely that he failed a few days later to record it in a diary, or forgot to mention it thirty yean after? All in all, nothing compels acceptance of the hypothesis of a diary, and those who so ground their confidence in Xenophon perhaps delude themselves. But this is not to destroy all confidence. His memories still have considerable credit, even if we doubt his version of bis own importance.
It is not all self-justification. Political bias has a part. Xenophon lived and wrote in a period when the sentimental longing for a union of Greeks in a crusade against Persia was widespread. The chief spokesman of this so-called Panhellenism was Isocrates who for forty years urged it as the panacea for Greece’s ills, and, though it had been familiar talk in the fifth century, receiving expression for instance in the Olympic Oration of the Sicilian sophist Gorgias, on the Attic stage (Arist. Lysistrata 1128f.) and from a Spartan admiral (H.G.I.6.7f.), it rose to a crescendo as poverty and the violent divisions both within and between cities increased. A central theme was that by seizing Persian territory Greece could settle her impoverished people in colonies which would exploit the wealth of Asia – a programme which found fulfilment of a sort in the foundations of Alexander and his successors. As Isocrates’ Panegyric shows, to the Panhellenists Persia was despicably weak, no match for Greek valour; the crusade would be more like a revel than a war. This creed Xenophon shared as did also his hero Agesilaus and his circle (baldly to assert what needs to be more fully argued than is possible here). At any rate, the Anabasis contains one passage in which the doctrine shows itself unmistakably. In Xenophon’s speech in the dawn assembly, after commenting on the Great King’s inability to master various peoples, he went on:
I am certain that the King would offer the Mysians all the guides they wanted, and would give them numbers of hostages to guarantee his good faith in sending them out of the country and would actually build roads for them, even though they wanted to go away in four-horse chariots. And I am as certain that he would be three times as pleased to do all this for us, if he saw that we were planning to stay here. No, what I am really afraid of is that, if we once learn to live a life of ease and luxury, enjoying the company of these fine great women, the wives and daughters of the Medes and Persians, we might be like the Lotus-eaters and forget about our road home. So I think that it is right and reasonable for us to make it our first endeavour to reach our own folk in Greece and to demonstrate to the Greeks that their poverty is of their own choosing, since they might see people who have a wretched life in their own countries grow rich by coming out here. [III.2.24f.]
Here are the essentials of the doctrine – the weakness of Persia, the opportunities it afforded the Greeks of sending the poor to reap the wealth of Asia. Of course, it cannot be proved that Xenophon did not utter such words on that tense October morning of 401, but when one considers the grim situation in which the Greeks found themselves on the banks of the Zab confronted by the cavalry of Tissaphernes it seems more likely that these cheerful sentiments belong to the Greek historian’s art of composing speeches. This passage in itself is not much, but it should remind us of the intellectual milieu in which the Anabasis was composed. For there is a serious matter which affects our understanding of the book. The curious inconsistency was noted above between the laudation of Persian virtue in the Education of Cyrus and the picture in the Anabasis of Persian perfidy, Tissaphernes agreeing with Clearchus to hold a round-table conference and then seizing those who came. It was suggested that the latter work belonged to a later phase of Xenophon’s development. But was there not perfidy in 401? Had Xenophon forgotten the treacherous fate of his friend Proxenus, when he wrote the Education of Cyrus? Of course, he could not forget, but precisely what? The facts were complex. Tissaphernes had for some time suspected that Clearchus was plotting to kill him, and fourteen days before the arrest of the generals a mysterious message had reached Proxenus that the Persians were about to attack the Greeks (II.4.16). At the Zab Tissaphernes and Clearchus met to discuss rumours of plots (cf. esp. II.5.1,10,16), and the upshot was that Clearchus consented to face his accusers before Tissaphernes. Hence the fatal visit to the Persian camp. What Xenophon makes little of is that it was Menon the Thessalian supported by Proxenus, Xenophon’s own friend, who made the accusation: Clearchus suspected that it was Menon who was slandering him, and the messenger from Ariaeus, after the arrest, declared that Menon and Proxenus had ‘reported his conspiracy’ (II.5.28, 38); Xenophon gave Menon as abusive an obituary as can ever have been written of anyone (II.6.21f), but that is all. Ctesias, who professed to have done all he could to mitigate the lot of Clearchus in prison, confirmed that Menon was responsible (Fr.27). We may sympathize with Tissaphernes. From the Greeks themselves came the accusation that Clearchus was plotting against him. Clearchus was summoned to his tent for trial, as Cyrus had previously summoned the traitor Orontas (1.6). The case was heard. Clearchus may even have seemed to be caught in flagranti delicti, for he had chosen to take with him about two hundred soldiers ‘as though to buy provisions’, and Menon may have made something of it; the purple flag was raised (Diod.XIV.26.7), perhaps a general alarm, not, as the Greeks took it, a prearranged signal. But whatever the truth of that, Menon’s accusation confirmed those black suspicions which, at the earlier meeting with Tissaphernes, Clearchus had sought to talk away. The arrest and condemnation are intelligible, a miscarriage of justice but not foul treachery. Now Xenophon may never have taken so detached a view. Tissaphernes may have seemed from that day a monster of perfidy. But what is so striking is that he has so little to say about the perfidy of the Greek generals themselves. The bad faith is all on the Persian side. His account is thus fully in accord with the mood in which he wrote the postscript to the Education of Cyrus. The impassioned Panhellenist, with the lapse of time, saw it all clearly in black and white, in this way too perhaps following Agesilaus, who spent his last six years in bitter efforts to harm Persia, but whose first act on landing in Asia in 396 had been to seek to negotiate a treaty with Tissaphernes (H.G.III.4.5). Both were Panhellenists who passed from fashionable sentiment to bitter hostility. The Anabasis was perhaps infected more with the latter.
Much of this account is debatable. The study of Xenophon is a slippery business. He will stand when his critics have fallen. He was not a man of great intellect. One has only to compare his Socratic dialogues with those of Plato to see that. Nor did he have the lofty detachment or intellectual rigour of a Thucydides. His philosophy is second-hand and second-rate, his history moralizing memoirs. He was at his happiest when far removed from what he regarded as the debasing trivialities of sophists’ talk (Art of Hunting 13). But though plain, he is never transparent. His fate has been to be read by schoolboys and to be puzzled over by scholars. His silences in the History of Greece, which the innocent ear does not catch, cry loudly to the attuned but often remain unexplained. Fortunately the Anabasis is his least perplexing and his most enthralling book. If we had Sophaenetus and Ctesias, much ‘would be clearer. But we may be sure that, unlike Xenophon, they would be read by very few.
To men like Isocrates the march of the Ten Thousand exposed the truth about the Persian empire. The mighty edifice was cracked and crumbling. A concerted effort by the Greeks would send it crashing in ruins. So Agesilaus could talk grandly in 394 about a new march up-country (H.G. IV.I.41). Jason of Pherae in the 370s indulged in similar fine utterances (H.G.VI.1.12). Isocrates kept issuing appeals to the great, and to the not so great, men of the age to lead the Greeks against Asia, to Agesilaus, to Alexander of Pherae, to Dionysius of Syracuse, finally to Philip of Macedon. What Cyrus had done others could do. The Persians had not even been able to stop the Ten Thousand moving through their empire virtually unscathed.
Nothing so bedevils understanding of Greek history as the uncritical acceptance of such talk. We must detach ourselves. The revolt of Cyrus was a domestic wrangle – the struggle of one member of the blood royal to deprive his brother of the throne. The essence of it was the single combat on the field of Cunaxa. As Cyrus indicated by his last-minute order to Clearchus to march against the King, the King’s person was sought, no more. Had Cyrus succeeded, things would have been no different from what they had been before. Any Greek attempt to do the same would encounter the resistance of the satrapal forces which Cyrus took with him from Asia Minor, and there would have been time for the King to assemble the royal army and come down to the sea, as Darius III was to do in 333 for the battle of Issus. The revolt of Cyrus divided Persian sympathies as it divided the terrible royal women (Ctes. Fr.27), but the unity of the empire against outside attack was, save for the year 401 alone, unimpaired.
Nature and the opposition of untamed, barbarian tribes made the march of the Ten Thousand arduous. Their march through Persian territory was not so remarkable. For a mere nineteen days after the arrest of the generals and the rupture of the pact with Tissaphernes, they had to expect harassment by Persian cavalry, and on six days to suffer it. But even then it was only harassment. Tissaphernes made no real attempt to block their passage. When he appeared with a large army (III.4.13f.), he attacked the Greeks on three sides, but despite his ample cavalry he left the van free. If the King had wanted to do more, he could have had the route blocked and the Greeks surrounded by mounted archers; in which case the Ten Thousand could hardly have avoided the fate of the Romans at Carrhae. (As it was, in the skirmishing many were wounded; Greek hoplites were well protected from death by arrows, not so well from disabling wounds.) So their march from the Zab up the Tigris was no great feat and proved nothing about Persian military power. Once they turned into the Kurdish hills, they were out of Persian-controlled territory. For it is important to understand that there were large areas of Asia which the King made no attempt to subject. Like the Roman empire in the age of Cicero, the Persian empire was basically a number of fertile, prosperous areas linked by great roads to the heart of the empire (I.5.9). The art of maintaining so vastly extended power was to avoid the inessentials. Kurds in their highland fastnesses were more trouble than they were worth: it was sufficient to keep them, by force or by agreement, from troubling the plain (III.5.16, Diod.XIV.27.5). The outlandish peoples, Macrones, Colchians, Mossynoeci and the like, had appeared at one stage on the official lists of peoples (cf. Herodotus VII.78), but by 401 they had clearly been written off as unimportant. The price of total pacification was too great. There was enough to do keeping the vital routes open and the tribute-bearing satrapies immune from warlike and perpetually troublesome people like the Cadusians by the Caspian Sea. Even a bargain, like the system of tolls paid to the Uxians on the road to Persepolis (Arrian Anabasis III.17), was good sense, not weakness – if Alexander had had to traverse it more than once, he might have thought well of the Persian method. Satraps could have constant war with Mysians, Pisidians, Lycaonians (III.2.23) but it all argued no more than the constant wars of, say, the Roman governors of Macedonia against the troublesome Thracian tribes. So the absence of Persian opposition for most of the march is no sign that the empire was tottering. The Greeks had six troubled days north from the Zab, they went unmolested through Armenia after an agreement with the satrap, until they themselves broke the agreement (IV.4.4,14,18); for the rest they were beyond Persian dominion. It took an Isocrates to think that this showed that the empire was ripe to fall.
Nor should one be misled by the curious situation revealed by the opening chapter of the first book, where Cyrus is found besieging Miletus, which Tissaphernes had disposed to his own satisfaction. The large satrapy, or rather combination of satrapies, and the equally large military command conferred on Cyrus by his father (I.9.7) was without precedent; it expressed the King’s determination to put an end to Greeks playing off one satrap against another and to bring Athens to defeat; and the wrangle between Cyrus and Tissaphernes is obscure. But the normal situation was for satraps to have, within broad limits, very considerable autonomy, and this could involve not just failure to concert strategy, as happened with Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus in 412, but even agreement with the enemy to another satrapy’s disadvantage, as happened in 395 when Tithraustes provided Agesilaus with money to take his army out of his satrapy and into Pharnabazus’. This strikes us as an odd form of imperialism, but we must recognize that it was not necessarily weakness. The empire was, in relation to the system of communications, huge and fragile. At so many points, at mountain passes or river-crossings, could the line of communications be broken that the kings could only keep control by not trying to keep tight control. The Lydian and Phrygian satraps could be brought to heel in time of crisis. For the rest their freedom to wrangle was a safeguard of the authority of the central power.
The one real weakness of the empire touched on in the Anabasis was Egypt, which had revolted yet again shortly before the expedition of Cyrus (II.1.14, 5.13). It proved again and again more trouble than it was worth. The intense nationalism of the native people rendered the satrapy prone to revolt. Its reconquest was a difficult military problem. The approach march across the desert made the provision of supplies difficult; the campaign had to be timed to begin as the Nile fell and to end before it rose; the arms of the Nile and the canal system made the country peculiarly defensible. In the fourth century the Persians had to make four expeditions before they recovered it in early 342, by which time they should have been active against their new enemy, Macedon. Egypt was a waste of effort, the great error of Persian policy, but that was all. The weakness discerned by Panhellenists was wishful thinking.
The Persian empire was vast. The Anabasis takes us through the western satrapies. Of the eastern, Xenophon knew perhaps little. There is no hint of the splendours of Persepolis or the vast tracts of eastern Iran where the strains and stresses of migrations were felt by Persian as later by Parthian. If he had known more, he might have hesitated before speaking in such general terms when in the Oeconomicus (4.4f.) he makes Socrates approvingly describe the Persian system. But at any rate that passage is a guide to the west.
The empire was divided into satrapies, provinces, and normally a satrap ruled in the name of the King. Often the satrapy was virtually hereditary. We are not accurately informed about the antecedents of Tissaphernes, but Pharnabazus certainly was son and father of satraps. Sometimes the king did not even send a Persian as satrap, but was content with native rulers, provided that, like the regular satraps, they produced the stipulated tribute and troops on demand. The most celebrated case is the native dynast of Caria, Mausolus, but another is the Syennesis (1.2.26f.), who bore the hereditary title of the native rulers of Cilicia. As already noted, the satraps were accorded considerable independence, but there were effective checks on their good conduct. Most notable were the officials called the Eyes and the Ears of the King, who scrutinized the satrapal administration, and the Royal Judges. If a satrap was reported on unfavourably to the King, there were generally sufficient loyal Persians at the satrapal court to arrest or to execute him, or at any rate not to prevent such orders. Tissaphernes himself, as satrap of Lydia, was to die six years after Cunaxa by royal command. Cyrus was in the exceptional position of being so close to the throne that he could command loyalty to himself, and his brother had to wait for news of his plans until Tissaphernes carried it in person. Normally a satrap would neither have been able to keep his secrets as long as Cyrus nor have even conceived such large ambitions. The proof of the effectiveness of the system is to be found in the fact that only in the late 360s, during the so-called Satraps’ Revolt when a large portion of Asia Minor was for a brief period alienated from the King, was revolt a serious problem, except of course for Egypt.
Xenophon in the Oeconomicus asserts curiously that the principle of division of civil and military authority was applied in all cases, save where there were satraps appointed. This is very odd, since as far as we know, apart from native rulers like Syennesis, every satrapy had a satrap. But perhaps we should take his statement as a serious warning against supposing that the system was uniform. We meet in the Greek sources officials described as hyparchs (governors), and it would be wrong to assume that they are either satraps or direct subordinates of satraps. Tiribazus (IV.4.4), hyparch of western Armenia, may be a case in point. He was, as Xenophon remarks, of high standing with the King. Although Diodorus refers to him as a satrap, presumably Xenophon had some different office in mind. Perhaps he was a military commander independent of a civil governor. Certainly the Persians showed in other spheres the tolerance necessary for a great empire. We should not expect uniformity in administration.
There was variety too in the tribute that satrapies had to pay. The Greeks entertained fantastic notions of the wealth of the King, for they conceived of every satrapy paying money. This is almost certainly wrong. Greek experience was largely confined to the western seaboard satrapies. But when the Macedonians captured Susa, they found precious metals of a value no greater than five times the reserve wealth of Athens at the height of her power. The explanation is provided by one of the Alexander historians, Potyclitus of Larisa, Most of the inland satrapies paid in kind. That is why the Ten Thousand found in Armenia ponies being reared as tribute (V.5.24, 34). The economy of such areas was too primitive for the King to be able to exact the sums of money he regularly received from the prosperous western satrapies. For Persia, as for Rome, these latter were of exceptional importance financially speaking.
The comparison with Rome is at all points fruitful. The Persian empire, eompared with what preceded it, was a miracle. It brought peace, both from outside attack and from the sort of raiding for which the Mysians were notorious and against which no doubt Asidates (VII.8.8f.) with his mixed forces was operating. It brought justice; though the famously just Royal Judges make no appearance in our book, the formal trial of Orontas (I.6.4f.) may serve as a reminder of this aspect of Persian rule. It brought prosperity, for the Persians devoted themselves (as Xenophon in the Oeconomicus stresses) to the improvement of agriculture. The Persians were the great gardeners of antiquity. Cyrus declared to an astounded Lysander that he gardened daily when not on campaign and had himself laid out the park at Sardis, his ‘paradise’ (to give the Greek version of the Old Persian word for a garden, firdu). In similar spirit they attended to agriculture in general, both maintaining carefully the ancient canals of Babylonia which impeded the Ten Thousand, and making important improvements in irrigation throughout the empire, as the prophet of Isaiah XL-LV foretold. Likewise with communications. The great roads they built were for the movement of armies, ‘carriage tracks’ like the road taken by Cyrus and his waggon train (I.2.21, III.2.24), but they served the purposes of peace as well. The Suez canal was built by Darius I purely for trade; the whole empire from India to the Aegean was to be linked by sea as well as by land. All in all, Persia was one of the chief civilizing forces of history, and the Greeks in calling them ‘barbarians’, as they called all who did not speak Greek, have greatly misled posterity. In one respect in particular a caveat is needed. Writers like Isocrates were prone to dilate on the evils of Persian rule of Greek cities. His words are wide of the truth. The Greek cities of Asia were ruled; they had to pay tribute and could feel the oppressive hand of a Tissaphernes. But generally speaking they were left very much to themselves. The situation in the opening paragraphs of the Anabasis is deceptive. That was the aftermath of the Athenian empire and the long agonies of the Peloponnesian War. The garrisons we meet in Ionia under Cyrus are not typical of the long years of peace in the fourth century, when the free world of mainland Greece was destroying itself and its power to stand together against the Macedonians. All the evidence we have suggests that many a Greek city of Asia hardly saw a Persian, let alone a Persian garrison in normal times. The reception of the Ten Thousand in Chrysopolis (VI.6.38) is an instance. The city was part of the Dascyleian satrapy ruled by Pharnabazus; his cavalry had already shown his hostility (VI.5.7f.); but the Greeks spent seven days amicably at Chrysopolis, which seems to have been unaware of, or indifferent to, the satrap’s policy. That was the normal condition in the fourth century of most of the Greeks Agesilaus burned to liberate.
From a military point of view the Anabasis is of the greatest interest. The campaign of Cunaxa and the retreat of the Ten Thousand came at a crucial stage in the development of Greek warfare. In the fifth century this was still essentially the conflict of forces of heavily armed infantry (hoplites). There was comparatively little for the supporting arms to do. The light-armed skirmished usefully enough in the preliminaries, but in the battle itself had only a minor role on the flanks. Likewise, the cavalry was useful before and after, but never struck the decisive blow. There was little for a general to do beyond deciding when and where to fight. Once battle was joined, the conflict was out of his control for he had no reserves, and often enough he joined in the fighting himself. Not that the Peloponnesian War lacked portents of change. The success of the lightly armed in the difficult terrain of Demosthenes’ Aetolian campaign of 426 foreshadowed the decline in importance of the hoplite. The corps d’élite which Argos and perhaps Boeotia began to maintain by 420 meant that Sparta would not long be unique in her professionalism. Great wars are bound to have their effects on armies, as on societies. Yet generally speaking the fifth century is an age of amateurs and in no sphere more than in war, whilst the fourth is the age of specialists and professionals. In the great battles of Epaminondas of Thebes we see the co-ordination of arms in a well drilled army and a general gaining victory by the timely deployment of reserves. By a melancholy accident of history he found an apt student in the Macedonian hostage, Philip, whose generalship of a highly trained professional army was to destroy the liberty of Greece.
These developments are all implicit in the experiences of the Ten Thousand. Cunaxa was a battle to make a Greek general think, quite unlike any previous engagement. The varied conditions encountered on the march posed almost daily new military problems. Again and again the light-armed have a vital role to play and it is a short step to the destruction of the Spartan hoplite formation by Iphicrates’ peltasts near Corinth in 390. The idea of holding force in reserve gains ground (III.4.23, VI.5.9). Generalship emerges as an exacting art. In the deliberations of the generals Greek resourcefulness asserts itself, and it is no great step to the inventive professional generals like Chabrias. Contact with barbary was clearly very stimulating.
Soldiering was becoming a profession. The very existence of this large body of men who soldier for a living is a sign of the times. They are not the first mercenaries by any means. Asiatic powers had been using Greek soldiers for generations. The three hundred hoplites under Xenias of Parrhasia who escorted Cyrus to his father’s death-bed are typical, and Cyrus was able to collect a large number of his army simply by hiring them for garrison duty (I.1.2,6). Even the leading city-states of Greece had begun in the Peloponnesian War to find mercenaries useful. For instance, the thirteen hundred Thracian peltasts, who butchered the children at Mycalessus in 413, Athens had hoped to use in Sicily. There were ample predecessors of the Ten Thousand. But they were the first body of mercenaries large enough to engage the forces of any single Greek state. As such they were a new menace to Greece and Spartan officials treated them accordingly. But shortly Sparta found it convenient to employ them. The truth is that the mercenaries of the fourth century so deplored by Isocrates as the evil consequence of poverty were a military necessity. War had ceased to be a seasonal occupation for ill-trained citizens. Full-time professionals were needed, as the Ten Thousand signified. The Theban Coiratadas, whom we meet at Byzantium offering his services as a general to any city or tribe that needed one (VII.1.33), is likewise significant. The days are quickly passing when it was presumed that any citizen who attained political power in a Greek city was also suitable to command its army. Generalship is now a specialist’s occupation. Men even profess to teach the art. Tissaphernes had in his pay a Greek, Phalinus, who ‘professed to be an expert in drill and infantry tactics’ (II.1.7). That is tell-tale. Theory is the handmaid of professional concentration. Within a generation or so a handbook of military science was to appear, written by one Aeneas. Generals in the fourth century needed collections of ‘stratagems’. Warfare had become a tricky business. (Unfortunately for students of Greek warfare only the last book of this Aeneas Tacticus survives – a rather tedious discussion about the least interesting aspect of the least advanced part of the subject, defence of cities. Had we the rest of the work, we might be able to determine the relation of the author to the Aeneas of Stymphalos who was killed on the march (IV.7.13) and to learn more about Xenophon. Doubtless Arcadians had sharp things to say about him.)
In one respect the Anabasis is uniquely revealing, viz. concerning the size of Persian armies. The Greeks and the Macedonians exaggerated wildly, for they seem to have regarded it as more glorious to picture themselves defeating a countless horde of worthless Asiatics than an efficient army of realistic proportions. Herodotus had 1,700,000 in Xerxes’ land army in 480. Arrian’s Macedonian sources led him to record 1,000,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry under Darius at Gaugamela in 331. Diodorus constantly derives from Ephorus totals of 300,000, and for Artaxerxes at Cunaxa 400,000. Xenophon was not outdone. He gave, and with emphasis, as present at the battle 900,000 (I.7.12,13), Abrocomas being late with his 300,000. If the King’s bastard brother had arrived with his contingent in time (II.4.25), Xenophon might have added a good many more myriads without hesitation; ten thousand Greeks were worth any number of Orientals; the wars against Persia were triumphs of virtue nourished by liberty. It was all very improving and conducive to self- respect. It was also rubbish. The armies of antiquity about which we are well informed were, by our notions, small. Alexander conquered Asia with a mere 40,000. Hannibal roamed Italy with 26,000, having set out from Spain with no more than 59,000. Of special relevance here, in the period of the successors of Alexander the Great Iran was drained of its military strength to the utmost, but the largest army we ever hear of was that of Antigonus in his attack on Egypt in 306, 80,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry. Apart from difficulties of finding an unfailing supply of suitable recruits (familiar to those who have studied the lame efforts of the emperor Augustus to maintain no more than 150,000 legionaries), there was a compulsive reason for keeping ancient armies as small as possible. The larger the army, the greater the problem of supplying it and the slower its movements. So on general grounds the fantastic totals of the Greeks should be reduced. But how far? Estimates for Xerxes’ land army for instance have varied between seventy to eighty thousand and over two hundred thousand. A yardstick is necessary. This is just what Xenophon’s account of the battle, as distinct from his totals, provides.
At Cunaxa, as was normal with Persian armies, both commanders took up their positions in the centre of their armies (I.8.13, Diod.XIV.22.6f.). The right half of Cyrus’ army consisted of about 13,000 Greeks who four deep, as in the review of Tyriaeum (I.2.15), would have had a front of about 3,000 yards, and of about 1,500 if eight deep. (This calculation neglects the difference between hoplites and peltasts, which could not seriously affect the argument.) At some point in Artaxerxes’ advance Cyrus realized that the Greeks, on whom he was relying to win the battle, would miss Artaxerxes unless the Greeks advanced obliquely, and so he rode along the line ordering such a manoeuvre (I.8.12–18). The narrative suggests that during this ride the King’s army was not very far away, and in any case it would hardly have been clear at more than a mile’s distance who was going to run into whom. Now Cyrus could only have delivered his order if Artaxerxes was somewhat to the left of the Greek left, but not very much so; he could hardly have expected the Greeks to advance a great distance to their left across the advance of the whole left of the King’s army. Therefore half the King’s army had a front of not much more than that of the 13,000 Greeks. It cannot be proved that their depth was not as great as their front or as any number one might choose to call, but even if they were as much as twenty deep, opposite a frontage of the Greeks four deep there would have been 60,000 on the King’s left, and, if the Greeks were eight deep, a mere 30,000. But, of course, the King’s infantry may have been much thinner on the ground. In any case the totals involved are within the range of the modest totals of Iranian armies of the Successors. So the King, with ample enough notice in the heart of his empire in defence of his throne, is shown by Xenophon’s account to have had in all likelihood no great army, 120,000 at the most, possibly a very great deal less. This is a rich result for Greek historians. It reinforces those who argue for the lowest total for the great invasion of Greece. It explains how a force of ten thousand Greek hoplites could be decisive, whether for Croesus appealing in 546 to the Spartan alliance, or for Agesilaus talking of a new anabasis, or for Persian commanders assembling an army to reconquer Egypt. In the Persian world armies were no bigger than anywhere else. Some Greeks must have known it. Thucydides appears to have done so (VI.33). Agesilaus should have, and possibly did. Those who wrote otherwise did so with tongue in cheek, or head in Panhellenist clouds.
The battle of Cunaxa is a puzzling affair. The full account of Xenophon contains such defects that he can clearly have taken no trouble to ascertain what had really happened elsewhere on the battlefield – either by personal inquiry at the time or by studying the accounts of others at a later date. He knew what Ctesias had to say about the wounding of Artaxerxes, and he knew that Ctesias was at hand to attend to what must have been a bloody and disabling wound (I.8.26,27). Yet he ignores Ctesias’ saying that Artaxerxes ‘occupied a nearby hill and rested’ (Plutarch Artax. XI) – a statement which either lies behind or confirms what Diodorus has to say on the subject. On Xenophon’s account Artaxerxes continued to take part in the battle, for he was joined in the attack on Cyrus’ camp by Tissaphernes (I.10.1,8). The King’s doctor seems the more reliable. Again, Xenophon’s account of the disposition of the King’s army is both incomplete and vague (I.8.9). He recorded only what he saw, adding what ‘ was said ‘ about the nationality of one unit and the command of another. He seems to have taken no trouble to find out more; there is no picture of the forces around the King’s person. All this is very unsatisfactory (especially for those who think Xenophon had collected in a diary material for future use). But there is worse. It is now generally recognized that Xenophon cannot be right in his repeated assertion that the King’s station was outside Cyrus’ left(I.8.13,23). Clearchus could not possibly have been ordered to march obliquely at the King, if that had meant marching right across the Asiatic troops of Ariaeus; nor could Cyrus have charged the King’s centre and aimed a weapon at the King. For these and other reasons, we must accept that Xenophon has erred. He should have said that Artaxerxes was outside the left of the Greeks. Granted that, the last minute order of Cyrus makes sense. But it is very damaging to Xenophon’s credit. Youth and lack of military experience, excitement and perhaps that great source of military inaccuracies, fear, have ill informed his memory.
There is an alternative account in Diodorus, which perhaps stems in large measure indirectly from Ctesias. It contains at any rate information from the Persian side of the sort which Ctesias was well placed to gather; for example, we are informed that the King’s army was assembled at Ecbatana, and the King’s camp is described in detail. Now although this account is in general similar to Xenophon’s there is one notable difference, viz. that when the King was wounded and withdrew from the battle, Tissaphernes was given the command. This could only have happened if Tissaphernes was in the centre with the King, and not charging up the left flank to the Greek camp, as Xenophon would have him. Consistently Diodorus later records that Tissaphernes was especially honoured by the King as having excelled in the battle, which in Xenophon’s account he hardly had. But if Diodorus is right, what of Xenophon? If he is wrong here too, nothing in his account of the battle that he did not know by direct personal experience can be accepted. He cannot answer for us the main problem.
The main problem is this. Cyrus knew what he was going against. He knew that the King would have a strong force of cavalry, certainly stronger than his own, which may have been only 3,000 (Diod.XIV.22.5f.). He knew too that the King would be likely to outnumber him overall. How did he hope to win? One must assume that he based his hopes on the Greeks. Hoplites had never before been seen on the plain of Babylon and the commonplace of Greek warfare that cavalry could not attack hoplites frontally may not have been understood in Persia. Certainly at Tyriaeum, if we may trust Xenophon (I.2.19), Cyrus derived great pleasure from the fears the Greek charge inspired in the non-Greeks. But if Cyrus was counting on the Greeks, his last-minute order for an oblique march argued either great lack of forethought or some quite unexpected development. He had assumed that the Greeks would assault the centre and the King. How could he have done so? Perhaps a guess is permissible. In his notice of the review at Tyriaeum Xenophon says that Cyrus ordered the Greeks to form up ‘in their normal battle order’ and ‘so they formed up four deep’. This is amazing. Nowhere else in the whole of Greek history do we hear of less than eight deep. The normal array was, as we find it later in the Anabasis, eight deep, and it may be suggested that by ruling that hoplites would stand four deep Cyrus hoped to defeat the King: his hoplites would overlap the King’s centre and rout the centre as well as the Hank. Then came the surprise. Whether by chance, or on the advice of Phalinus or by Artaxerxes’ own contrivance, Cyrus’ plan was forestalled. The 150 scythed chariots were to set the Greeks in disarray, but the King would be out of danger of the hoplites. Hence Cyrus’ last-minute appeal. His set-piece had gone awry. But this is conjecture.
Nor is the strategy of the campaign straightforward. We can readily understand why the King did not go out to meet Cyrus. There was no time for that. The King was still waiting for his full force to assemble when he had to fight for Babylon (cf. II.4.25, Diod.XIV.22.2). Cyrus had surprise on his side, having his army assembled and being on the point of setting out when Tissaphernes rushed off to report to the King. Distances were large and movement slow. Cyrus could be through the Cilician and even the Syrian Gates before a Royal army could get there. In any case by staying in the heart of the empire Artaxerxes presented Cyrus with all the problems of supplying, transporting and paying his army, and if the Euphrates had not been unprecedentedly low (I.4.17) these problems of themselves might have undone Cyrus. All this is clear enough. But why did Artaxerxes let Cyrus go so far towards Babylon, the rich prize, by this date without gates or walls? Cyrus himself presumed that the day after the midnight review would be the last possible for Artaxerxes to fight (I.7.14f.), and, when the day passed, he let his army advance towards Babylon in careless fashion. Why this perilous delay? The answer must be in part that he preferred to sacrifice the strategic advantages of trenches and canals and the Median Wall than to fight without his full forces. He was waiting for Abrocomas and the bastard brother. He finally had to fight, to save Babylon, without them.
But why was Abrocomas five days late (I.7.12)? He had been twelve days ahead of Cyrus when he crossed the Euphrates (I.3.20). He should have reached the King before the battle. His lateness illuminates the real strategic problem of Cunaxa. The highway into the heart of Asia was the route taken by Alexander, which led through upper Mesopotamia across the Tigris whence it went east to Ecbatana or south to Babylon (cf. III.5.15). Along this road Artaxerxes prepared to defend his throne. He assembled his army at Ecbatana (modern Hamadan) and moved into a position doubtless close to where Darius III fought Alexander. His bastard brother would arrive from Ecbatana, Abrocomas from the Euphrates, having moved ahead of Cyrus and done what he could to render the march difficult. Then Cyrus struck. He took the route south from the Thapsacus crossing, which the King would not have dreamed of his doing. All would be well as far as the Chabur river (Xenophon’s Araxes), but south of that there was a formidable desert of the sort which made the right bank of the Tigris impossible for the escape route. There was not even a proper road. The great Persian roads were paved, as the transport of waggons at a reasonable speed demanded. On Cyrus’ route the waggons fared badly, at times getting stuck in the mud. It was no road for an army. There was neither water nor grass (I.5.5). Artaxerxes could forget about it, or so he thought, and Abrocomas neglected it. Then came Cyrus’ bold dash to Babylon and the King had to rush to Babylonia, his plans awry.6
Such might be the explanation of the King’s dangerous delay. Only one bit of evidence stands in the way. Xenophon asserts that a ditch had been newly dug extending for ‘twelve parasangs’ to the Median Wall and leaving only a twenty foot passage beside the Euphrates, and that the King had it dug when he learnt of Cyrus’ coming (I.7.14,15). But his assertion is very dubitable. The ditch was there certainly. Who dug it and why, and how far it extended, Xenophon may have been far from accurately informed about. A ditch that long, ‘five fathoms across and three fathoms deep’, was not dug in a day. One suspects that it was merely the latest addition to the complicated canal system of Babylonia, and that Xenophon has erred. After all, if the King had had it dug for defence, he would have made some use of it at least to delay Cyrus. Traces of his cavalry patrolling had already been seen north of the ditch (I.6.1). So despite Xenophon’s suggestion that the King expected Cyrus to come the way he did, all strategic considerations point the other way. Cyrus nearly effected one of the greatest strategic surprises in history. If Babylon had gone over, the King’s position would have been very difficult indeed.
‘Cyrus, by raising the Ten Thousand, closed one period in the history of Greek mercenaries as he opened another.’ Thus Parke in his admirable Greek Mercenary Soldiers, which renders superfluous more than a few brief comments here.7 Despite Xenophon’s words to the contrary (VI.4.7f.), the Ten Thousand were probably no different from Greek mercenaries in general. They had come, for the most part, because poverty had forced them into soldiering. Both the study of the provenance of named individuals and Xenophon’s own explicit statement (VI.2.10) show that the majority came from the Peloponnese, especially Arcadia and Achaea, areas not much affected by the Peloponnesian War but notoriously the main source of mercenaries. Arcadians had even offered their services to Xerxes in 480, ‘because they had no living and wanted to be employed’. For the same reason no doubt in 401, save for the Spartans who were sent officially in answer to Cyrus’ appeal, most of the Peloponnesians especially sought in as large numbers as possible by Cyrus came for what was to be mere garrison duty for all they knew. Xenophon’s comment is absurd. He wants to explain why the plan to found a colony fell flat: the majority wanted to get home. Clearly they had had enough of barbarians, Persian or not, but equally clearly they did not want to go home. Most of them stayed, to serve in Thrace and in Asia Minor. Of those who had had enough, a considerable number had wanted to found the colony and settle down far from their families. The narrative shows that they were not entirely without alternative comforts. Xenophon was speaking perhaps only of the officers. Even so one may doubt the truth of his remark. Some were exiles, or like himself personae nongratae. Many were from the Peloponnèse. A number had clearly been on mercenary service before, like Episthenes who had once recruited a boys’ brigade – not entirely for war (VII.4.8). Nor were there special financial attractions. The original pay was one daric a month (under 26 Attic drachmas) which was precisely what Thibron undertook to pay (I.3.21, VII.6.1). It was the normal rate. Seuthes promised a cyzicene (about 28 Attic drachmas), as indeed had Timasion (VII.3.10, V.6.23). Similar rates apply elsewhere in the fourth century. The truth is that the Ten Thousand were the first large mercenary army, but in all else they were typical. As Isocrates was to declare of mercenary armies in general, the Ten Thousand took to war out of poverty, and menaced the peace and prosperity of Greece. No wonder the Greek cities refused to admit them.
One matter remains to be discussed. At first glance the Spartan attitude to the Ten Thousand is a bit puzzling. Initially, when Cyrus appealed to Sparta for help (H.G.III.1.1), they had responded by sending seven hundred hoplites under Chirisophus and the escort of a Spartan admiral (I.4.2). Nor on the return to Greece were they at first hostile. Chirisophus went from Trapezus to ask his friend Anaxibius for ships, and returned with a promise of help from the harmost (governor) of Byzantium, Cleander (V.1.4, VI.2.13). There was a temporary difficulty when Cleander arrived. He threatened to have the Ten Thousand outlawed from Greece, but the slanders of Dexippus were disproved, and the trouble ended with a promise to welcome the army at Byzantium fittingly (VI.6.9, 36). When they reached Chrysopolis, Anaxibius, in answer to an appeal from Pharnabazus, required them to move to Byzantium, whereupon the Spartans proceeded to treat them first with suspicion and then with hostility but firmly refused to let them cross to Asia. Indeed the successor of Cleander as governor of Byzantium, Aristarchus, threatened to sink them if they attempted to cross (VII.2.13). Then in early 399 Thibron sailed out from Sparta to fight against Tissaphernes and summoned them to Asia (VII.6.1). One wonders how the Spartan empire was run. Were the governors in the cities and the admiral free to do whatever they pleased, and was there no consistency of policy? Anaxibius, for instance, spurned by Pharnabazus after his successor was known to be on the way, tried to get the Ten Thousand over to Asia, thus going against his own previous firm policy. Was it all just the arbitrary rule of whoever happened to be in control?
Spartan policy could be fitful, but the acts of those sent out to administer it were carefully controlled. The fitfulness derived from the fact that foreign policy was largely shaped by the annually changing board of ephors who, chosen by some method mysterious to us but akin to the lot, were supposed to represent the monolithic unity of the privileged citizenry, but, as with monolithic unities familiar to us, views could diverge and policy change perchance. In the period covered by the Anabasis occurred one of the dramatic changes of Spartan policy. Sparta had won the Peloponnesian War on the strength of the money brought by the Persian alliance, and Cyrus was the firmest of friends. When therefore Cyrus appealed, both gratitude and recognition of the value of the Persian alliance compelled Sparta to support him. He was likely to succeed and the future of the concord with Persia must have seemed to depend on him. When he failed, Sparta had to atone, which we see her doing in keeping the Ten Thousand out of the satrapy of Pharnabazus. All the Spartan treaties with Persia had acknowledged the right of the King to Asia. Sparta could restore good relations with Artaxerxes by ridding his land of the Ten Thousand. Then came the great change, the greatest error of policy ever made by Sparta. Tissaphernes, established in the powerful position recently held by Cyrus, made the Greek cities fear reprisals for their support of Cyrus (H.G.III.1.3). They appealed to Sparta. The new ephors, who took office in autumn 400, concurred and Thibron was sent out. The decision saved the Ten Thousand and in due course destroyed the Spartan empire.
All the officials concurred in carrying out these policies. Sparta did not favour independence. The last-minute change of Anaxibius was the only act of independence, and if his order had been carried out, he would have been punished for it. As it was, we do not know that he was not. Thibron was himself fined at the end of the year. As to the treatment of the Ten Thousand, the Spartans behaved harshly but intelligibly. The Ten Thousand were a gang of roughs. Received into Byzantium, one of the key points of the empire, they were a menace to the city, or rather to Spartan control of a city ripe for coup d’état. By late 400 it was clear to the Spartan governors that the Ten Thousand were a menace.
It has already been remarked that Ephorus in the second half of the fourth century would appear to have had scant regard for Xenophon’s account of the expedition, and his fame for some centuries reposed rather on his Socratic writings and the Education of Cyrus. Polybius in the second century knew the historical books well enough and, if we had other Hellenistic historians, we would probably find that the Anabasis continued to be read by Greeks. But as far as Republican Rome as concerned the popular book was not the Anabasis, but the Education of Cyrus, to our taste surely one of the most tedious books to have survived from the ancient world. Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Hannibal, was said to have had that work constantly at hand and Julius Caesar showed, by a remark about how he would wish to die, that he too had read what Romans must have regarded as a handbook for would-be monarchs. But no one would appear to have been much interested in the Anabasis. Cornelius Nepos neglected Cyrus and Xenophon, and it is doubtful whether Cicero, perhaps the most cultured Roman of his day, had even read the book; which is no discredit to the Anabasis, but does illuminate the range of interests in the Roman Republic. With the Empire came a change. Although Seneca betrayed no interest, at the end of the first century Frontinus and Tacitus showed they had read the book. Xenophon’s style had never lacked admirers, as Cicero and Quintillian and, in the East, Dio of Prusa show, but now the subject matter of the Anabasis returned to favour. In Arrian, the second-century historian of Alexander, emulation of Xenophon and attention to all his work reached a climax: Arrian indeed was named the ‘new Xenophon’.
In modern times the easiness of the Greek has ensured a steady, if youthful, audience, but with the exploration of sites up the Tigris in the first half of the nineteenth century the book has been read with ever greater attention. With the development of scholarship loving credulity has given way to a more critical view. Today the work is widely accepted as in large measure apologia, but this does not necessarily diminish its interest or importance.
G. L. CAWKWELL
University College, Oxford
1972
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
A WORD should be said about some points connected with the translation. I have attempted to use as many English words and as few Greek and Persian words as possible; consequently I have, for example, got rid of the ‘parasang’, so familiar to beginners in Greek, and turned it, rather inaccurately, into miles. The fact is that the distance represented by a parasang differs in accordance with the nature of the country over which one is marching, so it is impossible to give an exact measurement that would not be insupportably cumbrous for each day’s march. I have kept the Greek words ‘hoplite’ and ‘peltast’ since their sound seems to me so much a part of the narrative. The following is a list of some other words in the text which seem to have no exact English equivalent or whose retention appears justified for other reasons:
Bulimia – the Greek word for what is apparently a state of exhaustion caused by cold and lack of food.
Doric – a Persian gold coin called after Darius (cf. a Louis or a Napoleon).
Ephor – five magistrates at Sparta were called ‘ephors’ or ‘overseers’, and had greater powers even than the kings.
Hoplite – heavy-armed infantryman.
Mina – unit of currency equal to 1/60 of a talent or 100 drachmas.
Magadis – a sort of pipe with a shrill, strong sound.
Obol – a coin worth 1/6 of a drachma.
Peltast – lightly-armed infantryman.
Perioikos – a free citizen of a town in Spartan territory.
Stater – a coin of gold or silver, also a unit of weight.
Talent – a weight of silver used in monetary calculations but not coined.
Athens 1946 R. W.