The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (7 page)

I prefer the analysis of the text offered by a Fresno State student I taught in a night class. “Sure, he might have lied a little,” he said. “Who doesn’t? And what do you expect? Thucydides with a tape recorder?”

Scholars and graduate students talk grandly of Thucydides “the realist,” whose bleak assessment of human nature was a valuable antithesis to romanticism. But this remote, literary language takes us far from the actual Thucydides, a hardheaded admiral whose judgments derive from firsthand experience and profound career disappointment. As a working mother at Fresno put it, “Thucydides might like Carter better, but he’d want Reagan dealing with the Russians.” Another student, an immigrant, agreed: “Be trusting with someone else’s life—not mine.”

Students in Fresno come to savor Thucydides as the disgraced commander too late to save the Athenian outpost at Amphipolis. In time they soak up the street fighting at Plataea, where the women and slaves “yelled from the houses and threw stones and tiles,” and root for the blood-hungry Athenians at the slaughter near Delium, who in their fury “fell into confusion in surrounding the enemy and mistook and killed each other.”

“I bet he killed a few himself to write like that,” observed one student, tattooed and scarred, in a humanities class. “It gets crazy like that in a free-for-all,” another added. When we discussed the slaughter of the Athenians on Sicily, which brought a pathetic end to the greatest generation of the greatest Greek city in its greatest age, one student urged me on: “Check it out. Don’t be afraid. Read it to us out aloud.” So I did:

The Peloponnesians also came down and butchered them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most fighting to have it.

If we’re to keep the ideas of ancient Greece alive, we must first rekindle the Hellenic spirit, for the two are inseparable. That spirit, though it may already be lost in the Ivy League, thrives here among students working at Burger King and among night-school returnees, who, once hooked on Thucydides’ blood and guts, then—but only then—begin to appreciate the power of his thought.

Students working off their tuition in places like Fresno, of course, don’t need the university to tell them how unique their own lives are and how richly diverse their past experiences are. But they welcome a tough guy like Thucydides, who shows how their brutal experiences are universal, even banal, and thus explicable through abstract canons that exist “for all time.” He is a storyteller first, an obtuse philosopher a distant second.

In an age like ours, in which setbacks and disappointments are often dealt without acceptance of the tragic nature of our existence, Thucydides’ honesty comes as a welcome touch of realism. With him there is no “feeling your pain,” no pretense of cheap compassion, and no easy apologies for what we are and what we have done. His description of the horrific plague at Athens is both scientific and gruesome, as he chronicles the social chaos in the manner of a physician reviewing symptoms, formulating a diagnosis, and offering a bleak cultural prognosis. His noble hero Pericles, Thucydides reminds us soon after his description of the plague, will die from the disease as well—ironic since the old man’s own inspired plan of withdrawing the population inside the walls of Athens will ensure the subsequent squalor that births the epidemic. Thucydides offers students of all races and classes the reassurance that, as humans, in many respects we are all more alike than we think. And in so doing, he offers wisdom about the present, but relief from it as well.

In central California, students naturally assume that Thucydides wrote his history from what he saw and did rather than from what he read, that he became a historian only because he could no longer be a warrior—that he was a man more like themselves than like their professors.

In Thucydides there is a soul every bit as powerful as his ideas. What has nearly killed classical learning is not too little but rather too much scholarly information, at the expense of unbridled enthusiasm about the unscholarly Greeks. In our eleventh hour of classics, we can often learn the most about Thucydides from those who still remain very much Thucydidean in their own lives.

Part II

Writing About War

CHAPTER 4

Thalatta! Thalatta!

The timeless attraction of Xenophon
*

X
ENOPHON WAS NO
Thucydides. He clearly lacked the latter’s ability to offer universal human truths from the often mundane events of the Peloponnesian War and subsequent city-state conflicts. But Xenophon (ca. 430–454) traveled, fought, wrote, and hobnobbed more than almost any other Greek of his age. He also had a multifaceted ability to relate such a rich life through the art of storytelling—and nowhere better than in his gripping tale of thousands of Greek mercenaries abandoned and trapped in hostile Persia.

In spring 401
B.C.
, amid the detritus of the recently ended twenty-seven-year-long war between Athens and Sparta, about thirteen thousand Greek mercenary soldiers marched eastward in the pay of the Persian prince and would-be usurper of the throne at Persepolis, Cyrus the Younger. The Greeks weren’t quite sure where they were ultimately headed. And as out-of-work veterans happy to receive gold for the use of their spears, most of them at first didn’t seem to care—even if it was unlikely that they were simply hired, as told, to put down some quarreling among insurrectionist Persian satraps.

Instead, the so-called Ten Thousand—the majority of whom were from the Peloponnese—put their trust in their Spartan drillmasters, chiefly the brutish paymaster Clearchus, and kept pressing ahead. Most wanted money, and many were inured to military adventure after long experience fighting for all sides in the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, this ancient Wild Bunch figured that any one of them in a fair fight could lick ten Persians, and there were lots of coins to be made and little to fear. Most had been nursed on stories of the Greek victories at Marathon and Plataea, and rightly figured that in such numbers they could do pretty much as they pleased in Asia.

Not too long after starting out from Sardis, the Ten Thousand discovered that Cyrus really meant to use them to depose his brother King Artaxerxes II, and wrest away kingship of the vast Persian Empire. No matter—money was still money, and Cyrus, always a reliable friend to Greeks, could deliver on promises of even more. By September 401, after a leisurely six-month march, Cyrus’s invading army ended up on the Euphrates at the plain of Cunaxa, not far from present-day Baghdad, where they finally ran into the much larger forces of the king. Cunaxa soon proved why these clumsy, heavily armed, and querulous Greek foot soldiers were worth bringing along on a 1,500-mile trek from the Aegean.

The Greek spearmen easily broke Artaxerxes’ far larger but variegated forces, had only one wounded in the bargain, and, at the moment of their victory, figured they were going to be rich beyond comprehension. But then catastrophe struck, as a rash Cyrus—posted on the other side of the army from the Greeks—wildly rushed out at the sight of his panicking brother, was swarmed, and perished.

Not long after, both former friends and old enemies, now united into the royal Persian army under King Artaxerxes, turned in unison on the mercenaries. What followed—unlike later disastrous retreats in the Western collective memory, such as Romans slaughtered after Crassus’s disaster at nearby Carrhae or Napoleon’s apocalyptic flight from czarist Russia—was a gallant nine-month trek over some 1,500 miles northward to the Black Sea, and then west along its shore toward European Byzantium. Somehow, the Ten Thousand, through snow, ice, ambush, and famine, saved three quarters of their force and proved to be folk far more resolute and innovative than mere hired thugs. Indeed, their organization, egalitarianism, and consensual decision making more resembled a “moving polis” of free citizens and voters than a mercenary army, and explained in large part how they were able to either outsmart or outfight an array of enemies.

We know all this because in his old age, Xenophon the Athenian—the prolific author of histories, biography, and how-to manuals—wrote a comprehensive memoir of his own youthful role, thirty-something years earlier, in saving the Greek army. Although he employed the optimistic title
Anabasis
(the first-leg “march up” into the interior of Iraq), in fact, Xenophon’s account really gets going only after the Greeks were dry-gulched at Cunaxa. So the core of the work is really a katabasis, detailing the heroic slog through the cold and snows of upper Iraq, Kurdistan, and Armenia to the safety of the Black Sea, ending with a parabasis, along the southern coast of the sea back toward Byzantium and Europe.

Classicists used to be fascinated with the
Anabasis
. The adventure proved an instructive primer for subsequent Greek generals, from the Spartan king Agesilaos to Alexander the Great, who prepped their armies for their own later, successful invasions of Persia. And whatever the brutish nature of the combatants, how the Ten Thousand survived—voting on critical decisions, assigning work by committee, creating new weapons and tactics—seemed to be a testament to Hellenic genius and innovation itself, and were felt to be antithetical to the authoritarianism of their imperial Persian opponents.

THE LATE TWENTIETH
century has not been so kind to either Xenophon or his march up country. The past few decades especially have seen an understandable resurgence in the study of Thucydides and Herodotus, brilliant authors of histories that also far better meet modern postmodern and anthropological tastes. Despite his philosophical pretensions, Xenophon does not stack up as such a seminal thinker, as one who could employ his narrative of warring Greeks for higher purposes. You seem to get only what you see in the
Anabasis
—and it is not quite a monumental war between Athens and Sparta (unlike his
Hellenica
, which takes up and completes Thucydides’ incomplete narrative) or the salvation of Greece from Eastern autocracy, much less Thucydidean insight on the interplay between culture and man’s nature.

Xenophon’s Greek, also, is straightforward, lacking long antitheses and elaborate subordination. The speeches serve the events at hand and are not used as larger explications of human nature. The narrative of the
Anabasis
moves along in predictable chronological fashion. For all those reasons the work is often the first prose text assigned to second-year Greek students—which has only seemed to cement the author’s reputation for pedestrian thinking and facile expression without much grammatical complexity.

The arrival of the politically correct age was no help. The very notion that thousands of greedy Greek male killers would invade eastern peoples, bent on plunder and profit, was bad enough. But when a Westerner chronicled the entire fiasco, informed by Eurocentric prejudices about effete Persians and duplicitous Armenians, there was even less romance in survival over terrible odds. In our skeptical age, recollections referring to the author in the third person, whether Xenophon’s or Caesar’s, naturally earn charges of self-serving fabrication or at least conceit. And so much of what has been written in the past two decades about the
Anabasis
uses Xenophon as a locus classicus to take off on Western triumphalism, male supremacy, and colonialism.

Perhaps September 11, and the subsequent toppling of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, reignited some interest in this otherwise obscure tale of Western adventurism come to naught—even if bin Laden did not include Xenophon and company with the Crusades and the Reconquista in his litany of still-unpunished Western sins. In any case, in March 2003, the heavily armed Americans trudged up the Tigris-Euphrates corridor, not far from sites like Cunaxa (and Alexander’s later masterpiece battle at Gaugamela), in relatively small numbers, intent on toppling a despot, and otherwise supremely confident, despite their relative ignorance of what they were getting into.

Robin Lane Fox, best known for an engaging biography of Alexander the Great, organized a symposium on the
Anabasis
in October and November 2001 at Oxford University. Yale University Press published the subsequent twelve essays in 2004 under the somewhat confusing title
The Long March
—while the trek was long, it little resembled Mao’s more famous escape.

It should be admitted at the outset that there is little chance non-classicists will read
The Long March
. Besides the fact that few Americans now know who Xenophon was, the essay titles range from “Sex, Gender and the Other in Xenophon’s
Anabasis
” (by Fox) to “You Can’t Go Home Again: Displacement and Identity in Xenophon’s
Anabasis
” (by John Ma), and they reflect the university seminar rather than the interest of the general readers. Yet, compared with most such collections in the contemporary academic genre,
The Long March
turns out to be an engaging read.

Thomas Braun, in “Xenophon’s Dangerous Liaisons,” gives a nice portrait of both the Spartan mercenary warlord Clearchus and the Persian prince Cyrus. But the charm of his essay, aside from his constant references to having studied classics with the greats (like Tony Andrewes and Russell Meiggs), is how it politely strips away the sometimes warm and fuzzy Xenophonean veneer from the tyrannical Clearchus and the would-be fratricide Cyrus—and from Xenophon himself, who, after all, went to kill others largely in pursuit of profit. They were not nation-builders, nor imperialists, but rather simply contractors, like their modern counterparts working for a private company like Blackwater that provides veteran mercenaries for various tasks in the Middle East for a set price. That they were not Persian grandees in the hire of a despotic Artaxerxes does not quite make them Hellenic liberators either.

In “Xenophon’s Ten Thousand as a Fighting Force,” Michael Whitby explains how the march offers a valuable prognosis of an evolving Greek warfare to come. While hoplite crashes no longer constituted the main arena of war, phalanxes of heavy infantry still could change an entire theater—if generals were wise enough to incorporate light-armed cavalry and archers into a multifaceted army without worrying about the social connotation or past tradition that often hampered military efficacy.

The Ten Thousand, then, really were a precursor to Alexander, who crushed his enemies at four set-piece battles with phalangites, but who also got to those battlefields only through the use of almost every other type of troops imaginable. One of the great stories of ancient military history was the divorce of infantry organization, tactics, and weaponry in the fourth-century
B.C.
from the original agrarian moral landscape of its birth. That evolution saw small farmers of the phalanx in heavy bronze panoplies give way to hired phalangites with eighteen-feet-long pikes. Somewhere in between lie the hired hoplites of the Ten Thousand, who ventured into exotic terrain against untraditional enemies, requiring changes in organization, armament, and tactics.

James Roy, in “The Ambitions of a Mercenary,” reminds us that most of the Ten Thousand were Peloponnesians, and then, again, mostly Arcadian hoplites. Neither rich nor poor, they were probably recruited from hardscrabble farming families on the rocky plateaus of Arcadia, who went east not so much to escape poverty as to find wealth in good wages and booty that might earn them, like Xenophon himself, a nice retirement estate back in rural Greece. Xenophon, like Wellington in India, came home from Asia a relatively rich man. The Ten Thousand may now seem like romantic explorers, but almost all of them went east for money, either in wages from Cyrus or in booty from Artaxerxes—or both.

TIM ROOD, WHO
contributes an essay to the Fox volume on the speeches in the
Anabasis
and the resurgence of Panhellenism, offers in a new book almost everything that we might have wished—and perhaps far more besides—about just two immortal words, “The Sea! The Sea!” (
thalatta, thalatta
), that famous chorus of exultation that Xenophon’s men hollered after catching a glimpse of the Black Sea. The survivors were almost done in after their harrowing winter escape from Iraq. From atop Mount Theches, near Trapezus, they caught unexpected sight of the coast far below, which meant salvation and a return to civilization among the Hellenic communities along the southern shore.