WHAT I DIDN'T LEARN FROM THE  ANABASIS 

Jerry Harkins

Teachers are workers who spend a great deal of time with other people's children.  This is not as much fun as you might suppose but someone has to do it to preserve the sanity of parents.  God is amused by the whole idea of purgatory on earth and has struck a deal with the Teachers' Union:  salvation for a regular supply of slapstick.  It is not known why this is the Christian God's favorite kind of humor.  The Greek gods, after all, had much more sophisticated tastes.  You never heard a belly laugh from Mount Olympus during a performance of a play by Aristophanes.  Of course you probably wouldn't laugh either.  As any literature teacher will be happy to explain to you (at length) great literature is not about ha-ha comedy.  Instead, comedy is merely the term used to classify works in which the good guy somehow manages to be alive at the final curtain.  There is, for example, nothing humorous about the Book of Job except that the hero manages to survive God's best efforts to make him miserable.

As both student and teacher, I have had many encounters with great literature.  Stultifying encounters for the most part.  Exhibit A is The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, a novel so irredeemably boring that even the Cliff Notes should be burned as a threat to the public health.  Now this is merely my opinion and is born entirely of my narrow-mindedness with respect to leisure pursuits.  I simply cannot abide having to pay for the privilege of becoming depressed.  There is a sufficient supply of depression available free in the real world and I have no need to attend to the psychodynamic obsessions of serialist composers, British televisions dramas or French cineastes.  I stand condemned by the many Best Books published by the distinguished critics of The New York Times newspaper.  Almost never have I, a voracious reader, read a book that made their cut.  Or one of the obscure authors they interview every week.  The Times always asks, "What books are currently on your nightstand?"  Not surprisingly, the respondents seem to read mostly each other's work.  Actually I wonder if the Times knows that the original purpose of the nightstand was to conceal  a chamber pot and contain its noxious odor – a perfect example of convergent evolution and appropriate re-purposing.

 In high school I studied ancient Greek.  It was an elective which I hoped might
impress the girls.  The very first day, Father McGrail introduced himself and his next words were, “Please turn to Page One of the Anabasis. Let’s look at the first sentence.” It read, “Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται παῖδες δύο, πρεσβύτερος μὲν Ἀρταξέρξης,νεώτερος δὲ Κῦρος.”  Instant, total immersion.  It seems Darius II, King of the Persian Empire, and Parysatis, his principal wife, had two sons, Artaxerxes the elder, named after his paternal grandfather, and Cyrus the younger.  It takes a
while for a novice to absorb any of this information from the gibberish displayed above just as it took   poor Alan Turing a while to figure out the gibberish produced by the Enigma machine. 

Actually His Majesty had thirteen legitimate children at least seven of whom had no names –  no names that have come down to us at any rate.  He died before our story begins and Parysatis favored the succession of her younger son for reasons that are not clear.  It always struck me that there must be a good story there but we don't actually know much about any of the Persian actors except, of course, that they were the bad guys.  We do know that Parysatis was unsuccessful and her older son became King Artaxeres II.  (She later got her revenge by poisoning Art's principal wife.  He didn't miss her very much as he had 349 others who provided him with 150 sons.  An amazing achievement in the days before professional basketball.)  But the history was written by Xenophon who, while not technically on the winning side of the conflict, was part of a Greek expeditionary force of 10,000 soldiers hired by Cyrus to overthrow Artaxerxes.  Being Greek, these mercenaries were the good guys even if they were working for the bad guys.  Sadly Cyrus was killed in the climactic battle of Cunaxa (modern Baghdad) and the Greeks, now beset by the King's loyalists, were stranded far from home.  The Anabasis tells the story of how Xenophon managed to lead them north across 500 miles of foodless deserts and snow-filled mountain passes toward the safety of the Greek colonies on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea.  Harassed by the Persians loyal to Artaxeres and half starving, they reached the port of Trabzon in modern Turkey and broke out into their immortal cheer, "Thlatta, thalatta!"  The sea, the sea!  Xenophon did not stress that this great feat of generalship was a retreat much less a rout.  Rather he thought of it as an advance to the rear.  The memoirs of generals are no more reliable than any other memoirs which is why you think Julius Caesar won decisively every battle he fought in Gaul and why the British think Bernard Law Montgomery was a military genius surrounded by allies who were idiots.  By now you may also know that in spite of the lovely Libby's 45-year PR campaign to the contrary, her husband, George Armstrong Custer, was a military moron.

I know scholars think the Anabasis relates one of the great adventure stories of all time but from my point of view it only goes to show that scholars are as easily amused as God.  For one thing, almost all the swashbuckling parts take place before the book begins and, for another, the Anabasis simply does not qualify as beach or bathtub reading.  You need a scorecard to keep track of the players and the teams they play for.  For example, a few sentences into the book, Xenophon informs us about the beginning of the plot:

Still another army was being collected for him [Cyrus] in the Chersonese which is opposite Abydus, in the following manner: Clearchus was a Lacedaemonian exile; Cyrus, making his acquaintance, came to admire him, and gave him ten thousand darics. And Clearchus, taking the gold, collected an army by means of this money, and using the Chersonese as a base of operations, proceeded to make war upon the Thracians who dwell beyond the Hellespont, thereby aiding the Greeks. Consequently, the Hellespontine cities of their own free will sent Clearchus contributions of money for the support of his troops. So it was that this army also was being secretly maintained for Cyrus.

It will be quite a while before we find out that this secret army was the very same one Xenophon eventually led to the sea.  More annoyingly, we are told that this war was aiding the Greeks which is bound to confuse the reader who knows that the army was bought by and fighting for Cyrus.  The Greeks, as usual, were at each others' throats which was an impediment to anything like a Greek consensus on the subject of Persia.  Moreover, Clearchus, was not an exile from Lacedonia but rather a fugitive under a death sentence for disobeying orders.  In fact, he was a bona fide mercenary from Sparta.  After Cyrus died, Clearchus became commander-in-chief of the whole army but was betrayed and sold to Artaxerxes who had him executed.  One final point about this story:  if you believe that the good citizens of Hellespont donated money to Clearchus willingly, you may not want to accept any more calls from Nigerian Princes.

After selling out Athens by fighting for Persia, Xenophon sold out Persia and went home but soon sold out Athens again, this time to Sparta, a crime for which he was banished.  Well, he didn't like Athens very much anyway because of its democratic philosophy (which in truth was more pretension than philosophy) but that's not important because by then the story had long since come to its end.  Mercifully.

A close reading of the Anabasis will quickly disclose that it's more fiction than history.  For example, Xenophon claims his side won the battle of Cunaxa and only had to retreat because Cyrus was killed.  He tells a cockamamie story about why Cyrus was irreplaceable but that was pure hogwash.  The Greeks did acquit themselves well although Xenophon's claim that they suffered only one casualty is nonsense. But the more compelling question is this:  having kicked Artaxerxes' ass, why did Xenophon now feel compelled to retreat?  My guess is they had run out of money but that's not a very heroic reason.  Nor is any possible alternative.  The fact is Artaxeres survived and Cyrus did not.  Aside from his mother, Cyrus didn't have many friends but, those he did have would have been hard pressed to think of him as the winner of the battle.  Had the Greeks stayed around they would have been slaughtered because their allies had already been decimated and they were virtually alone against a King who now was not only alive but really pissed off.

The moral of the story is that you don't have to feel bad about being unable to keep track of the various Peloponnesian Wars or the Punic Wars or the War of the Austrian Succession for that matter even though the latter had a local version called the French and Indian War.  By extension, you don't need to worry about your ignorance of history in general.  There is no line, fine or otherwise, between history and mythology.  As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote;  “Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.”  Of course Schopenhauer was one of the most unpleasant, misanthropic, misogynist creatures God ever created.  But in this case, he was right.  And it doesn't matter.  What is important is not what is true but what people believe to be true.  Call it Libby Custer's Axiom.  Or perhaps Gresham's Anti-axiom:  myth always Trumps truth.  The only exception is the myth that studying ancient Greek is useful for impressing girls.