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Message:: [QUOTE="Nathan B., post: 4564200, member: 112852"]It's nice to see a fellow Xenophon fan.  I thought I would add a few remarks. I always feel that Xenophon has for too long been underappreciated by scholars (ever since the 19th century, when his reputation declined substantially from its hitherto very high place).  Xenophon's history has often been considered inferior to Thucydides'. His philosophy has for long been considered less "philosophical" than Plato.  (And there are reasons for both sentiments.) But he was one hell of a writer.  Thucydides did not live to complete his History of the Peloponnesian War--in fact, his book ends mid-sentence.  Xenophon aimed to carry on the account of this history and bring it closer to his own present-day, so he wrote his wonderful Hellenika, which picks off pretty much exactly where Thucydides left off.  In so doing, he contributed to a massive historiographical project that began with Herodotus' coverage of the war of the Greeks with Persia, continued through Thucydides' account of the war between Athens and Sparta, and finished with the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea (in 362 BC), in which an alliance led by Thebes crushed the Spartan military machine in a war that exhausted the Greek cities, paving the way for their conquest and domination by Alexander the Great only thirty years later. Xenophon wrote several Socratic dialogues, including a Symposium (you can read them in the Penguin Classics book Xenophon: Conversations of Socrates). He also wrote two works that I have not yet gotten to, but which I suspect are extremely interesting: (1) a work on household management, which may be of interest to this forum's readers, in particular, and (2) the Cyropedia, which was an embellished biography (i.e. part fiction) of the Persian king Cyrus.  Xenophon's portrayal of Persian government apparently had a substantial effect on the thinking of some of the US's founding fathers. I get the impression that the pendulum in terms of scholarly estimations may have started to reverse course, as there are now some scholars who have argued that the scholarly consensus, which began in the 19th century, that sought to depreciate Xenophon was overdone.--Here are a few snippets from my long-ish journal entry on the Hellenika, which I read in the Landmark edition, as I had done with Herodotus: Now it must be said that Xenophon has nowhere near the intellectual rigour or balanced honesty of Thucydides. Where Thucydides can critically if coldly appreciate both Athenian and Spartan military doings, Xenophon writes explicitly with all the warmth of a Spartan partisan. (Background: Thucydides was an Athenian general who was exiled, and he spent considerable time in Sparta. Xenophon actually fought in Spartan armies and hobnobbed with Spartan kings.) Xenophon also falls short of the great historian’s standards when it comes to methodology. Unlike the atheistic Thucydides, the believer Xenophon often has recourse to the supposed will of the god when it comes to interpreting history. On the other hand, Xenophon is probably more entertaining than Thucydides, and I found myself engrossed in the personalities of many of his characters. Xenophon’s history really makes the ancient wars of the Greeks come alive for me. What made all those soldiers tick? Appeals to honour and glory, certainly, but appeals to money, too. (Sparta would not have defeated Athens without Persian money to pay for its ships and mercenary rowers for its fleet.) I’m grateful for the opportunity to have read Xenophon. Despite the fact that he is a “second-rate” historian compared to Thucydides, he is still very certainly worthwhile, being both entertaining, and instructive.--I think it's appropriate to end this note with my journal entry on the Anabasis: Xenophon’s Anabasis may well be the perfect novel. A skillfully-structured narrative, gripping characters, and unusually vivid imagery combine to make the story far more of a good read than many other literary texts. Then, too, the work is much more enjoyable than Xenophon’s own Hellenika. The edition I used was the Folio Society’s one, titled “The Persian Expedition”; the book is known by other titles, too: “March of the 10,000,” “and “The March Up-Country.” While my FS volume was quite short on explanatory aids, the fact that I had already read the Hellenika in the Landmark edition was most helpful. The story, of course, is based on history, though it is clear that the book was written as an apologia by its main protagonist, the author himself. In a nutshell, a “gang of roughs” (as the FS introduction calls the 10,000), were mercenary soldiers hired out of various cities in Greece by Cyrus the Younger, who wished to seize the crown from his brother Artaxerxes II. Despite being, apparently, victorious, Cyrus was slain in battle with Artaxerxes deep in Babylonia. A short truce prevailed for negotiations to take place between the Greek generals and the Persian monarch, but this ended with the massacre of the unsuspecting Greek generals and their aids in the Persian camp. One man only escaped, running and “holding his entrails in his hands” until he gave the bad news to the Greeks. From that point on, Xenophon steadily rose to challenge after challenge until, following the departure of the more senior general weeks later, he was in command of the entire army himself. The army had to deal with logistics problems involving their baggage train, their constant need for food, their ever-present struggle against enemies from Persian cavalry forces to Kurds and other hardy folk in the mountain ranges of the north. The soldiers had to brave the winter snows in the Turkish Alps that made men so sleepy that Xenophon had to beat them to wake them up and so prevent their freezing to death. Throughout the story, the stature of Xenophon grows until the story becomes less the story of the 10,000 and more a story of one man, the writer himself: his motivations, his conduct, his principles, and his ideas. It makes for fascinating reading, not least because the narrative structures and characterization reminded me, on the one hand, of Moses and his frustrations with his people in Exodus, and on the other, of Bilbo Baggins as well as Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin’s struggles not only where you’d expect them–in enemy territory–but where you wouldn’t: upon their return home. As things turned out, Xenophon would go on to gain the friendship of one of the kings of Sparta, while most of the 10,000 who escaped Persia would be reincorporated back into the “Greek” (i.e. Spartan) army.  This led to a definite lessening in Persian goodwill towards Sparta (a goodwill that had helped to defeat Athens during the Peloponnesian War), and so it helped to contribute to the downfall of Sparta from its preeminent position within Greece. The Anabasis, as Xenophon’s best work, cries out for a responsible adaptation by Hollywood.  From the hero Cyrus the younger’s fatal refusal to wear a helmet as he rode into battle with his heavily-armed troops, to the famous cry of “θαλαττα, θαλαττα!” (the cry of the returning army upon catching its first sight of the sea after a march of thousands of kilometers through hostile enemy territory), to the frostbitten noses, ears, and feet that were amputated during the pass through the Kurdish mountains--the entire work reads less like what one expects from a book, and more like what one would expect from a Hollywood blockbuster.  That would be an exciting movie, and one that could be made, with little effort, into something much better and more thought-provoking than your typical action flick.[/QUOTE]

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