Summer IX. Anabasis

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer VIII. Heat + light

I read much less than I used to do; I think much more. Yet what is the use of thought which can no longer serve to direct life? Better, perhaps, to read and read incessantly, losing one’s futile self in the activity of other minds.

This summer I have taken up no new book, but have renewed my acquaintance with several old ones which I had not opened for many a year. One or two have been books such as mature men rarely read at all -- books which it is one’s habit to “take as read”; to presume sufficiently known to speak of, but never to open. Thus, one day my hand fell upon the Anabasis, the little Oxford edition which I used at school, with its boyish sign-manual on the fly-leaf, its blots and underlinings and marginal scrawls. To my shame I possess no other edition; yet this is a book one would like to have in beautiful form. I opened it, I began to read -- a ghost of boyhood stirred in my heart -- and from chapter to chapter was led on, until after a few days I had read the whole.

... Were this the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to learn the language in order to read it. The Anabasis is an admirable work of art, unique in its combination of concise and rapid narrative with colour and picturesqueness. Herodotus wrote a prose epic, in which the author’s personality is ever before us. Xenophon, with curiosity and love of adventure which mark him of the same race, but self-forgetful in the pursuit of a new artistic virtue, created the historical romance. What a world of wonders in this little book, all aglow with ambitions and conflicts, with marvels of strange lands; full of perils and rescues, fresh with the air of mountain and of sea! ...

Alpha.

Where to start with this? His first paragraph if full of “but!”s for me. I may read a bit less now, since I read less at a time, precisely so I can think more. His notion of a time when thought is obsolete is truly foreign to me... I was tempted to write that it was Greek to me.

By a really startling coincidence, in just the past week I was advising a fellow YouTube commenter (on a video about the BEF fighting retreat from Mons to the Marne, in the opening weeks of the Great War) to read the Anabasis. My copy is a Penguin paperback that is nice enough (by my standards) and, of course, translated into English as The Persian Expedition. I would as soon learn to fly a plane so I could travel to Europe, as learn a language so I could read a particular book. If I had any ability to learn languages I would learn Japanese so I could read biographies of Imperial Japanese Navy admirals that I can’t find in English. Or I would learn French so I could read biographies of Marshal Berthier, for the same reason.

Xenophon and Thucydides are the fathers of written history and, of the two, I somewhat prefer Xenophon -- in part because he was also of Socrates’ set in Athens, and actually wrote an alternate Symposium to Plato’s more famous version. (Recently I went to my shelves to find Xenophon’s Symposium only to discover I don’t own a copy. I neglected to search online -- because Xenophon and Internet don’t normally mingle in my mind -- but of course the book does exist, and in a fairly attractive version, in cyberspace here.)

Herodotus seems to have been the most gullible of the Hellenic race. In my imagination, word would spread through any barbarian village Herodotus entered that a Greek had arrived who would believe absolutely anything... and write it down for posterity. It has been many years since I’ve read either of these authors -- though now I’m thinking of re-reading Xenophon -- but the only story I recall Herodotus actually having reservations about, was the story of the Phoenicians who claimed to have circumnavigated Africa. Of course this is also why we now have reason to believe the story, since what Herodotus found unbelievable was that you could go from summer to winter by sailing south. But even this is interesting.

On the one hand, Herodotus rejects a story because the details are not in agreement with his conception of reality -- rather than questioning that conception of reality based on new data. On the other hand, he still relates the story including the details he finds suspicious so that we, much later, can read him and think, “Damn, those Phoenicians must have really done it.” He so easily could have ignored the story or dropped the details that sounded fishy. So I have to give him credit, and if the BBC some day has a feature on the giant, gold-digging ants of South Asia, I will owe him a heartfelt apology.

Next: Summer X. Pilgrimage.