Best wishes for a sweet and healthy year to all of my friends, colleagues and readers.
(Photo: Melissa Goodman)
Month: September 2009
Xenophon Roundtable: The Shadow of Herodotus
Cunaxa is an interesting counter-point to the three traditional pillars of Herodotus’s Histories, Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. While those three confrontations took place in or near Attica, the cradle of democracy, Cunaxa happens in Mesopotamia, the cradle of despotism. Herodotus skillfully built a narrative of the clash of East and West, Freedom and Slavery, Democracy and Despotism out of the Persian attempts to conquer an obscure people on the fringes of the Known World. His account looms over those of his successors, even the works of the prickly Thucydides, who considered himself superior in every respect to the world traveling gossip from Halicarnassus.
Xenophon was no exception. The Anabasis almost reads like a strange mirror version of the Histories. Instead of the Ascent of Darius, Xerxes, or Mardonius into the heart of Hellas, it’s the descent of the Greeks into the heart of Achaemenid power. The squabbling Greeks, under the less than inspired figures of Clearchus, Proxenus, and Menon, appear rather shabby compared to the heroic generation of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Pausanias. Cyrus in his foolish death and disfigured body and Artaxerxes II in his pettiness and undignified scramble to keep his throne fall far short of the power and majesty of Darius and Xerxes, so exalted that Herodotus portrayed them as living embodiments of hubris, pride that not only rivaled but threatened that of the gods themselves.
Michigan Employment
When I was back in college they had on campus interviewing. At the time in the very late 80’s we were in a midst of a recession and I was pretty open to talking to virtually any company.
I received a call from a recruiter and he started talking to me about an opportunity with Ryder trucking. Then he said something that I’ll never forget
“It’s in Detroit and don’t hang up”
The words ran together very closely and with urgency so it is obvious that this was a common problem, even then – as soon as people even heard the word “Detroit” they simply hung up the phone as a non-starter. I didn’t hang up on the guy (I was too polite back then) but I certainly viewed it as some sort of last ditch, about-to-be-homeless type of opportunity.
I have since worked near Detroit (in the vast suburbs) and I don’t want to slam the place based on stereotypes. The suburbs are very nice and the whole area seems to function OK – you might go into the city proper for a sporting event (which has security) but that’s about it.
This Wall Street Journal article reminded me of that time with the recruiter as it describes how white collar employees, often managers with years of experience in fields like marketing and technology, are finding themselves being laid off from the auto makers and related industries in Michigan. I’m sure that many, if not most, are hard working people just trying to do their best in a difficult situation. Since the housing market in Detroit has pretty much collapsed as well, people can’t sell their houses (except at a huge loss), and it isn’t obvious where they’d go, so they are just remaining in the state and are trying to make ends meet however they can. One former manager that they profile is now a janitor.
Xenophon’s Ascent
The title of the book under consideration is, in English translation, The Anabasis of Cyrus. The title has two key words, a noun “anabasis” and a proper name “Cyrus”.
The identity of Cyrus is unambiguous. We know Cyrus was the younger brother of the King of Persia (really an emperor of many kingdoms). Cyrus was the satrap of Lydia and Phrygia, but he aspired to seize the throne of his brother the King for himself. Cyrus raised an army, led it against the King, and died in battle at Cunaxa, in 401 BC.
The other key word in the title is “Anabasis”, which is transliterated, but not translated, from the Greek. The translator tells us this about the word:
This noun has the root meaning of “a going up,” and it is used to indicate such ordinary ascents as the mounting of a horse or a way of going up a hill. In the sense of a march upcountry, it is used first by Xenophon, only in this work, and only in [certain passages] … It is used three times in Plato’s Republic to indicate the ascent from the cave. The related verb anabaino is used of an “ascent” from the coast to the interior by Herodotus … and by Plato … as well as by Xenophon. I generally translated the verb as “to ascend” and its opposite as “to descend”.
Book I contains the tale of the assembly of the army, and its “march upcountry”, from coastal Ionia, where the Greek mercenary portion of the host came ashore into Asia, and its march into the interior, upcountry from Sardis, Cyrus’s capital, until the two armies meet at the battle of Cunaxa. At the battle, the Persian King’s army in part was defeated, on the section of the battlefield where it faced the Greek mercenaries. The Greek mercenaries “won” their part of the battle of Cunaxa. But elsewhere on the battlefield, due in part to the rashness of Cyrus, and his resulting death, the King’s army defeated the rest of Cyrus’s army. At that point, the Greeks, despite tactical success, were marooned in the middle of a hostile country.
Thus we are faced with a bit of a puzzle from the outset.