Where Xenophon Gets The Greeks Out of a Jam

The March Up Country by Xenophon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My 4-star evaluation is a blend of the original story itself (kinda cool, though flawed enough to only be about a 3 from me) and the English translation (which I thought was excellent, 5 stars).

I can't find a definitive date for the translation, but it appears to come from just before or around the time of World War II, and there's no doubt in my mind that someone could do an amazing translation in 2024 that reads more smoothly or, for that matter, has better notes. But I don't have any quibbles with the language, and I barely even thought about the translation as I read, and that usually means he's done the job. So hat tip to Mr. Rouse.

The story itself, in the original Greek, is very cool in its way. It's amazing to hear the thoughts of someone from 24 centuries ago. Kinda shocking, actually. His morality is very different from that of a modern man. And at a surface level, this is a very exciting, illuminating, almost unbelievable adventure story. Ten thousand Greek soldiers 1500 miles from home, in enemy territory, surrounded by armies, have to fight their way back to Greek lands by crossing rivers, climbing mountains, facing tribe after tribe of hostile natives, negotiating or fighting to acquire enough supplies to hold off starvation, devising new defensive strategies to survive, all while trying to hold together a coalition among the various Greeks so that they didn't fracture and die separately.

That's all pretty great.

But then the story reaches a sort of climax, very near to resolution, then proceeds to wander off into random wars that they sign on for, long passages that sound like a courtroom, boring personal and political disagreements, all leading to a vague, unsatisfying conclusion. What I'm saying is that the final third is nothing like a Hollywood script. I would have to end it when they reach the Black Sea and find some Greek colonies, small cities along the shore. Yay! We're saved!

Narrator: they weren't saved. That wasn't the end.

But it's still fun in parts and well worth reading for the insights into the minds of people then. I'm not sure, even after googling, if the frequent sacrifices made through the story were animal or human. (They are often called "victims," which points one way, but might be misleading. Or so I read online.) Putting that question aside, the "might makes right" morality of the story is disturbing but informative. Nobody has any qualms at all about raiding a peaceful village, killing a bunch of people, taking all their food, and making the rest of the people captives to be sold as slaves later. They don't seem too worried about breaking agreements. In fact, using force to hold someone to an agreement seems to be the norm. Being fooled by someone is more shameful, apparently, than fooling someone. It's things like this that I really didn't know that I found particularly interesting.

I wish Xenophon knew the questions we'd have, because I have more now than I did when I started. Very near the end he mentions his servant, and I realize it's the first I've heard of it. I imagined him setting up his own tent and cooking own his food, but nope. These guys had non-combatants with them, even a thousand miles from home. Probably some of the slaves they took. Women aren't mentioned, or I missed it if they were--Cyrus had women with him, members of his family, all in fancy litters, but I thought it was just him--but maybe the Greeks had women with them. Some of the things Xenophon assumes everyone knows are exactly the things I want to read about. He told us how wide every river was, but he didn't tell us everything I wanted to know about their life in camp.

There is a lot of military strategy here, and that's great. It shows how they created a small mounted group because they were getting torn up without it, and how they recruited some of their guys to be slingers, holding off the armies chasing them with their lead bullets. And there are many things like this, where we see them growing more and more sophisticated in order to survive.

Anyway, this is pretty entertaining and quite informative. At about 150 pages, it's not too long to look into if one has a little curiosity about it.

Recommended for writers and history nerds.

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