February BOTM: The March of the Ten Thousand, by Xenophon.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > February BOTM: The March of the Ten Thousand, by Xenophon.

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Welcome earthlings to the Awful Book of the Month!
In this thread, we choose one work of ~~literature~~ absolute crap and read/discuss it over a month. If you have any suggestions of books, choose something that will be appreciated by many people, and has many avenues of discussion. We'd also appreciate if it were a work of ~~literature~~ complete drivel that is easily located from a local library or book shop, as opposed to ordering something second hand off the internet and missing out on a week's worth of reading. Better yet, books available on e-readers.

Resources:

Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org

- A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best.

SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/

- A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here.

:siren:

For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM me. :siren:

Past Books of the Month

[for BOTM before 2014, refer to archives]

2014:
January: Ursula K. LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness
February: Mikhail Bulgalov - Master & Margarita
March: Richard P. Feynman -- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
April: James Joyce -- Dubliners
May: Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- 100 Years of Solitude
June: Howard Zinn -- A People's History of the United States
July: Mary Renault -- The Last of the Wine
August: Barbara Tuchtman -- The Guns of August
September: Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice
October: Roger Zelazny -- A Night in the Lonesome October
November: John Gardner -- Grendel
December: Christopher Moore -- The Stupidest Angel

2015:
January: Italo Calvino -- Invisible Cities
February: Karl Ove Knausgaard -- My Struggle: Book 1.
March: Knut Hamsun -- Hunger
April: Liu Cixin -- 三体 ( The Three-Body Problem)
May: John Steinbeck -- Cannery Row
June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood
(Hiatus)
August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me
September: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone
October:Seth Dickinson -- The Traitor Baru Cormorant
November:Svetlana Alexievich -- Voices from Chernobyl
December: Michael Chabon -- Gentlemen of the Road

2016:
January: Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwwY9y6O3hw

Current:

The March Up Country (The Anabasis) of Xenophon

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It's entertaining, it's action-packed, it's philosophical, it's political, it's historical.

It's free online here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1170

The nutshell version is this:

quote:

Xenophon was a student of Socrates, yes, that Socrates. He was a young kid and wanted to be a soldier but the Pelopponesian Wars had just ended and his city lost. One of his buddies was leading a mercenary army, and being young and ambitious, he joined up (after asking Socrates' advice. Sortof.)

The mercenary army, roughly ten thousand men, got hired for a secret mission and marched for a couple months. Then they realized the secret mission was to try to help the Persian King's brother seize the Persian throne.

They march into the heart of Persia, the greatest kingdom in the world at that time. They are massively outnumbered. They fight anyway. They fight all drat day. They kill everyone who comes close to them. End of the day, they're holding the battlefield.

But there's a small problem. The guy who hired them, yeah, he died. And the Persian King didn't.

The mercenary generals, including Xenophon's buddy, go to deal with the Persian King to see if they can talk their way out of this mess. He kills them all despite the flag of truce.

That night, all the Greeks who are left are sitting around their campfires going "oh gently caress." They have no leaders, they're stuck a thousand miles deep in Persia with no supplies except their weapons, they have no leaders, nobody's got any idea what to do, basically they're all just envisioning death on a Persian impaling spike.

But Xenophon has had an education. And nobody else is taking charge. Somebody has to step up and lead. He does. And at his inspiration, they decide to fight their way home.

The rest is, as they say, history. Written in this book, step by step, battle by battle, wound by wound.

Don't be afraid that because this is a "classic" it'll be too difficult: Xenophon was a military man and he wrote like one -- plainly, simply, straightforwardly. If you can read a modern fantasy novel, you can read this too -- it's all swords and gods and battles, so pretty much just the same thing you're already used to!

Historical Context:

This mercenary expedition took place in a historical lull.

Prologue:

Roughly eighty years before, Athens and Sparta, together, leading the rest of the greek city-states, had defeated the invading Persian army and navy. If you saw Frank Miller's 300, that fight. This was a huge deal, because the Persian army was many, many times larger, and the Greeks won basically just through superior training, skill, and tactics. There aren't many modern analogues to the scope of this victory, but if you've played Civilization, imagine one unit of Hoplites defeating thirty units of spearmen and chariots.

After that, though, the Greeks spent the next few decades fighting each other -- Athens and Sparta fighting over who was top dog. For a long time, Athens routinely won the sea battles and Sparta won the land battles; eventually AThens hosed up and lost (they weren't helped by a plague).

So it's a few years after the end of that (semi-civil, greek against greek; internecine) war) is over. Athens is still the acknowledged leader in terms of philosophy and the arts and sciences and mathematics and knowledge and so forth, but Sparta is in charge. Sparta set up a puppet government in Athens that ruled it for a few years, but they get kicked out in 403. Now it's 401 BC. Athens -- and every other city in Greece -- have a lot of trained soldiers left, but nobody wants to fight any more because Sparta has already won and there's no point.

So where to go? Well, we kicked those Persians' asses, right? Maybe try that again?

Aftermath:

The other half of the historical context is what happened afterwards. After Xenophon's group fought their way back, they had effectively proved that a mixed Greek force could march at will, undefeated, through Persian territory. That gave someone an idea, and that someone was Alexander the Great. xenophon directly inspired Alexander and Alexander kept a copy of Xenophon's book with him during his conquest of Persia. That makes this book arguably one of the single most influential books in the entire course of world history. Without Xenophon, there might have been no Library at Alexandria, no Greek conquest of Persia, no preservation of Greek philosophers and writings through the European dark ages, no Renaissance, etc.

About the Author

quote:

Xenophon (/ˈzɛnəfən, -ˌfɒn/; Greek: Ξενοφῶν [ksenopʰɔ̂ːn], Xenophōn; c. 430 � 354 BC), son of Gryllus, of the deme Erchia of Athens, also known as Xenophon of Athens, was a Greek historian, soldier, mercenary,[1] and student of Socrates. While not referred to as a philosopher by his contemporaries, his status as such is now a topic of debate. He is known for writing about the history of his own times, the late 5th and early 4th centuries BC, especially for his account of the final years of the Peloponnesian War. His Hellenica, which recounts these times, is considered to be the continuation of Thucydides� History of the Peloponnesian War. His youthful participation in the failed campaign of Cyrus the Younger to claim the Persian throne inspired him to write his most famous work, Anabasis.

Discussion, Questions & Themes:

One of my favorite things about this book is that it's a really compelling microcosm of Greek political theory and the practical application of Greek philosophy. The army is a mixed bag of Spartans, Athenians, etc., and they all have to get along. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don't. There aren't any firmly fixed leaders so keeping the leadership is a constant struggle (and one Xenophon doesn't always succeed at). All those pretty theories Xenophon learned from Socrates get put to the practical test -- and a test that lives depend on, because if the mercenaries lose their cohesion, if they fall apart as a fighting unit, they'll all get killed.

Pacing

Try to go section by section and post as you read through the book if you can. There are some action elements and a bit of suspense even to this book so don't rush to the end. That said, it's also 3000 years old, so no complaining if people post spoilers.

References and Further Reading

There are an almost infinite amount of other things to read that relate one way or another to this book. I'd personally recommend Mary Renault's historical fiction set in Ancient Greece, some of which (e.g. The Last of the Wine) features Xenophon as a minor character. If you have other suggestions for good companion reading, please post those suggestions in the thread.

A lot of modern fiction is to one extent or another inspired by this book (including, as per the clip above, the 1979 movie The Warriors, which transposed the action to a single day in New York).

Final Note:
If you have any suggestions to change, improve or assess the book club generally, please PM or email me -- i.e., keep it out of this thread -- at least until into the last five days of the month, just so we don't derail discussion of the current book with meta-discussion. I do want to hear new ideas though, seriously, so please do actually PM or email me or whatever, or if you can't do either of those things, just hold that thought till the last five days of the month before posting it in this thread. Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book!

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Feb 3, 2016

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 05:43

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:00

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Crashbee posted:

Is there a recommended translation? I've been looking at The Expedition of Cyrus by Robin Waterfield.

Good question. Good starting place for discussion!

The free version is by Dakyns, from the 1800's.

First version I ever read was the Rex Warner translation from the Penguin Classics series, and I've always had a fondness for it, but I've no idea how authoritative it is.

Also, these quotes from reddit:

quote:

I don't know which is best, but Project Gutenberg has Anabasis by Xenophon translated by Henry Graham Dakyns (1838�1911), a British translator, and The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis by Xenophon literally translated with explanatory notes by the Reverend John Selby Watson (1804-1884), a British classical translator and murderer noted for his plea of insanity as his defense against the murder charge. Those translations are freely available for download in a variety of electronic formats or can be read online.

quote:

Perseus has an English translation here:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0202

I wish the Landmark series would come out with their edition but I've been waiting years and they haven't.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 03:03

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Oh, it turns out that Italo Calvino, who we have featured before on BotM as the author of Invisible Cities, wrote a big essay on why you should read the Anabasis. I'll quote a chunk of it:

quote:

Reading Xenophon's Anabasis today is the nearest thing to watching an old war documentary which is repeated every so often on television or on video. The same fascination that we experience when watching the black and white of a faded film, with its rather crude contrasts of light and shade and speeded-up movements, emerges almost spontaneously from passages such as this:

quote:

They completed another fifteen parasangs in three days, every day through deep snow. The third day was particularly terrible, because of the North wind blowing against them as they marched: it raged all over the area, destroying everything and freezing their bodies . . . During the march, in order to defend their eyes from the glare of the snow, the soldiers put something black in front of them: against the danger of frostbite the most useful remedy was to keep moving the feet, never staying still and especially removing one's boots at night. . . A group of soldiers, who had been left behind because of these difficulties, saw not far off, in a valley in the middle of the snow-covered plain, a dark pool: melted snow, they thought. In fact the snow had melted there, but because of a spring of natural water, which rose nearby, sending vapours up to the sky.

But it is difficult to quote from Xenophon: what really counts is the never-ending succession of visual details and action. It is difficult to locate a passage which epitomises entirely the pleasing variety of the text. Maybe this one, from two pages before:

quote:

Some Greeks, who had moved away from the camp, reported having seen in the distance what looked like a massive army, and many fires lit in the night. When they heard this, the commanders thought it unsafe to remain bivouacked in separate quarters, and once more made the soldiers regroup. The soldiers then all camped together again, especially as the weather seemed to be improving. But unfortunately, during the night so much snow fell that it covered the men's armour, the animals, and the men themselves huddled on the ground: the animals' limbs were so stiff with the cold that they could not stand up; the men delayed before standing up because the unmelted snow lying on their bodies was a source of heat. Then Xenophon bravely got up, stripped and started to chop wood with an axe; seeing his example, one of the men got up, took the axe from his hand and continued with the chopping; others got up and lit a fire; and all of them greased their bodies, not with oil, but with unguents found in the local village, an oil made from sesame-seeds, bitter almonds and turpentine, and lard. There was also a perfumed oil made of the same substances.

The rapid shift from one visual representation to another, and from those to an anecdote, and from there again on to a description of exotic customs: this is the texture of the backdrop to a continuous explosion of exciting adventures, of unforeseen obstacles blocking the way of the itinerant army. Every obstacle is overcome, usually, by some piece of cunning on Xenophon's part: every fortified city that has to be captured, every enemy that takes the field to oppose the Greeks in open battle, every fiord to be crossed, every bit of bad weather � all of these require a piece of brilliance, a flash of genius, some cleverly thought-out stratagem on the part of this narrator-protagonist-mercenary leader. On occasions Xenophon appears to be one of those heroes from children's comics, who in every episode manage to survive against impossible odds; in fact, just as in those children's comics, there are often two protagonists in each episode: the two rival officers, Xenophon and Cheirisophus, the Athenian and the Spartan, and Xenophon's solution is always the more astute, generous and decisive one. On its own the subject matter of The Anabasis would have been ideally suited to a picaresque or mock-heroic tale: ten thousand Greek mercenaries are hired under false pretences by a Persian prince, Cyrus the Younger, for an expedition into the hinterland of Asia Minor, whose real aim was to oust Cyrus' brother, Artaxerxes II; but they are defeated at the battle of Cunaxa, and now leaderless and far from their native land, they have to find a way back home amidst very hostile peoples. All they want is to go back home, but everything they do constitutes a public menace: there are ten thousand of them, armed, but without food, so wherever they go they ravage and destroy the land like a swarm of locusts, and carry in their wake a huge following of women.

But Xenophon was not the type of writer either to be tempted by the heroic style of the epic or to have a taste for the grim and grotesque aspects of a situation such as that. His is a precise record written by an army officer, a kind of log-book containing all the distances covered, geographical reference points and details of the vegetable and animal resources, as well as a review of the various diplomatic, strategic and logistical problems and their respective solutions.

The account is interspersed with 'official statements' from high command, and speeches by Xenophon either to the troops or to foreign ambassadors. My classroom memory of these rhetorical excerpts was one of great boredom but I think I was wrong. The secret in reading The Anabasis is not to skip anything, to follow everything point by point. In each of those speeches there is a political problem, regarding either foreign policy (the attempts to establish diplomatic relations with the princes and leaders of the territories through which the Greeks have to pass) or internal politics (the discussions between the Greek leaders, with the predictable rivalry between Athenians and Spartans etc.). And since the work was written as a polemic against other generals, about the responsibilities of each person in managing that retreat, then this background of overt or merely covert polemic can only be elicited from those rhetorical pages.

As an action writer Xenophon is a model. If we compare him with the contemporary writer who is his nearest equivalent � Col. T. E. Lawrence � we see how the skill of the English writer consists in surrounding events and images with an aura of aesthetic and even ethical wonder that lies like a palimpsest beneath the factual surface of the prose; whereas in the Greek there is nothing beneath the exactness and dryness of the narration: the austere military virtues mean nothing other than austere military virtues.

. . . .

Xenophon has the great merit, in moral terms, of never mystifying or idealising his or his men's position. If he often displays an aloofness or aversion towards 'barbarian' customs, it must also be said that 'colonialist' hypocrisy is completely foreign to him. He is aware of being at the head of a horde of parasites in a foreign land, and that the 'barbarian' peoples whose lands they have invaded are in the right not his men. In his exhortations to his soldiers he never fails to remind them of their enemies' rights: 'You have to bear in mind something else. Our enemies will have time to rob us, and will have good reason for ambushing us since we are occupying their property . . .' In this attempt to give a certain 'style' or rule to this parasitical movement of greedy and violent men amidst the mountains and plains of Anatolia resides all his dignity: not tragic dignity, but rather a limited dignity, fundamentally a bourgeois dignity. We know that one can easily succeed in endowing the basest actions with style and dignity, even when they are not dictated as these were by a state of necessity. The Greek army, creeping through the mountain heights and fjords amidst constant ambushes and attacks, no longer able to distinguish just to what extent it is a victim or an oppressor, and surrounded even in the most chilling massacres of its men by the supreme hostility of indifference or fortune, inspires in the reader an almost symbolic anguish which perhaps only we today can understand.

[1978]

# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 03:52

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Interesting website on Xenophon as a philosopher:

quote:

Xenophon�s political philosophy is a matter of interpretation and some controversy. Did his relationship with Sparta incline him away from Athenian democratic values? Was his evident admiration for Persian kings indicative of an allegiance to absolute monarchy? The main works examined in an effort to reconstruct this aspect of his thought are The Education of Cyrus (also known as Cyropaedia;) a partial biography of a Persian king building an empire, the Anabasis (account of the ill-fated Greek mercenary expedition in Persia), Hiero (a conversation about tyranny), Agesilaus (biography of a Spartan general),the Constitution of the Lacedaimonians (description of the system of laws and social practices of Sparta), and Hellenica (history of Greece from 411 � 362 B.C.E., taking up where Thucydides ends). One thing is clear and beyond controversy: Xenophon has an abiding interest in describing leadership, the constellation of qualities that enables a person to function as a leader in groups, whether military, civic, or familial.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/xenophon/

# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 05:01

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Peel posted:

First off, I thought the numbers (and particularly the victories attached to those numbers) in the battles at the start seemed a little implausible. Overturning odds of ten or more to one and so on, a million-man army for the emperor. Can history goons input on how accurate the book is thought to be to the real events?

I've had the same thought before. Since you asked, and because I had already found all the links for this thread, I went and pulled up the text on Perseus:

quote:

1 The number is probably overstated. Ctesias, the King's Greek physician (see viii. 26), is said by Plutarch (Artax. 13) to have given it as 400,000

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0202%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D7%3Asection%3D11

So they're defeating odds of four to one, not ten to one. Of course, that's just this battle. Once all the other Persians abandon them, they are outnumbered by crazy amounts.

Pulling up that quote from Plutarch:

quote:

13 1 And now the thirty messengers came riding up with joy and exultation in their faces, announcing to the king his unexpected good fortune. Presently, too, he was encouraged by the number of men who flocked back to him and formed in battle array, and so he came down from the hill under the light of many torches. 2 And after he had halted at the dead body of Cyrus, and its right hand and head had been cut off (in accordance with a law of the Persians), he ordered the head to be brought to him; and grasping it by the hair, which was long and bushy, he showed it to those who were still wavering and disposed to fly. These were amazed, and made obeisance to the king, so that very soon seventy thousand men were about him and marched back with him to their camp. 3 He had marched out to the battle, as Ctesias says, with four hundred thousand men. But Deinon and Xenophon say that the army which fought under him was much larger. As to the number of his dead, Ctesias says that it p157was reported to Artaxerxes as nine thousand, but that he himself thought the slain no fewer than twenty thousand. This matter, then, is in dispute. But it is certainly a glaring falsehood on the part of Ctesias to say that he was sent to the Greeks along with Phalinus the Zacynthian and certain others. 4 For Xenophon knew that Ctesias was in attendance upon the king, since he makes mention of him and had evidently read his works; if, then, Ctesias had come to the Greeks and served as an interpreter in so momentous a colloquy, Xenophon would not have left him nameless and named only Phalinus the Zacynthian.15 The truth is that Ctesias, being prodigiously ambitious, as it would seem, and none the less partial to Sparta and to Clearchus, always allows considerable space in his narrative for himself, and there he will say many fine things about Clearchus and Sparta.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Artaxerxes*.html

That text though seems like it has its reasons for being suspected also. I think the best we can probably say is that the lower bound was 400,000 and the upper bound was a million.

Another estimate would probably come from the size of the armies Alexander faced, but I can't check those right now.

edit: just checking Wikipedia, Darius's forces at Gaugamela, vs. Alexander a generation later, were:

quote:

According to Arrian, Darius's force numbered 40,000 cavalry and 1,000,000 infantry,[28] Diodorus Siculus put it at 200,000 cavalry and 800,000 infantry,[29] Plutarch put it at 1,000,000 troops[30] (without a breakdown in composition), while according to Curtius Rufus it consisted of 45,000 cavalry and 200,000 infantry.[31] Furthermore, according to Arrian, Diodorus, and Curtius, Darius had 200 chariots while Arrian mentions 15 war elephants.[28] Included in Darius's infantry were about 2,000 Greek mercenary hoplites.[5]

So we get a similar range there.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Feb 4, 2016

# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 14:34

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Minor mind-blowing moment for me on my re-read last night.

The kindle edition I'm reading now has different footnotes from versions I'd read previously, and points out that the general Menon in this book (who gets executed by the Persians, and who Xenophon states was just out for himself and implies might have betrayed the other generals) is the same person as the Meno of the Socratic Dialogue where Socrates discusses the meaning of virtue.

quote:

The dialogue begins with Meno asking Socrates to tell him if virtue can be taught. Socrates says that he does not know what virtue is, and neither does anyone else he knows.[1] Meno responds that, according to Gorgias, virtue is different for different people, that what is virtuous for a man is to conduct himself in the city so that he helps his friends, injures his enemies, and takes care all the while that he personally comes to no harm. Virtue is different for a woman, he says. Her domain is the management of the household, and she is supposed to obey her husband. He says that children (male and female) have their own proper virtue, and so do old men�free or slaves.[2] Socrates objects: there must be some virtue common to all human beings.

. . . .

Meno proposes that virtue is the desire for good things and the power to get them. Socrates points out that this raises a second problem�many people do not recognize evil.[6] The discussion then turns to the question of accounting for the fact that so many people are mistaken about good and evil and take one for the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno

So Meno wasn't just an abstract talking head; he was someone everyone in Attic Greece knew was an out-for-himself jackass who had possibly died in torture as a result of his greed and conniving. So when Socrates says in the Platonic dialogue that not everybody can tell good from evil, it's actually a cutting barb against Meno as an individual. Similarly, when Xenophon starts ranting about what a selfish jackass Meno was, he wasn't just talking; he was saying something that must have been common knowledge in his circles.

Do we have any classical scholars who can tell me if I'm right about this analysis or not?

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 15:00

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Tao Jones posted:

Xenophon mentions that people took Cyrus's crossing of the river at Thapsacus as being an omen of his destiny to become king. But Cyrus fails; is this a criticism of omens? Prior to the battle scene at the climax, Cyrus tells Xenophon that omens and sacrifices were made and favorable, but those aren't mentioned in the text otherwise.

Wow, I'm glad you singled that out. Throughout most of the text, everything is incredibly omen-driven, to the point that Xenophon almost seems insane. There's one particular point where the army doesn't do poo poo for like five days despite having no food because the omens tell them to stay put.

In the past I'd always put that down to Xenophon writing it 30 years after everything happened and just retroactive memory justifying things, but it was a topic I was definitely hoping someone would bring up because it's incredibly strange to a modern reader. Even within that framework though that passage really stands out. I think it may be the only completely unfulfilled omen in the whole book.

quote:

I was intrigued by a bit of detail that Xenophon points out when the armies are preparing for combat -- the Persians don't wear headgear when they fight. Why not? Is this just an interesting anthropological detail, some attempt to otherize the Persians, or is it significant? Xenophon doesn't seem overly fond of 'fun facts' like Herodotus, so it kind of stuck out.

Probably my fantasy reader's background but GRRM makes a point of having characters that don't wear helmets get facial scars. Maybe he's foreshadowing Cyrus's fate here?

As to Cyrus as a model of leadership, Xenophon also wrote a Cyropaedia, but that was of Cyrus the Great, not this Cyrus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyropaedia

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Feb 9, 2016

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 04:34

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Just want to say that I'm really happy with this thread so far, thanks everyone.

How reliable a narrator do we think Xenophon is? On the one hand, he seems to pretty clearly be talking himself up at every opportunity (and also talking up how loyal he is to Sparta, which is interesting for an Athenian). On the other, though, there were roughly ten thousand other witnesses to all this; if he had lied about anything, someone would probably have called him out on it, right?

Edit: yeah for purposes of reading for fun skipping everything before the first battle is probably legit.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 16:16

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

The impression I always had from that passage was that the Greeks were wearing polished metal armor and moving in drilled, unified formation, and the Persians just had no conception of that, and reacted like we would to an alien invasion or something.

Aren't almost all the barbarians wearing cloth or wicker armor?

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 17:04

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

golden bubble posted:

That's not surprising, coming from a mercenary captain. But, as the Sack of Antwerp attests, people still failed to pay their mercenaries for at least 2000 years after Xenophon.

Thus demonstrating, via negative example, the value of a classical education.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 21:05

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Shout-out for the Zelazny reference

Rusty posted:

What makes a sacrifice unfavorable anyway? I think it's funny ever step of the way they are making sacrifices to see what direction to take. They make them in public, in private, and sometimes won't move even when they are starving because of the sacrifices. The have ships brining in animals to sacrifice as part of the war supplies. And to top it off, the guy who interprets the sacrifices rats out Xenophon's questions that he sacrifices over. It's such a large part of the book.

I started digging around online and it's surprisingly difficult to find information on ancient Greek divination by entrails. I think the presumption is you slaughter the animal and if it's shot through with cancer that's a big "no."

I did find this incredibly silly site attempting to apply etruscan Haruspexy (which we apparently have records of through Cicero) to the ritual sacrifice of . . . an egg. http://corvallistoday.com/Europe/italy_rome/etruscan.htm

# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 02:35

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Elyv posted:

2) Reading the army descriptions before the big battle, it was funny/startling to hear that the Great King's army was 1.2 million. Wikipedia says 40,000 at Cunaxa so I guess that's Xenophon basically saying "They had a shitton of guys." Would his readers actually have believed that number, or would they have understood as "Their army was really really big"?

Hrm. Tracking back the source for that wikipedia # I'm kinda suspicious of it; it seems like the source is modern revision, not contemporary .

When I looked that section up on Perseus earlier, the quote I found was

"The number is probably overstated. Ctesias, the King's Greek physician (see viii. 26), is said by Plutarch (Artax. 13) to have given it as 400,000."

So contemporary sources give a range between four hundred thousand and a million, and that's a similar range of troops given by other contemporary historical records for other Persian armies at other similar points in history (i.e., against Alexander at Gaugamela a generation later, etc). Cutting that down to a mere forty thousand would require none of the contemporary Greeks be able to count, not even the ones hired by the Persians on the other side. Of course that's possible but i'm hesitant to discard contemporary sources without really, really strong evidence.

Anyone around who can give us a more authoritative analysis than Wikipedia?

EDIT:

For comparison, here's the wikipedia entry on the army sizes at the battle of Gaugamela, where Alexander fought the Persian army a generation later under the subsequent Emperor, Darius.

quote:

Some ancient Greek historians suggest that the main Persian army numbered between 200,000 and 300,000, but some modern scholars, such as Delbruck and a number of his students, suggest that it was no larger than 50,000 because of the logistical difficulty of fielding more than 50,000 soldiers in battle at the time. However, it is possible that the Persian army could have numbered over 100,000 men.[2] One estimate is that there were 25,000 peltasts,[2] 10,000 Immortals,[26] 2,000 Greek hoplites,[5] 1,000 Bactrians,[5] and 40,000 cavalry,[4] 200 scythed chariots,[27] and 15 war elephants.[28] Hans Delbr�ck estimates Persian cavalry at 12,000 because of management issues, Persian infantry (peltast) less than that of the Greek heavy infantry, and Greek mercenaries at 8,000.[25]

Warry estimates a total size of 91,000; Welman 90,000; Delbr�ck (1978) 52,000; Engels (1920) and Green (1990) no larger than 100,000.

Ancient sources[edit]

According to Arrian, Darius's force numbered 40,000 cavalry and 1,000,000 infantry,[28] Diodorus Siculus put it at 200,000 cavalry and 800,000 infantry,[29] Plutarch put it at 1,000,000 troops[30] (without a breakdown in composition), while according to Curtius Rufus it consisted of 45,000 cavalry and 200,000 infantry.[31] Furthermore, according to Arrian, Diodorus, and Curtius, Darius had 200 chariots while Arrian mentions 15 war elephants.[28] Included in Darius's infantry were about 2,000 Greek mercenary hoplites.[5]

While Darius had a significant advantage in numbers, most of his troops were of a lower quality than Alexander's. Alexander's pezhetairoi were armed with a six-metre pike, the sarissa. The main Persian infantry was poorly trained and equipped in comparison to Alexander's pezhetairoi and hoplites. The only respectable infantry Darius had were his 2,000 Greek hoplites[5] and his personal bodyguard, the 10,000 Persian Immortals.[26] The Greek mercenaries fought in a phalanx, armed with a heavy shield but with spears no longer than three metres, while the spears of the Immortals were 2 metres long. Among the other Persian troops, the most heavily armed were the Armenians who were armed the Greek way, and probably fought as a phalanx. The rest of Darius's contingents were much more lightly armed; the main weapon of the Achaemenid army historically was the bow and arrow, and javelin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaugamela#Size_of_Persian_army

Personally I'm inclined to lean towards the range set by the ancient sources because, you know, first hand sources vs. tenth hand analysis. Every decade or so there's a new article that comes out that finds that ancient sources were actually right about something after all, from Schliemann actually finding Troy on down to Herodotus's gold-digging giant ants.

But I also havent' read any of the articles by the modern scholars explaining why they think the numbers are really so much smaller. Maybe the eggheads are right after all.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 11:31 on Feb 14, 2016

# ¿ Feb 14, 2016 11:05

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Xenophon posted:

What can I say, I write a pretty good book

no but in all seriousness I came here looking for something else and y'all have chosen a fine book to read

Awww, you're just saying that because you want to found a colony in our subforum!

More seriously though it's getting to be time for suggestions for next month's book. Based on the relative success we've had the past couple months, it seems that being a free ebook is a big plus. The "ideal" BotM selection is probably 1) free on kindle, 2) intelligent to at least some degree (so taht there's something to talk about) 3) relatively accessible, and 4) entertaining and not too long.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Feb 19, 2016

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 06:57

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Hat Thoughts posted:

How about The Man Who Was Thursday

It was already selected as a BotM in January of 2012. I can put Napoleon of Notting Hill on the list though.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 23:52

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

How about an Eco book? Doesn't have to be Name of the Rose, but it could be.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2016 09:01

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Bilirubin posted:

drat sorry I missed this. I'd be up for some Eco but seeing as I just started chapter 3 of Gravity's Rainbow don't think I'll be finished on time (with 400 pages still to go)

The discussion doesn't have to end just because the month does! If people aren't posting because they feel it's "over", don't worry, jump in. There are always people who get started late.

# ¿ Feb 29, 2016 15:03

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:00

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

A note before the next thread goes up:

Was reading the introduction to the Landmark edition of Xenophon's Hellenika and Strassler had an interesting comment on Xenophon's religion.

He pointed out that other contemporary writers of Xenophon are nothing like as religious and don't show anything approaching Xenophon's desire to show piety rewarded and evil doings punished. Herodotus portrays the gods as flawed and envious and jealous, and good people are as likely to be punished as bad; Thucydides is deistic at best if not atheistic.

Strassler's theory seems to be that Xenophon's religious piety might be due to the influence of Socrates.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2016 00:17

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > February BOTM: The March of the Ten Thousand, by Xenophon.