Tea at Trianon: On the Enduring Appeal of Xenophon’s Anabasis

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, December 30, 2021

On the Enduring Appeal of Xenophon’s Anabasis

From LitHub:

Xenophon of Athens (c. 430-355 BCE) is one of just a few Greek writers whose full output has come down to us from antiquity. His fourteen books cover subjects ranging from history to household management, but are nearly all influenced by the philosopher Socrates, Xenophon’s teacher. His most famous work is his Anabasis, the story of Cyrus the Younger’s rebellion in 401 BCE against his brother, the Great King of Persia. The younger sibling, fired with ambition, hired a 10,000-strong force of Greek mercenaries as a leading edge to counter and cut through the numerically superior barbarian force his brother had under his command.

At the crucial moment in the heart of Babylonia, the commander of the Greeks disobeyed his order to attack the King’s own position in the center, and instead kept his force by the Euphrates River, a salutary warning about the dangers of relying on mercenaries. Cyrus was killed in the battle, and afterwards his head and right hand were cut off and displayed on the field by his brother.

In his eyewitness account, Xenophon, who later becomes one of the Greek leaders following the dramatic seizure of their high command by the Persians, tells of the army’s hazardous retreat homewards from Mesopotamia. His engaging descriptions of battles and of the highs and lows of the march are a classic illustration of what ancient writers termed enargeia, “vividness.” This quality is one reason why his Anabasis has retained its appeal to readers over the centuries.

Another is the book’s value as a mine of historical geography. Taking in much of what was the western half of the Persian empire—today Turkey, Syria and Iraq—the story provides a firsthand report of places and peoples the army encountered and is one of the earliest records of the natural and human environments of the region. The author, for instance, names and provides the width of many major rivers, describes in detail the date harvest in Mesopotamia, and names wild animals, like the ostrich, which are no longer present in the area. On the Black Sea coast, he describes such phenomena as “mad honey” and whistled speech, both of which can be found today in the same localities. His account of a desperate week fighting the Kardouchoi in south-eastern Anatolia may be the first written description of the ancestors of the modern Kurds. Later encounters with tribes such as the Drilai, Mossynoikoi and Taochoi are poignant in that little is heard of these peoples again in the historical record; in some cases virtually the only trace of them now is found in the pages of Xenophon’s book. (Read more.)