The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

by Victor Davis Hanson

  XENOPHON WAS NO Thucydides. He clearly lacked the latter’s ability to offer universal human truths from the often mundane events of the Peloponnesian War and subsequent city-state conflicts. But Xenophon (ca. 430–454) traveled, fought, wrote, and hobnobbed more than almost any other Greek of his age. He also had a multifaceted ability to relate such a rich life through the art of storytelling—and nowhere better than in his gripping tale of thousands of Greek mercenaries abandoned and trapped in hostile Persia.

  In spring 401 B.C., amid the detritus of the recently ended twenty-seven-year-long war between Athens and Sparta, about thirteen thousand Greek mercenary soldiers marched eastward in the pay of the Persian prince and would-be usurper of the throne at Persepolis, Cyrus the Younger. The Greeks weren’t quite sure where they were ultimately headed. And as out-of-work veterans happy to receive gold for the use of their spears, most of them at first didn’t seem to care—even if it was unlikely that they were simply hired, as told, to put down some quarreling among insurrectionist Persian satraps.

  Instead, the so-called Ten Thousand—the majority of whom were from the Peloponnese—put their trust in their Spartan drillmasters, chiefly the brutish paymaster Clearchus, and kept pressing ahead. Most wanted money, and many were inured to military adventure after long experience fighting for all sides in the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, this ancient Wild Bunch figured that any one of them in a fair fight could lick ten Persians, and there were lots of coins to be made and little to fear. Most had been nursed on stories of the Greek victories at Marathon and Plataea, and rightly figured that in such numbers they could do pretty much as they pleased in Asia.

  Not too long after starting out from Sardis, the Ten Thousand discovered that Cyrus really meant to use them to depose his brother King Artaxerxes II, and wrest away kingship of the vast Persian Empire. No matter—money was still money, and Cyrus, always a reliable friend to Greeks, could deliver on promises of even more. By September 401, after a leisurely six-month march, Cyrus’s invading army ended up on the Euphrates at the plain of Cunaxa, not far from present-day Baghdad, where they finally ran into the much larger forces of the king. Cunaxa soon proved why these clumsy, heavily armed, and querulous Greek foot soldiers were worth bringing along on a 1,500-mile trek from the Aegean.

  The Greek spearmen easily broke Artaxerxes’ far larger but variegated forces, had only one wounded in the bargain, and, at the moment of their victory, figured they were going to be rich beyond comprehension. But then catastrophe struck, as a rash Cyrus—posted on the other side of the army from the Greeks—wildly rushed out at the sight of his panicking brother, was swarmed, and perished.

  Not long after, both former friends and old enemies, now united into the royal Persian army under King Artaxerxes, turned in unison on the mercenaries. What followed—unlike later disastrous retreats in the Western collective memory, such as Romans slaughtered after Crassus’s disaster at nearby Carrhae or Napoleon’s apocalyptic flight from czarist Russia—was a gallant nine-month trek over some 1,500 miles northward to the Black Sea, and then west along its shore toward European Byzantium. Somehow, the Ten Thousand, through snow, ice, ambush, and famine, saved three quarters of their force and proved to be folk far more resolute and innovative than mere hired thugs. Indeed, their organization, egalitarianism, and consensual decision making more resembled a “moving polis” of free citizens and voters than a mercenary army, and explained in large part how they were able to either outsmart or outfight an array of enemies.

  We know all this because in his old age, Xenophon the Athenian—the prolific author of histories, biography, and how-to manuals—wrote a comprehensive memoir of his own youthful role, thirty-something years earlier, in saving the Greek army. Although he employed the optimistic title Anabasis (the first-leg “march up” into the interior of Iraq), in fact, Xenophon’s account really gets going only after the Greeks were dry-gulched at Cunaxa. So the core of the work is really a katabasis, detailing the heroic slog through the cold and snows of upper Iraq, Kurdistan, and Armenia to the safety of the Black Sea, ending with a parabasis, along the southern coast of the sea back toward Byzantium and Europe.

  Classicists used to be fascinated with the Anabasis. The adventure proved an instructive primer for subsequent Greek generals, from the Spartan king Agesilaos to Alexander the Great, who prepped their armies for their own later, successful invasions of Persia. And whatever the brutish nature of the combatants, how the Ten Thousand survived—voting on critical decisions, assigning work by committee, creating new weapons and tactics—seemed to be a testament to Hellenic genius and innovation itself, and were felt to be antithetical to the authoritarianism of their imperial Persian opponents.

  THE LATE TWENTIETH century has not been so kind to either Xenophon or his march up country. The past few decades especially have seen an understandable resurgence in the study of Thucydides and Herodotus, brilliant authors of histories that also far better meet modern postmodern and anthropological tastes. Despite his philosophical pretensions, Xenophon does not stack up as such a seminal thinker, as one who could employ his narrative of warring Greeks for higher purposes. You seem to get only what you see in the Anabasis—and it is not quite a monumental war between Athens and Sparta (unlike his Hellenica, which takes up and completes Thucydides’ incomplete narrative) or the salvation of Greece from Eastern autocracy, much less Thucydidean insight on the interplay between culture and man’s nature.

  Xenophon’s Greek, also, is straightforward, lacking long antitheses and elaborate subordination. The speeches serve the events at hand and are not used as larger explications of human nature. The narrative of the Anabasis moves along in predictable chronological fashion. For all those reasons the work is often the first prose text assigned to second-year Greek students—which has only seemed to cement the author’s reputation for pedestrian thinking and facile expression without much grammatical complexity.

  The arrival of the politically correct age was no help. The very notion that thousands of greedy Greek male killers would invade eastern peoples, bent on plunder and profit, was bad enough. But when a Westerner chronicled the entire fiasco, informed by Eurocentric prejudices about effete Persians and duplicitous Armenians, there was even less romance in survival over terrible odds. In our skeptical age, recollections referring to the author in the third person, whether Xenophon’s or Caesar’s, naturally earn charges of self-serving fabrication or at least conceit. And so much of what has been written in the past two decades about the Anabasis uses Xenophon as a locus classicus to take off on Western triumphalism, male supremacy, and colonialism.

  Perhaps September 11, and the subsequent toppling of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, reignited some interest in this otherwise obscure tale of Western adventurism come to naught—even if bin Laden did not include Xenophon and company with the Crusades and the Reconquista in his litany of still-unpunished Western sins. In any case, in March 2003, the heavily armed Americans trudged up the Tigris-Euphrates corridor, not far from sites like Cunaxa (and Alexander’s later masterpiece battle at Gaugamela), in relatively small numbers, intent on toppling a despot, and otherwise supremely confident, despite their relative ignorance of what they were getting into.

  Robin Lane Fox, best known for an engaging biography of Alexander the Great, organized a symposium on the Anabasis in October and November 2001 at Oxford University. Yale University Press published the subsequent twelve essays in 2004 under the somewhat confusing title The Long March—while the trek was long, it little resembled Mao’s more famous escape.

  It should be admitted at the outset that there is little chance non-classicists will read The Long March. Besides the fact that few Americans now know who Xenophon was, the essay titles range from “Sex, Gender and the Other in Xenophon’s Anabasis” (by Fox) to “You Can’t Go Home Again: Displacement and Identity in Xenophon’s Anabasis” (by John Ma), and they reflect the university seminar rather than the interest of the general readers. Yet, compared wi
th most such collections in the contemporary academic genre, The Long March turns out to be an engaging read.

  Thomas Braun, in “Xenophon’s Dangerous Liaisons,” gives a nice portrait of both the Spartan mercenary warlord Clearchus and the Persian prince Cyrus. But the charm of his essay, aside from his constant references to having studied classics with the greats (like Tony Andrewes and Russell Meiggs), is how it politely strips away the sometimes warm and fuzzy Xenophonean veneer from the tyrannical Clearchus and the would-be fratricide Cyrus—and from Xenophon himself, who, after all, went to kill others largely in pursuit of profit. They were not nation-builders, nor imperialists, but rather simply contractors, like their modern counterparts working for a private company like Blackwater that provides veteran mercenaries for various tasks in the Middle East for a set price. That they were not Persian grandees in the hire of a despotic Artaxerxes does not quite make them Hellenic liberators either.

  In “Xenophon’s Ten Thousand as a Fighting Force,” Michael Whitby explains how the march offers a valuable prognosis of an evolving Greek warfare to come. While hoplite crashes no longer constituted the main arena of war, phalanxes of heavy infantry still could change an entire theater—if generals were wise enough to incorporate light-armed cavalry and archers into a multifaceted army without worrying about the social connotation or past tradition that often hampered military efficacy.

  The Ten Thousand, then, really were a precursor to Alexander, who crushed his enemies at four set-piece battles with phalangites, but who also got to those battlefields only through the use of almost every other type of troops imaginable. One of the great stories of ancient military history was the divorce of infantry organization, tactics, and weaponry in the fourth-century B.C. from the original agrarian moral landscape of its birth. That evolution saw small farmers of the phalanx in heavy bronze panoplies give way to hired phalangites with eighteen-feet-long pikes. Somewhere in between lie the hired hoplites of the Ten Thousand, who ventured into exotic terrain against untraditional enemies, requiring changes in organization, armament, and tactics.

  James Roy, in “The Ambitions of a Mercenary,” reminds us that most of the Ten Thousand were Peloponnesians, and then, again, mostly Arcadian hoplites. Neither rich nor poor, they were probably recruited from hardscrabble farming families on the rocky plateaus of Arcadia, who went east not so much to escape poverty as to find wealth in good wages and booty that might earn them, like Xenophon himself, a nice retirement estate back in rural Greece. Xenophon, like Wellington in India, came home from Asia a relatively rich man. The Ten Thousand may now seem like romantic explorers, but almost all of them went east for money, either in wages from Cyrus or in booty from Artaxerxes—or both.

  TIM ROOD, WHO contributes an essay to the Fox volume on the speeches in the Anabasis and the resurgence of Panhellenism, offers in a new book almost everything that we might have wished—and perhaps far more besides—about just two immortal words, “The Sea! The Sea!” (thalatta, thalatta), that famous chorus of exultation that Xenophon’s men hollered after catching a glimpse of the Black Sea. The survivors were almost done in after their harrowing winter escape from Iraq. From atop Mount Theches, near Trapezus, they caught unexpected sight of the coast far below, which meant salvation and a return to civilization among the Hellenic communities along the southern shore.

  Rood exhaustively traces how the refrain came to symbolize both a universal sigh of relief after an impossible ordeal survived and, more specifically, became a theme in almost every European adventure story of survival in the East. Because so many Edwardians and Victorians, in addition to American and continental elites, had been nursed on the Anabasis as part of their obligatory Latin and Greek childhood education, it was no surprise that the adventure story stayed with them for life, whether they evoked it at the desk or out in the wilds of the British Empire.

  And what a gallery of illustrious men (and women) Xenophon’s march has inspired, from fiction writers and poets like Daniel Defoe, Louis MacNeice, and Mary Shelley, to the real men of action like the Norwegian adventurers of the Arctic, T. E. Lawrence, and the desperate at Dunkirk. Novels and stories were titled “Thalatta,” and “O, You Xenophon!” The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Xenophon—a re-creation of the shouters from the heights of Mount Theches—was for a time inspiration for the Philhellenic romantics of early-nineteenth-century London.

  Of course, Rood acknowledges that, more recently, the image of Xenophon’s story has devolved from that of confident Western triumphalism to the postmodern angst of ending up where you don’t belong and so deserve what you get. But the sheer richness of his examples—and the wide variety of both leftists and imperialists who were inspired by the Anabasis—reflects the timeless power of human ordeal and triumph.

  After Rood’s (often mind-boggling) catalog of Xenophonisms, one wonders: If Thucydides and Tacitus were the superior ancient historians, why is it that the ripples of the Anabasis proved far broader over some 2,500 years of Western creative experience?

  The answer is that for all the brutality of the Ten Thousand, Alexander at the Indus, or Hernan Cortés burning his ships at Vera Cruz, Xenophon, along with Arrian and Bernal Díaz, captures a desire for something big, something heroic against all odds—however dark the heart—in all of us.

  * I have expanded here on reviews that appeared in the October 2005 issue of the New Criterion of The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, edited by Robin Lane Fox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), and “The Sea! The Sea!”: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination, by Tim Rood (London: Duckworth, 2004).

  CHAPTER 5

  The Old Breed

  The brilliant but harrowing narrative of E. B. Sledge*

  Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country—as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, “If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.” With privilege goes responsibility.

  So E. B. sledge ends his memoir of the horrors of the Marines’ fighting in late 1944 and spring 1945 against the imperial Japanese on Peleliu and Okinawa. Like Xenophon, Sledge, even at a young age, was a reflective man—a writer and a warrior, who went East and endured unimaginable suffering against enemies as brutal as they were different from those his early in life in the American South. We should recall these concluding thoughts in his memoir about patriotic duty because With the Old Breed has now achieved the status of a military classic—in part on the perception of Sledge’s blanket condemnation of the brutality and senselessness of war itself.

  Although there are horrors aplenty in the graphic accounts of the First Marine Division’s ordeal in these two invasions in the Pacific, Sledge’s message is still not so darkly condemnatory. The real power of his memoir is not just found in his melancholy. Even in his frequent despair over the depravity seen everywhere around him, there is an overriding sense of tragedy: Until human nature itself changes, reluctant men such as E. B. Sledge will be asked to do things that civilization should not otherwise ask of its own—but must if it is to survive barbarity.

  Sledge, a previously unknown retired professor, late in life published his first book, which was originally drawn from contemporary notes taken during battle and intended only as a private memoir for his family. Yet within two decades of publication that draft became acknowledged as the finest literary account to emerge about the Pacific war.

  Despite the still-growing acclaim given to With the Old Breed—first published in 1981 by the Presidio Press of Novato, California—the death of Sledge at seventy-seven, in March 2001, garnered little national attention. After his retirement, Sledge, the master memoirist of the Second World War, had remained a mostly private person who rarely entered the public arena.

  Who, in fact, was Eugene Bondurant Sledge? Even with his perfect Marine name, E. B. Sledge might have seemed an unlikely
combat veteran. Born to a prominent local physician in Mobile, Alabama, the articulate, slight, and shy Sledge spent only a year at Marion Military Institute and then enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology—before choosing instead to leave the officers’ training program there to enlist in late 1943 in the U.S. Marine Corps as a private. This early intimate and ambiguous experience with officer training, together with the subsequent decision to serve with the enlisted corps, colors much of the narrative of With the Old Breed. Sledge repeatedly takes stock of officers, and both the worst and best men in the corps prove to be its second lieutenants and captains.

  After the defeat of Japan, Sledge served in the American occupying force in China; his account of that tour was published posthumously as China Marine. Sledge later remarked that he found the return to civilian life difficult after Peleliu and Okinawa, as did many veterans of island fighting in the Pacific who could not “comprehend people who griped because America wasn’t perfect, or their coffee wasn’t hot enough, or they had to stand in line and wait for a train or bus.” Yet Sledge adjusted well enough to graduate in 1949 with a B.S. degree. By 1960 he had completed his Ph.D. in zoology and settled on an academic career; at thirty-nine he joined the University of Montevallo, where he taught microbiology and ornithology until his retirement.

  His scholarly expertise and precision of thought and language, gained from nearly thirty years as a teacher and scientist, perhaps explain much of the force of With the Old Breed. The narrative is systematic and peppered with wide-ranging empirical observations of his new surroundings—and Thucydidean philosophical shrugs about the incongruity of it all: “There the Okinawans had tilled their soil with ancient and crude farming methods; but the war had come, bringing with it the latest and most refined technology for killing. It seemed so insane, and I realized that the war was like some sort of disease afflicting man.”