de Gruyter (2019) h/b 204pp £82 (ISBN 9783110671414)
Xenophon is a man of many sides. There is Captain Xenophon, the leader of the Ten Thousand, managing to instill some discipline into that gang of roughs and eventually leading them through parasang after parasang to safety. He transforms into Colonel Xenophon, happy in his retirement in the Peloponnese and grateful to Sparta for his estate, enjoying his hunting and his dogs, a man full of bottom. Then there is the intellectual Xenophon who was fascinated by Socrates—not something to make him any keener on Athens, given what Athens did to Socrates. There is also the literary Xenophon, one of the most versatile, innovative, and enterprising prose writers of antiquity. As for violence, Captain Xenophon had witnessed, and used, plenty of it: he tells the tale of how he set about a recalcitrant muleteer, when he found the lazy man burying alive an invalid he had been detailed to carry (Anab. 5.8.1-12). There the most telling detail is that, when challenged, Xenophon had to be reminded of the circumstances, for such chastisement was clearly so routine that it did not stick in the mind. The life of Colonel Xenophon became more tranquil: the violence on his estate would mainly be done to the unfortunate beasts. The intellectual Xenophon would muse on when violence was necessary and when it was not, and we should remember that Socrates fought on campaign as willingly and bravely as anyone. And the literary man might—might—say different things in different genres. It is a good topic for a collection, and K. has done a good job in assembling his cast and editing the papers. His own monograph on Xenophon’s Peloponnesian War appeared almost simultaneously, and is reviewed at http://classicsforall.org.uk.testing.effusion2.dh.bytemark.co.uk/reading-room/book-reviews/xenophons-peloponnesian-war.
First, two papers analysing the words. Cinzia Bearzot traces the differences between βία, the physical act of violence that need have nothing personal about it, and ὕβρις, that usually does. Paolo Tuci looks at ὀργή, especially damaging when it makes people act without forethought, though there is a time and a place even for anger. Tuci finds it ‘nearly an oxymoron’ that anger can be ‘rational’: the idea of justified, if not necessarily rational, anger might seem less paradoxical to those who have spent time wrestling with the end of the Aeneid.
P. J. Rhodes looks at violence in law-making in the different cities. Xenophon is fullest on Athens, even for those periods when he was in exile, with Sparta some way behind. The evidence is patchier elsewhere. Particularly important is Rhodes’ measured account of the Arginusae trial and its alleged illegalities: he concludes that the denial of speech to the generals probably was illegal, but trying all of them together was not, though it was unconventional. At Sparta Rhodes shows that the relation between ephors, commanders, and kings is often strained, but actual cases of violence are not found.
The focus on Sparta returns in the next few papers. Frances Pownall analyses the many instances of civil strife in the Hellenica, where episodes come thick and fast, in Corinth, Elis, Arcadia, and especially in Thebes. Thucydides’ Corcyrean chapters naturally come to our minds and were doubtless in Xenophon’s and his reader’s minds too. All sides are to blame for the violence, but Sparta is seen to have a bloodstained hand in many of these scenes, even though their own domestic dissensions are less spectacularly lethal. Pownall brings out that these are often closely juxtaposed with Sparta’s more or less successful campaigns elsewhere, notably Dercylidas’ and Agesilaus’ campaigns in Asia Minor. Plutarch had a similar idea: there was an opportunity for the king to play Alexander before his time, but he was recalled from Asia by the discord back in Greece (Ages. 15).
One of the most interesting papers is on an apparently unpromising subject, as Edith Foster examines minor infantry defeats in the Hellenica. The findings here are less expected than in some of the other papers. She has a good contrast, for instance, of the techniques of Thucydides and Xenophon in describing a hoplite reverse, with Thucydides the richer in descriptive power (4.32–6) and Xenophon in analysis of what went wrong. There is much more concentration on Spartan defeats than on any other, especially in books 3-5, those dealing with the period of Sparta’s domination. She brings out how recurrent themes expose deep-seated Spartan weaknesses: their inability to develop new techniques of warfare, the inflexibility of their hoplite tactics, the lack of imagination and often brutality of their leaders. All too often commanders face predicaments with no ideas beyond readying themselves for a heroic Spartan death. Just as Thucydides concentrates on embedded Athenian weaknesses as the cause of their final defeat (2.65), so Xenophon does the same for Sparta, as these central books show how Spartan manpower ebbs away and the deficiencies become clear that culminate at Leuctra.
Edward Harris then illustrates from three sample passages violence within the state, in particular cases where violence might seem to be threatening a legal framework; in fact, he argues, the violence is regarded as legitimate, with violence an accepted mode of social control, and certainly no less disconcerting for that. One of his cases is the assassination of Euphron of Sicyon, and the birth of the notion, not just an Athenian one, that tyrant-slaying carries its own legitimacy: sic semper tyrannis.
The final papers concentrate on particular works or incidents: Nathan Crick treats ‘the rhetoric of violence’ in the Anabasis, with persuasion sometimes contrasted with force but equally capable of being used to justify it. Bogdan Burliga looks at the darker side of the Cyropaedia, with the violence not concealed that was necessary to set Cyrus on his path to benign greatness. Aggelos Kapellos himself adds a short piece on the Greek reaction to the slaughter of the Athenian captives after Aegospotami, not one (he suggests) of particular outrage: the more remarkable thing was that the fate was not shared by all Athenian males after the city’s capitulation, as they had themselves feared in view of what they had done to Melos, Scione, and Torone. Finally Andrew Wolpert explores the accounts of the Thirty in Xenophon, Lysias, and the Athênaiôn politeia, analysing and explaining their differences but putting more stress on the uniformly negative portrayal of their ‘moral bankruptcy’. The truest remark is that of Xenophon’s Critias: we are no less a tyranny because we are Thirty rather than one.
The overall conclusion should perhaps be that Xenophon’s own views are both more conventional and more uniform than one might have anticipated. Violence is to be avoided wherever possible, and persuasion is always a cannier way of exercising domination when one can; forceful oppression wins no friends. But the world is hard, war is everywhere, and one has to be realistic both about the necessities of battle and the rigours of effective discipline. The more shocking aspects of the book are the insights it gives into Greek everyday realities, ones to which one can so easily become desensitised. Crick makes a fair point about a particularly atrocious moment in the Anabasis, where the Greeks launch an attack on a well-provisioned town. They are greeted by a scene of women throwing their children down from the rocks to their deaths, then leaping after them; the men did the same (Anab. 4.7.13–14). ‘Imagine the international condemnation which would have followed if it had been captured on video in a technological age. Rather than having his account of his expedition be deemed a “classic” of virtuous generalship to be read and imitated by schoolchildren across the centuries, he and his band of marauders would have been condemned as war criminals and terrorists’ (p. 140). Admittedly, this was a scene that Xenophon himself classed as ‘terrible’, just as Thucydides was horrified by what happened at Mycalessus (7.29–30) and was surely not immune to the chillingness of the Melian dialogue. But there were so many other instances too, and the glorious days of Greece were dripping with blood.
Christopher Pelling