Creating Barbarians V

Xenophon (420-350’s B.C.), comes a generation removed from Aeschylus and overlaps with Herodotus.  His work, the Anabasis, brings this discussion into the world of autobiography/biography.  This is distinguished from Herodotus’s Persian Wars in that Xenophon’s Anabasis is a record of what the author saw, without an inquiry into causes, and his Cyropaedia is a complex work of fiction.[1]  We must remember that while Xenophon does not seek to lay bare the deep causes beneath events after the manner of Herodotus or Thucydides, his works were not therefore considered less “valid” in the minds of his audience.  As Hartog states, the “seeing eye was the means of knowledge valued above all others.”[2] While modern readers may note that Xenophon lacks the wit and polish of a Thucydides or a Plato, and appears a practical writer, Hunt asserts that this “practicalizing” tendency affords us a much closer view to what the average “Greek on the street” thought.[3] Thus, Xenophon offers an insight into the Greek/Barbarian dichotomy that is in some way more representative of the thoughts and feelings of the average Greek adult male.

By way of background, Greece had just come through the devastating period of pan-Hellenic conflict known as the Peloponnesian War.  Xenophon, an Athenian by birth, writes in a time of Spartan military hegemony.[4] Xenophon fought the Persians under a Spartan-sponsored expedition and might be expected to carry a certain bitterness toward the Persians with him from that experience.  What I find is that while the basic stereotypes remain the same, Xenophon’s understanding of them is more complex, drawing on his actual experience with various members of the Persian Empire.  The Homeric motifs are acknowledged in Xenophon but the Greek/Barbarian dichotomy is articulated through observations based on actual experience. 

For Xenophon, the Persians represent a race that has fallen from its former glory.  The implication is that the Persians were not always the soft, cowardly, and decedent Asiatics that they had become by his own time.  This view is clear in the final chapter of the Cyropaedia.[5]  The outset spells out Xenophon’s position explicitly:

Now I think I have accomplished what I proposed.  I say that the present

Persians and their associates have been demonstrated to be more impious

regarding the gods, more irreverent regarding relatives, more unjust

regarding others, and more unmanly in what pertains to war than were their

predecessors ...[6]

What differs from Herodotus is Xenophon’s belief that the present “slavishness” of the Persians was not always the case.  In other words, contra Herodotus, the Persians do not have an inherent “slave nature.”  The implication is that there was a time, Cyrus the Great’s time, when the Persians more closely resembled the Greeks.  Indeed, Xenophon’s fictionalized Cyrus looks and thinks a great deal like a Greek.  This is important since it shows that in order to find something praiseworthy in the Persians, Xenophon is forced to reconstruct them along Greek lines.  Once the Persians of Cyrus’ era have been suitably “hellenized” they are worthy of Xenophon’s praise.[7]  Even though Xenophon’s view is perhaps more complex, it still proves the rule.  One might even suspect that the Cyropaedia is in fact a crypto-polemic in favor of Spartan rule.  After all, Xenophon was in the pay of the Spartans and admired them as war-like and efficient, an embodiment of proper “Greek” virtues.[8] This pattern of “selective Grecicizing,” or “bivalent othering” is at the heart of Xenophon’s articulation of the Greek/Barbarian dichotomy in the Anabasis.

While the Cyropaedia deals with a fictionalized past, Xenophon’s Anabasis is firmly rooted in his own experiences in the Persian Empire fighting for Cyrus the Younger.  Indeed, there is evidence that Xenophon modeled characters and institutions in his Cyropaedia from his experiences serving under the younger Cyrus.[9] With these things in mind, it is to the Anabasis that I will be turning for the duration of this examination.

The Anabasis narrates Xenophon’s personal odyssey fighting in the great battle between Cyrus the Younger and Artaxerxes, and his tumultuous homecoming through “strange” and “barbarian” lands.  The fact that the entire structure of the book bares immediate comparison to Homer’s Odyssey should alert us that Xenophon is still in discourse with the Homeric motifs in his Anabasis.[10]

The first identifier, the disordered barbarian hordes, presents itself to us in an interesting twist.  As the battle lines are drawn at Cunaxa, the author prepares his audience for the sort of scene depicted in Aeschylus and Herodotus: the Greeks coming on in ordered silence while the Persians come on with wild cries and disorder.  Xenophon acknowledges this expectation that the Persian “barbarians” will come on “with a great outcry,” giving the nod to the Homeric motif.  Indeed he places it in the mouth of his Cyrus the Younger: “Our enemies have great numbers and they will come on with a great outcry; for the rest, however, if you can hold out against these things, I am ashamed, I assure you, to think what sorry fellows you will find the people of our country to be.”[11] Xenophon narrates the reality of the battle as something entirely different:

As for the statement, however, which Cyrus made when he called the

Greeks together and urged them to hold out against the shouting of the

barbarians, he proved to be mistaken in this point; for they came on, not

with shouting, but in utmost silence and quietness, with equal step and

slowly.[12]

For the first time in my canvass of authors, then, I see a non-Greek other march on in the silent discipline that has previously been the sole preserve of the Greeks.  Xenophon acknowledges the expected Homeric motif and presents it in his work by inserting it in Cyrus’ speech.  Nevertheless, the actual encounter itself is framed in terms of Xenophon’s remembered experience.[13]

The Persian’s moment of “Greek-like” discipline is short lived, however, as the second identifier follows hard on the heels of the first: the stereotype of Barbarian effeminacy through a life of oriental luxury.  The moment the Greeks charge, the Persians run: “And before an arrow reached them, the barbarians broke and fled.”[14] For Xenophon, it is not that the Persians have a “slave nature” that makes them run away, but the fact that they have fallen from their former hardness through decadence.  They no longer engage in the bodily discipline of hard work (ponos) that Xenophon sees as the key to discipline, manhood, and warrior prowess.[15] The basic stereotype of barbarian military impotence is preserved, and the nod is given to the audience’s expectation of the Homeric motif, but these are both channeled through the medium of Xenophon’s actual experience.[16]

The final identifier, the “Great Leader”, can be seen clearly in Xenophon’s depiction of Cyrus the Younger.  As a “Great Leader” in the tradition of Priam, Hector, and Xerxes, Cyrus’ fate is an interesting one.  His death is not the climax of the Anabasis, as Hector’s is in the Iliad, but rather the starting point from which the real adventure begins: the struggle through strange lands to return home.  In this sense, then, just as Hector’s death precipitates the fall of Troy and sends Odysseus on his odyssey, so Cyrus the Younger’s death is the beginning of Xenophon’s odyssey.

Perhaps the main point of comparison with the other “Great Leaders” of this examination is the juxtaposition of Cyrus’ autocratic rule and pronouncements and the conglomerate of Greek leaders’ democratic rule and rhetoric.[17] Robin Lane Fox notes in particular that “barbarians” do not employ rhetoric in the Anabasis, only Greeks.[18] This is important when one considers Tim Rood’s statement that:  “more than a quarter of the Ananbasis is composed of direct speeches.”[19] The picture that emerges is similar to that of Aeschylus and Herodotus, a picture of a unified Greek coalition of peers compared with a “barbarian” autocracy.[20] Indeed, at its core, it is another representation of the Homeric motif.[21]  Clearchus and Xenophon fill the shoes of Iliadic heroes like Agamemnon and Odysseus, while Cyrus fills in for Hector and shares his fate.  Just as in the case of Hector, the “story” of the Anabasis is not about Cyrus the Younger, no matter how sympathetically he may be portrayed, but about the Greeks.  Just as Hector exists only to provide a worthy opponent for Achilles to kill at the Climax of the Iliad, so Cyrus “exists” in the Anabasis only to provide a worthy employer for the Greeks and to die so that their story may begin.

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[1] For the Anabasis as a record, not an inquiry, cf. Robin Lane Fox, “Sex, Gender, and the Other in Xenophon’s Anabasis,” in The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, ed. Robin Lane Fox, op. cit., 213.  For Xenophon’s Cyropedia as a work of fiction, cf. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization, op. cit., 133-134.  In addition, cf. Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, op. cit., 64.

[2] Francois Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd, op. cit., 4.

[3] Peter Hunt, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians, op. cit., 145.

[4] For more on Xenophon and Sparta see Tim Rood’s handling of Anabasis 6.1.27, 6.6.12-13, and 7.1.27, cf. Tim Rood, “Panhellenism and Self-Presentation: Xenophon’s Speeches,” The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, ed. Robin Lane Fox, op. cit., 319.

[5] For purposes of this paper, we will be attributing the last chapter of the Cyropedia to Xenophon.  Even if Xenophon is not the author, the passage still dates to his time and reflects the biases of his day.  What is important is the view of Persians that it demonstrates, and that, when understood properly, it is in keeping with his view of Persians in the works that we can positively identify as belonging to Xenophon.  For more on the Cyropedia and its role in Western “othering” of the Persians, cf. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, “The Fifth Oriental Monarchy and Hellenocentrism: Cyropaedia VIII viii and its Influence,” Achaemenid History II The Greek Sources:Proceedings of the Groningen 1984 Achaemenid History Workshop (Leiden: Nederlands Institute voor het Nabije Dosten, 1987), 117-131.

[6] Xenophon. The Education of Cyrus, trans. Wayne Ambler, op. cit., 8.8.27.

[7] Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, op. cit., 62-65.

[8] For further discussion of these possibilities, cf. Wayne Ambler, “Introduction”, Xenophon. The Education of Cyrus, trans. Wayne Ambler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1-18.

[9] Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization, op. cit., 133.

[10] Of particular interest are the concepts of civilization as cultivated space, and cannibalism versus “the men who eat bread”, cf. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World (Baltimore: Johns-Hopkins University Press), 1-15.

[11] Xenophon, Anabasis, ed. Loeb, trans. Carleton L. Brownson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 1.7.4.

[12] Ibid., 1.8.11.

[13] We must keep in mind that it is just that: “remembered experience.”  For a look at Xenophon’s exaggerated totals of combatants and casualties, cf. Christopher Tuplin, “The Persian Empire,” in The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, ed. Robin Lane Fox, op. cit., 174-175.

[14] Xenophon, Anabasis, ed. Loeb, trans. Carleton L. Brownson, op. cit., 1.8.19.

[15] Peter Hunt, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians, op. cit., 152.

[16] Indeed, one might add that at least Homer’s Trojans stand and put up a fight!

[17] Remember that for the Greeks of Xenophon’s time, “rhetoric” was the backbone of lawful government, whether in the Athenian assembly or the Spartan Gerousia.  For the importance of rhetoric as the great equalizer in Greek society, cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, op. cit., 46-47.

[18] Robin Lane Fox, “Sex, Gender and the Other in Xenophon’s Anabasis,” in  The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, ed. Robin Lane Fox, op. cit., 187.

[19] Tim Rood, “Panhellenism and Self-Presentation: Xenophon’s Speeches,” in Ibid., 306.

[20] For example, cf. Aeschylus, Persians, ed. Loeb, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth, op. cit., lines 447-471.  In addition, cf. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. George Rawlinson, op. cit., 8.90, 92.

[21] Homer, Iliad, ed. Loeb, trans. A. T. Murray, op. cit., IV.329-363, III.161-242.