THE SEA! THE SEA! The shout of the Ten Thousand in the modern imagination. By Tim Rood. 262pp. Duckworth. £25. 0 7156 3308 2. US: Overlook. $23.95. 1
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THE LONG MARCH. Xenophon and the Ten Thousand. By Robin Lane Fox, editor.
351pp. Yale University Press. Pounds 25 (US $45). 0 300 10403 0
Why, when Oliver Stone came calling, did Robin Lane Fox not steer him away from Alexander, and point him in the direction of Xenophon? If swords and sandals it had to be, then what classical text better suited to Stone's strengths than the Anabasis? Quite as masculine and humourless as Salvador, it is also steeped in those same themes of honour, comradeship and betrayal that characterize all the director's best work -with the added benefit of boasting a hero who was neither blonde, nor gay, nor given to embarrassing fantasies of universal conquest. Far from looking to press on to the limits of the world, Xenophon wanted only to get back home -which is again a theme hardly lacking in resonance for Stone, that disillusioned veteran of the 25th Infantry Division. Indeed, sketch out the plot of the Anabasis and one might almost be pitching a movie set in Vietnam. A rich boy volunteers for a morally dubious war in Asia; he and his buddies find themselves trapped deep in enemy territory; they make an arduous trek back to safety, sniped at by shadowy guerillas here, plundering villages there; they even trip out on hallucinogens (not LSD, of course, but some wild and very dodgy honey). This is, as a hopeful scriptwriter might hype it, Platoon meets the Odyssey.
Yet Hollywood has left the March of the Ten Thousand well alone. Neither Lane Fox, in his introduction to The Long March, a new selection of essays on the Anabasis, nor Tim Rood, in his much more detailed analysis of the text's afterlife, The Sea! The Sea!, can come up with any film directly inspired by Xenophon, beyond The Warriors, a rather ropy street-gang flick featuring some extravagant Afros and a trek from the Bronx to Coney Island ("The sea! The sea!"). This might be thought surprising: after all, the Anabasis is the original adventure yarn -"the world's first eastern", in Rood's witty formulation -and simply begging, it might be thought, to be transplanted to the Wild West or outer space. Yet perhaps the patina of chalk-dust has lain too thick on the Anabasis for Classicists, let alone Hollywood scriptwriters, to find much inspiration in it: Xenophon and Caesar, as Rood puts it in another of the jokes that make his book so enjoyable to read, "were the Hobbs and Sutcliffe of the schoolroom -opening partners in the teaching of Greek and Latin". As any Classics student can vouch, there is nothing quite so wearying as the passage of parasangs.
And yet, simultaneously, no phrase in the whole of Greek literature has had a more varied afterlife than the cry raised by the Ten Thousand as they saw the sea at last from the sacred heights of Mount Theches: "Thalatta! Thalatta!": long before the Warriors echoed this shout, Heine, Shelley and Joyce, among many others, were turning it to their own ends. Indeed, its appearance in the opening pages of Ulysses enables Rood, with the exuberance of a scholar truly in love with his subject, to argue that "'Thalatta! Thalatta!' becomes the joyful shout of the modernist release from literary convention". It was certainly a leitmotif ideally suited to Joyce's purposes, bearing as it did a quite bewildering array of associations, from the elevated to the cheerfully demotic -and Rood, with the relentlessness of a bloodhound, appears to have tracked down every last one. From poems and paintings to military memoirs to advertising jingles, they are all here, resulting in a book much richer and less recherche than its subtitle might suggest. Far more than merely a survey of the reception of Xenophon, it takes an honourable place among studies of that perennially fascinating theme, the reinterpretation by the modern world of ancient Greece.
And what of the now? Readers wanting to know what a contemporary Xenophon might look like are fortunate in having a comprehensive answer ready to hand. In The Long March, edited by Robin Lane Fox, twelve eminent scholars, Tim Rood among them, have sought to redeem the Anabasis from the immense condescension of academia, and restore to it at least some of the status that it enjoyed back in the nineteenth century. Lane Fox, who points out in his introduction that with the decline in the study of Greek "the effect of learning it through the Anabasis has receded", argues that "the text now deserves to return to the centre of cultural histories of the Greeks". It is a case which he makes with great conviction; and all the more so for the heavyweight back up that he receives from his phalanx of contributors.
It goes without saying, of course, that the Xenophon of contemporary academic taste is far removed from the bluff figure -a scout-master manque -whom Victorian schoolmasters found so inspiring. A writer once admired for his plain and manly style is now seen as someone altogether tricksier, "evasive, apologetic, and a master of leaving unwelcome things out" -while the Anabasis itself, as befits the testament of such an unreliable narrator, is reconfigured as something almost approaching a postmodernist text. George Cawkwell, in the opening essay of the collection, repeats his argument that Xenophon's memoir had a ghostly twin, penned by his comrade on the expedition, the shadowy Sophaenetus; and even though P. J. Stylianou, in the succeeding essay, applies Occam's razor with great ruthlessness to this theory, we are still left with a sense of the Anabasis as haunted by silenced voices, by depths barely hinted at. Even its most celebrated phrase, once routinely interpreted as a cry of ecstasy and release, can now be represented as something altogether bleaker and more delusory. "The protracted activity of 'going home'", John Ma argues in the book's concluding essay, "solves nothing; resolution and return are constantly deferred."
All of which, of course, is to make the Xenophon of the twenty-first century no less culturally specific than the Xenophon of the Victorians. Yet one can acknowledge as much, and still recognize that the essays in Lane Fox's collection decisively advance our understanding of the Anabasis. This is most clearly demonstrated by Christopher Tuplin, who, following in the pioneering footsteps of Pierre Briant, brilliantly demonstrates how Xenophon's distorted and fragmentary comments on the Persian Empire can be pieced together to add "colour or circumstantiality to what would otherwise be a bald record". Here, since our sources for Persia have always been so patchy, is a particularly exciting development; yet this methodology of looking through the gaps in Xenophon's narrative for glimpses of what may lie beyond it can be applied with equal fruitfulness by historians of Greek mores. Two essays, in particular, stand out: Lane Fox's own often moving analysis of how the Anabasis portrays -and fails to portray -women; and Vincent Azoulay's psychologically profound portrayal of Xenophon as a soldier in retreat not merely from Mesopotamia but also from anxieties over his status as a hireling.
