The New Criterion

Caught between the twin giants of Greek history, Herodotus and Thucydides, Xenophon can come off as a lesser figure. He lacks the whimsy of Herodotus, and, though he covered the Peloponnesian War, his own account of the protracted conflict between Sparta and Athens, the Hellenika, is eclipsed by the monumental work of Thucydides. Outside that dwindling tribe for whom the Loeb Classical Library is a holy canon of sorts, he is not widely known.

Xenophon’s most famous work is probably The Anabasis, which recounts how he, a native Athenian, joined a Spartan army in the service of Cyrus the Younger, who aimed to depose his brother Artaxerxes and claim the throne of Persia. But the Ten Thousand—as the Greeks were known—quickly found themselves on the losing side of the conflict and, after their generals were murdered, were forced to march back home through hostile terrain.

Anabasis translates roughly as “The March Up-Country,” but today the text is famous as the basis for the 1979 cult move The Warriors, in which a dystopian New York City is ruled by rival gangs. One, headed by the aptly named Cyrus, finds itself stranded in the Bronx and must fight its way through the ravaged landscape to its home in Coney Island, much as the Greeks had battled their way to the friendly settlements of the Black Sea—without the assistance, of course, of a heavily graffitied D-train.

In popular culture, at least, this is Xenophon’s claim to fame. The handsome new Landmark Xenophon’s “Hellenika,” ought to restore his standing as a serious historian of the ancient world, and not just as an obscure pop-culture reference. Its editor, Robert Strassler, once again applies a formula that worked with great success for both Herodotus and Thucydides: he issues beautifully produced volumes that have the weight of authority but are free of the burdens of academic texts. Filled with attractive maps and illustrations, they are a pleasure to behold. It is hard to imagine that we will need another edition of the Greek historians anytime soon.

The introductory essay, by David Thomas, is especially helpful to the casual reader. Thomas ably situates Xenophon within the complex politics of the Hellenic world in the fourth and fifth centuries, while the Peloponnesian War still raged in its third (and final) stage and Athens teetered on the cliff’s edge of its cultural and military decline. Born right as the great conflict began (around 430 B.C.), Xenophon belonged to “an Athenian family that was rich enough to own horses but was perhaps not quite the cream of aristocracy.”

In 401, he joined the fateful Persian campaign that provided source material for The Anabasis. His allegiance to Sparta during the inauspicious campaign led to his formal exile, or ostracism, from Athens around 396. And it is from Sparta, the seat of the Peloponnesian League, that Xenophon narrates the downfall of the city of his birth. Yet, as Thomas notes, “Xenophon never expresses bitterness about his exile, so presumably he accepted that he had done something to deserve it.” He did, in fact, return to Athens in 360, and the Hellenika reflects his curiously bifurcated allegiance.

Xenophon begins his account of the Peloponnesian War with a famously strange formulation: “And after this …” The passage is referring to Thucydides, whose work he intended to continue. He picks up in 411, with the upstart general Lysander—the product of a decidedly un-aristocratic background—largely responsible for an ascendant Sparta. By 404, Lysander had won crushing naval victories over Athens at Notion and Aigospotamoi, and the formerly democratic polis soon found itself under the stifling rule of the Thirty Tyrants, a Sparta-friendly oligarchy installed in the city at the conclusion of the war.

It would be a mistake to regard Xenophon’s work as an instance of Spartan triumphalism. Thomas points out that “Xenophon favored what is sometimes called dual hegemony, in which the leadership of Greece was to be shared by the two cities between which he had split his loyalties, with Sparta dominant on land and Athens at sea.” This did not come to pass: both powers receded, and the Macedonian father-son duo of Philip and Alexander soon conquered much of the known world.

What does emerge in John Marincola’s translation is a clear-eyed view of war, a recognition of both its necessity and brutality. There is almost something of an ancient Hemingway in Xenophon’s hypnotically plain descriptions of battle (at least as they are rendered here), such as the story of Corinthian exiles battling against Spartan forces: “Some of them climbed up the steps to the top of the wall, from which they threw themselves down and were killed, while others, being pushed together around the steps, were struck and killed there.”

If there is a villain in Hellenika, it is not Athens—Xenophon clearly admired the city’s democratic tradition, perhaps because Sparta was markedly more despotic. Rather, it is Thebes, which defeated Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra in 371, for which he reserves his greatest scorn. Thomas writes that Xenophon regards Thebans as diplomats of “naked self-interest, without any attempt to show the justice of their case” and warriors “swinging foolishly between extremes of hope and fear.” Their victory at Leuctra and the subsequent ebb of Spartan influence paved the way for the eventual conquests of Phillip of Macedon, who had himself supposedly read The Anabasis.

The Hellenika is often messy: Athens and Sparta are the primary players, but Corinth and Thebes constantly jump into the fray, and Persia, Sparta’s sometime ally, is always lurking at the periphery. All this can be confusing, and one of the more impressive things about the Landmark edition is how much it tries—and succeeds—in making the texts of ancient Greece accessible to contemporary audiences.

The extensive footnotes are both informative and readable: one explains how the Long Walls of Athens protected the city against a naval siege; another details an intricate drinking game, kottabos, played at the kinds of symposia Socrates frequented. Side notes, meanwhile, offer a running plot summary, in case the casual reader neglects to follow, say, the hostilities between Agesilaos and Phleious. The maps generously sprinkled across these pages are uniformly clear, showing both battle maneuvers and shifting geopolitical alliances. And the appendix is a veritable treasure trove of secondary material: essays on everything from “Units of Distance, Currency, and Capacity” to pithy biographical entries and rival accounts of the Peloponnesian War by later historians like Diodorus Siculus.

The Landmark Xenophon is no beach read, but it doesn’t try to be. Instead, it hews to a neat and careful line between serious scholarship and accessible, general-interest reading. A marathon read from front cover to back would constitute a first-rate education in classical history. But it might be more pleasurable simply to enjoy morsels of Xenophon’s sprawling work: here a siege of Corinth, there a trial of Athenian generals. At the very least, this volume should ensure that Xenophon is remembered for more than just 1970s kitsch.