School of War - Ep. 10: Shane Brennan on Xenophon

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

Shane Brennan, associate professor of history at the American University in Dubai, joins the show to discuss the new Landmark edition of Xenophon's Anabasis, which he co-edits. The Anabasis, long unjustly neglected, is Xenophon's classic memoir of war and command in the lands which today constitute Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Times 01:26 - Introduction 05:07 - Who was Xenophon 06:09 - Late 5th century Athens 09:07 - Prince Cyrus of Persia 12:17 - The Greek's position and Xenophon's rise to leadership 16:46 - The army's path though Syria, Iraq and Turkey 20:42 - The end of Xenophon's expedition 23:42 - Xenophon's lessons for military leadership today 27:40 - Importance of Xenophon's work Recorded December 9, 2021

For many generations, to be educated was to be classically educated. To be classically educated generally involved knowing some ancient Greek. And knowing ancient Greek involved knowing some Zenophon. None of these statements have much bearing on our world today. And that's a shame. Xenophon's analysis, the subject of our discussion, is a thrilling memoir of the battlefield and ultimately of command, chronicling the author's participation as a soldier of fortune

and a daring expedition through what's now Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, to depose the king of Persia. But it rapidly became a desperate struggle by an army of Greek mercenaries simply to survive. In the book which Xenophon wrote about the campaign remains a classic study of command, of politics, and of war.

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to first. face a grave situation in Iran.

And the people who knock these buildings down will hear all. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. We are delighted today to be joined by Shane Brennan,

who is Associate Professor of History at the American University in Dubai, and is the co-editor of the new landmark Xenophon's Anabesis. Shane, thanks so much for joining today. Thanks for having me, Aaron. Can I just start by saying how personally excited I am at the appearance of this volume. For those who don't know, the landmark series, and there are now, what, five or six books in the series? Yeah.

Yeah, remarkable contribution. Since I was an undergraduate reading Thucydides, I had the landmark Thucydides. and these are these lavishly illustrated. It's true that they are lavishly illustrated, but that doesn't quite sum it up. It's not pretty pictures. It's maps, appendices, ways to help the student who is not an expert in, you know, in this case, you know, fourth century, fifth and fourth century, Greek history,

orient themselves to the realities and the context of the text they are reading. And this, like the volumes that preceded, it just is extraordinarily helpful and thorough. You've walked to the route that, Xenophon walked in the Anadysis personally. I want to talk about all of that, but how did you come to work on this particular project and come to work with the landmark series? I guess I come at it from an interest in travel. I've had a great passion for travel and travel writing. And when this book came my way, a long time ago now, it struck me as being a really interesting account of the region at that time. And I was interested to

to see what would be still around from the time that Sennepon wrote. So I took the idea to retrace the route on foot. And I did that. I was probably quite lucky in that the geopolitical environment at the time was favorable. So I was able to go through countries that I mightn't have been able to easily afterwards, which is not to say it was always easy at the time. but it was it was a wonderful trip and it was a great way to travel

one of the things when I when I had the idea to do it was I wanted to travel on foot I feel we may lose a bit in the modern world when we travel in machines because we tend to cross the landscape very quickly and we miss things but when you walk does it kind of a truth to it you feel every step

and you experience everything thing, which of course can have its downsides as well. But that was what brought me to this. And I did the route. I completed it. And then I wrote a book about it, a travel book. But I also came to understand that there was a lot more to Xenophon's book than just a travel story. And, you know, it's probably true to say that it's not a text that in modern times has maybe been fully appreciated because there's so much in it. And I'd almost wager that any academic you ask to explain the book or to answer the question, what is it?

We'll give you a different answer. I would have started off by saying, well, it's a travel story. But then as I grew to understand more about xenophon and the text, then, you know, that evolved over time. And I then got into the academic side, where I've happily been spending my time for the last 20 years, mostly working on this text. So let's talk about Xenophon for a bit, for listeners who may not be familiar with his career and his writings. Who was he?

So he, Xenophon was an Athenian, and he lived, he was probably born about the beginning. of the Palapinian War, which started in 431. So he grew up in a time of war, which is something, I think, important when we come to his writings. He grew up in very interesting times. He was an associate of many important statesmen in the region. And maybe most interestingly, he was a student of Socrates. And that influence comes through in his writing. So that would be kind of a general, an Athenian from the late 5th century who would have been well connected and interested in the world around him.

In Athens in the late 5th century, talk about the city and talk about what's happened recently before Xenophon makes his decision to become a kind of soldier of fortune and go off up into Persia and Mesopotamian. Well, the Peloponnesian war, which I started with, ends and we get a civil war at Athens, in which the democratic side is victorious. And Sennephan may at that point be finding himself marginalized as somebody who would have been associated, though not necessarily a participant in the regime that ruled immediately after, that was installed by the victorious Spartans and the Peloponese. Eastern War, Zenephon would have been linked with that side. So when the other side came to power, the democracy, the outlook for him probably wasn't

great. And so when an opportunity, such as the one we're going to be discussing today, came along, he probably didn't take a lot of, it didn't take a lot of, a lot to persuade him to do that. The opportunity was to join Cyrus the Younger, who's a Persian prince of great ambition, who decided that he wanted to become the king himself. So he started to raise an army of Greek mercenaries together with his own troops in his own satrapy in what will be today Western Turkey. Xenophon was one of those who joined him, though not as he is at Paine's.

to tell us, not in a military capacity. And that leaves us to kind of work out for ourselves what his motivation for joining that expedition was. There's an interesting little story as well about his joining, which is that when he was contemplating it, he did like, I suppose any of us would do. We would seek out advice. And Xenophon went to Socrates to ask him what his advice was.

And because it was a decision, a very momentous decision, Socrates didn't feel he had enough knowledge to advise Xenophon himself. So he sent him to Delphi to the oracle. But there was then a slight problem in that Xenophon didn't actually do what Socrates told him to do. Rather, he went to the question he asked the Oracle was, to what God should I sacrifice for the journey I'm going to undertake? rather than asking, should he undertake the journey or not? So Socrates wasn't that pleased when Xenophon came back with this answer, but he said, as you've asked your question that way and you've got your answer, you must do what the God tells you.

And so with that, Xenophon set off to join Cyrus in Asia. So Cyrus the Younger, what's his, he wants to be the king, you know, what's his grudge against Artaxerxes and what's his plan? How is he going to use these Greeks? the justification for his rebellion is thin. I think we have to admit that. And that is a problem for Xenophon as a pupil of Socrates, because it looks very much like that Cyrus didn't accept the fact that his older brother

was the rightful king. And he wanted that position for himself. So it looks like naked ambition, a very unssocratic circumstance, which, as I say, was awkward for Xenophon. So Cyrus decided, in any case, he was going to try and win the throne for himself. He had an army of local troops under his command levies, maybe around 30,000. And he then hired Greek mercenaries to maybe around 10,000, 12,000.

The Greek soldiers had a good reputation, and they'd come out of a very hard campaign, many of them, in the Peloponnesian War. Greek hoplites especially were formidable in formation. So Cyrus banked on this Greek contingent to be his cutting edge against his brother. So broadly, that was one side of his plan, another was to get there quickly. And so he took a rather direct route from Western Anatolia, modern Turkey, to Babylon, Babylonia, in modern Iraq. with some trials along the way, they arrived on the battlefield and Cyrus ordered the Greeks to attack the enemy center, which was where the king was situated. Persian kings tended to situate themselves in the center of the battle so that they could give instructions to either side and they would get there.

The instructions would get there quickly. But the Greek commander didn't, controversially didn't obey that order. and instead he kept his force beside the river, the Euphrates River, and they attacked the enemy in front of them. That enemy, as it happened, gave way, so there was no opposition to speak of and the Greeks thundered down along the Euphrates. In the meantime, Cyrus, ironically, was worried

that the king would then get behind the Greeks. And so to prevent that happening, he himself and his personal guard of 600 charged at the king, what must be one of the great heroic charges of history. And there was a fierce battle. Cyrus has said to have struck his brother, injured the king, quite severely maybe. But then Cyrus himself was struck down,

a spear striking him in the cheek. He hadn't worn a helmet. He took his helmet off before the battle to show his fearlessness or as to symbolize his transparency or whatever. but Cyrus was killed in the battle and thereafter the king caught off his head and his right hand. And it's striking that the book comes down to us called The March Up and you know you've just given the the main bullets of an extraordinarily harrowing and interesting story.

But it's really just the start. It's the first book of a much longer text, right? The rest of the text is everything that happens next in which I guess Xenophon really comes to the fore. So they have a success on the battlefield, but then obviously at the moment of achieving real success, the whole purpose of the enterprise dies. What position do the Greeks now find themselves in? And how does Xenophon emerge as a leader here? After the battle, the Persians come and demand their weapons as the victors. But the Greeks dispute that the Persians are the victors.

They say that they are the victors. So there's some negotiation goes on, but the upshot of it is that there's an agreement between the Greeks and the Persians, which is that the Persians under the Great Satrat Zesafernas will lead them under certain conditions back to Greece. And so the two armies set off together along the Tigris River into northern Mesopotamia. But the Persians, I suppose, are not so keen to let this pass. we have a foreign army not a holy foreign army but we have a large contingent of Greeks have just marched into the heart of the

empire, virtually without loss. I mean incredibly, Xenophon tells us that the only casualty was some guy got run over by a chariot. So one is inclined to think that the king is not keen to let this group go

back unmolested as it were. At the junction of the Tigris and as Zab, modern Zab rivers, they engage in talk and Tysiphanes invites the Greek leader,

the one who disobeyed Cyrus's order on the battlefield to come to his tent and talk all this over because there'd been a tension building between the two sides. They then agreed as the outcome of the meeting

that the next day the Greek commander would bring other Greek commanders back and they would identify the people who'd been intriguing against each other. So who were the people

that were responsible for building the tension between the two armies. But when they arrived the following day, the Greeks were seized by the Persians. So effectively, we had a decapitation strike on the Greek commands. This is the point where Xenophon is introduced into the story. And he does via a series of elaborate

and stirring speeches that he delivers to the men to exhort them to defend themselves and to be honorable Greeks and to fight their way back to Greece if necessary. It's striking, you know, when we think of, or I think when most people think of the military, they don't think of it as an almost kind of democratic group that needs to be persuaded to do this or not do that. But this is the situation that Xenophon finds himself in. Are the soldiers predominantly Athenian, are they drawn from across Greece?

Oh, it's a nice question. Yeah, they're predominantly drawn from across Greece. There wouldn't be comparatively few Athenians there, which might raise a question about Xenophon's particular leadership style. But the point that you make, I think, is one that Xenophon tries to get across. And I was listening to last night to your first podcast with General McMaster. And it struck me that modern soldiers are very much bound to follow their orders.

In this case, we have mercenaries who are not bound by their commission, as it were, to anyone. And so they need careful handling. And so Xenophon demonstrates ways in which that can be done. The battle that you describe, that General McMaster describes in Iraq, it's actually very close geographically to the battle I described where Xenophon and the Persian king were fighting and it's just kind of

really interesting and one of a number of parallels that came to my mind when I was listening to that very interesting podcast and you know I don't know if we actually said this for folks who don't you know they don't have a map in front of them of the march but the you know the army walks through Turkey the fight happens in

in Iraq and modern Iraq and then the retreat is is back up north again into the high ground of you do you go you don't go do you go through Syria on the way out or you come through Syria on the way in on the way in on the way so you go through Syria into Iraq and then on the way out back into Turkey up to the up to the black sea yeah um as somebody who's walked to the route what what did what did that personal experience how did that inform your your your work on the book what did you learn um from having seen it not not only firsthand but actually on your feet that helped you appreciate the history.

Well, I mean, one of the problems when you deal with an ancient text is trying to establish what you're dealing with. Is it, you know, have we got the absolute truth here, or is there some element of fiction? Xenophon himself has written another book, again related to Persia, the chiropedia, that there are a lot of fictional elements in it, though it may in some respects be based on history. So one could legitimately ask of this book of Xenophon's analysis.

I mean, how accurate is it? Xenophon gives us tremendous detail. Is that detail simply a backdrop to enable him to talk about leadership and the things he's interested in? Or is it a real framework? Does it actually exist? And if so, why? What was his aim in doing that?

So in walking the route, I was able to establish that, the veracity of the March record. And also to be able to see the things that he described in his book. And one of the things, I'm just going off script a little bit, but one of the things on the journey was to take two examples, he describes a fountain in Turkey, a booming fountain. When I passed by there in 2000, the fountain was there. It's not there anymore. Turkey has experienced quite significant ecological change. Lakes have dried up. Water has disappeared.

It's no longer there. Going up the Tigris in Mesopotamia, just before the event where the Greek commanders were seized, shortly after that, we come to the ancient cities of Nimrod and Nineveh. which when I visited them were intact. I don't know what they looked like today after a period of ISIS occupation, who famously didn't like these sort of reminders of previous civilizations.

So even on that short, even in just the 20 years have passed, we've lost so much. And being able to actually have seen it and record it as being there. is a kind of a validation of Xenophon's record. So the back end of your question, how it informs my kind of engagement with the text

would be, it's already a layer of truth that he's laid down. And so when he talks about leadership, and I'm sure we're going to come on to that, we know that it's not fictional. There's a real historical characters on a real expedition in a real environment. And I think that's important because the reader, the reader feels more involved and is more engaged by the text than they would be if they weren't, if it was more kind of fictional.

Not to say that fiction can't achieve the same ends, but I think there's a power in using the actual journey to tell your story. So in a moment, let's talk about leadership and let's talk about him as a writer. but before that, let's close off the actual account. So they make it back, right? And what role does Xenophon play in that? What does the final stage of the journey look like? So they do make it back after a harrowing period of travel in the winter in eastern Anatolia. So after Xenophon has roused them in Mesopotamia, they're harassed by the Persians for

another period of time. But then they come to mountains, which belong to a tribe called a carducoy. Now, the carducoy were regarded as quite a formidable people, indeed a whole army sent by the Persian king to subdue them once was said to have, nobody is said to have survived the expedition. So the Persian seemed to have funneled them into these mountains. And once they went in, I would say that Tisyphyrna, the Persian commander, felt that his job had been done and done very well. And they probably never expected to see the Greeks, again, at least not as an intact unit.

But as Xenophon tells us, they persevered against enemies and the weather, ferocious weather, winter and eastern Anatolia, is pretty harsh. So they survived that and then maybe in the high point of the whole story they reach the Black Sea

and they come in sight of it on Mount Feces and there's a famous cry from the Greeks, the Sea, the Sea, which really kind of marks the end of their hardest phase of their journey.

So they arrived then at the Black Sea and the ideally they would have proceeded from there by ship, but they didn't have enough boats in spite of trying to commandeer them on the sea with some boats that they had pirated. So they had to continue on foot.

So they basically went along the Black Sea coast as far as Sinup where they did get ships and then they sailed quite a way to Heraclia and then they marched the remainder of the journey to the Bosphorus, which where we have modern day, Istanbul, crossed into the city, caused some trouble there, and then spent a winter in Thrace, where eventually they were co-opted by the Spartans who were about to start a war in Asia against the Persians. And they effectively ended back where they had started in Sardis, in Lydia, in Western Anatolia, this time fighting for the Spartans against the Persians, and guess who was there in the Persians, their old enemy to Safernaz. If you take a step back, you know, it's 2021. And I think there's a, you could make a case that

Xenophon is a bit out of favor. You know, even in the broader context of the classics being out of favor, the Greeks being out of favor, Xenophon star compared to where it once was, where it was a, you know, I think the Anavis was sort of an established school text for a long time. For everyone reading Greek, it would have been quite common to read this as a schoolboy. It seems to me as somebody who had a kind of classical education myself, that he is not an author that is tremendously popular with those setting the curricula for schools. So what does he have to say about leadership?

What would be of interest to military professionals or just people interested in leadership and history today from what he's teaching? I think, well, one thing to kind of say, Xenophon didn't write this until some 30 years after the event. And that's really striking. And it prompts us to question what he was doing and why did he write the book then? And when I mentioned listening to your earlier podcast, I wondered, what would it be like

if somebody who had participated in the Iraq War 1990 wrote a book today? What would that book look like? And what would they want to tell us? So I think we need to, we take Xenophon's book in that, context. And we take it as the work of a sophisticated author, who's, as I mentioned earlier, a pupil of the late Socrates and very interested in promoting Socrates's worth to his audience. So I think that I would start with that point. And then I would look at what the core lessons he's he's telling us about about leadership are well let me actually can I just read you

something that he says about about leadership in another book the memorabilia this is about the life of Socrates kings and rulers Socrates said are not those who hold a sceptor nor those who are chosen by the masses nor those on whom the lot falls nor those who owe their power to force or deception, but those who know how to rule. It sounds, maybe the tale there sounds a little bit obvious, but Xenophon shows in his Socratic works how Socrates spends his life meeting people who think they know how to do things. Socrates will meet somebody on the street who tells them he wants to be a general in the

army. And Socrates says, great, you know, how are you going to go about and do this? and he starts to ask questions and it quickly becomes apparent that the person actually knows very little about generalship. And I think his view is that the critical element is willing obedience. It's being able to achieve that with those who you are leading. And he gives us ways to do it. I mean, you know, you have to, the leader turn that has to show himself to be the best. he has to be he has to do what he asks he can't order a soldier to do something unless he himself

does it and maybe thirdly he has to be able to provide for his men um he has to be able to provide them with food and shelter and in the particular circumstances of of the retreat that we're discussing he has to be able to turn up booty as well because these are mercenaries and they want they want um you know they want money um so so i think the the The takeout, for me, of his concept of leadership is that willing obedience. That, I think, is critical. So let's talk a little bit more about the method. Because, again, going back to my earlier point that, for those, for example, setting texts that undergraduates might read, I think there's this common assumption that there's just more tooth acidities.

There's more of interest in Herodotus. Xenophon is a sort of crumudgeonly, you know, retired colonel, if you will, without a great, deal to contribute on the most profound questions of politics. You disagree with it and you find him to be a subtle and interesting writer. There's maybe one way to get into that is he goes along as a cavalryman or as someone who's professionally a cavalryman into this military expedition, but not in a military capacity. What on earth does that mean or indicate? Yeah, exactly. Well, I did say that Cyrus's expedition was suspect from a moral perspective because he didn't seem to have any just cause other than his own ambition.

That really seems to be the nub. And Xenophon doesn't disguise that. He even plays on it and tells us that his mother was involved because his mother just liked him more than she did the older brother. So it's awkward for him to come forward and say, I joined this expedition with a principle at stake because there wasn't other than Cyrus's ambition. Mercery service also was not something that educated Greeks, well-off Greeks, so we say, it wasn't that well-looked upon for the simple reason.

If you hired yourself to somebody, you were beholden to them. And at the least, there was a risk, you know, that you might, your interests and the interests of your city-state would be in conflict because you were in the pay of somebody else. So it was really important for him to distance himself from the expedition and from mercenary service. And that's where I think, that's how I think we can explain his elaborate declaration on his own introduction to the story that he followed neither as a captain nor a general nor an ordinary soldier. And you were working on a book on Senephon right now, correct? In addition to this? I am and I've just finished it in fact.

Congratulations. Thank you very much, Aaron. hopefully it will be published next summer. And would you mind if you could? What is the upshot of the book? What is its survey exactly? The title of the book is Xenophon's analysis. A So it's arguing that Xenophon embeds in his history

a Socratic perspective. So we've got Socratic values, for example, are perpetuated through events and people in the story. So it really argues for the deep influence that Socrates had on Xenophon's life and on his writing. And Socrates is killed and executed in what, 399? Yes. Xenophon would have been what in his early to mid-20s?

I would guess he would have been around party. Yeah, yeah. Around 30. Okay, got it. Many of the events that he's writing about in his military service sort of follow that point. and yet here in his older age as a writer, it's this relationship of his youth that seems to hover over, you know,

events like the events of the Anaphasis that have nothing directly to do with Socrates. I think it speaks to the power of Socrates and the fact that at that time people were still writing about him, but also it also tells us that Socrates was a contested figure. you know, maybe we kind of usually take the story that, you know, Socrates was unjustly found guilty by the Athenians.

But I think, you know, it's not black and white. The Athenian jury was a sophisticated one. And they made their judgment on the basis of the evidence they had, which would have been a lot more than we did. And they judged that Socrates probably, ultimately, they were saying he wasn't contributing the way they would like to Athenian democracy and Athenian society. So we have to, I think, we have to see that a lot of people were distrustful of him.

And so Xenophon may well have felt that he wanted to be part of a movement that tried to revive interest in Socrates and demonstrate, crucially, that he wasn't a malign figure. that quite the opposite, he was a very positive role model. And my core argument in the forthcoming monograph is that Xenophon on the retreat is a model student of Socrates. So he is doing what a pupil of Socrates should have done had he found himself in the same situation. So the whole book is a testament to the worth of Socrates. as I argue. Shane Brennan, I'll look forward to reading that book,

and thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much, Aaron. I appreciate it. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.