School of War - Ep 124: Shane Brennan on Xenophon and Leadership

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Shane Brennan, Associate Professor of History and Classics at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and author of Xenophon's Anabasis: A Socratic History, joins the show to talk about why the Anabasis remains an important part of the Western canon of military writing. ▪️ Times      •      01:30 Introduction      •      02:05 Dubai to Bangladesh     •      05:37 Xenophon’s start       •      09:25 Several levels of failure     •      12:37 “An exemplary Socratic student”       •      14:40 Fighting for the Persians     •      17:18 Cyrus the Younger         •      20:46 A leader emerges       •      29:41 “How was he so right?”      •      36:43 Matterhorn     •      38:33 Exile     •      42:01 An instruction on leadership     •      44:16 “There is always something there…” Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack Follow the link to buy the book - Xenophon's Anabasis: A Socratic History

Generations of schoolboys were once raised on classical authors, and Xenophon of Athens used to be an important member of that curriculum. Today not so much, but the general and student of Socrates is a critical source for the military history of ancient Greece, and he's also a deep, penetrating commentator on command and leadership, not least in his great anabasis. Zenophon's memoir of sorts of his time leading a Greek army cut off deep within the Persian empire fighting for survival and for its soul. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay on it. We continue to face a grave situation

in Iran. 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. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Shane Brennan, who is Associate Professor of History and Classics at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh.

He's taught at a number of other places to include the last time you came on the show, you were in Dubai, correct, Shane? That's right, that's right, Aaron. Well, welcome back. Last time you were here discussing your editorship or co-editorhip of the magnificent landmark Xenophon's Anavisysus. We should probably talk a little. People can go back and listen to that episode, but it's worth just talking for a second about how impressive these landmark editions are and how neat it was that you produced this version of anavis. And now you're back to continue the conversation because you've written a book called Xenophon's Anavis, a Socratic History. Shane, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for having me, Aaron. It's a pleasure.

What took you from Dubai to Bangladesh? I guess a life change. I kind of, Dubai is an unusual place. It's a strange place in lots of ways, and I somehow never quite felt at home there. But I found it a difficult place to leave. I suppose it's a classic comfort zone thing. And it just eventually I somehow managed to pull myself out of it.

and to undertake a year out to travel and spend some time with my dad, who was ill at the time. He had dementia, and I wanted to be able to spend time with him while he was still with us. So that's what got me out of there. I hadn't anticipated ending up where I did, but it's a very interesting project here at the Asian University for women. the the aim is to give girls who for whatever the circumstances, be the political or cultural or social, don't have opportunities perhaps like their peers do or that girls might do in other places. So the idea is to give them a chance to have a good quality education. And then hopefully that that empowers them to go back to their communities and be agents of change.

there in a positive way. So I liked the mission. I like it. And so that's that's why I'm here. So kind of a big contrast from Dubai. I'm probably overthinking it with this question because, of course, you can fly home whenever you want and no decree of exile has been passed. And as far as I know, you've not earned any money from mercenary work. But you have spent years of your life now. I mean, really a good portion of your career, because this is your third book on Xenophon, right? focused on this man who is a Greek, famous for many things, probably most famous for being a Greek, who goes to Asia, and never really goes home, I guess, maybe a little bit right at the end. Do you feel any sort of deep spiritual connection to Xenophon's consequence? No, but it's a, you know, it's a good question.

I mean, Xenophon has kept me engaged for, as you say, a very long time and continues to do so. I would say he did actually, yeah, okay, sure. I would be one of those who would say he never returned home to Athens, but he did go back to Greece, which is, I guess, a home of sorts for a Greek, for an Athenian. So I suppose he did return from his adventures abroad, even if he never chose to go back to Athens. And it's still a very, very much debated question as to whether in the end he did go back to Athens. And if he didn't, why didn't he go back? So why don't we start with the basics here?

We have done one episode on this already. But just to rehearse the facts a little bit. Who was Xenophon? This is somebody who, you know, 100 years ago, I think we would have expected anyone who is getting a, you know, quote unquote, quality education. and there was some quality to it, to have probably read Xenophon in high school, maybe in Greek. Nowadays, that's not going to be the case. Why was he once part of this set curriculum for kids growing up? What was his contribution to the story of the West?

Yes. So I describe him as one of those young men that Socrates was interested in. I think that's his kind of entry point to history, like, that somehow one day, as Diogenes records in his lives of the philosophers, Socrates barred his way in the market and asked him a series of questions. And the final one of which, we asked him where various things could be found in the market. And then he concluded by asking him, I think it was about where can I find, where can you find virtue? And Xenophon didn't have a ready answer. And Socrates said, well, follow me then.

So I like to think of it. The story tells us a lot, and I think it tells us that he was somebody that Socrates was interested in. He wasn't somebody random or without some type of leadership potential, which was Socrates's great, or at least according to Zanophon, his great mission in life to identify promising young men who would contribute to the state in a positive way. And he evidently saw on Xenophon qualities that he wanted to develop the one. wanted to bring to nurture. So I like to see Xenophon's origins as a significant figure in that Socratic frame. And then for a long time, even during the time when he would have been part of the set curriculum at a lot of schools, amongst the students of Socrates, the other very famous

one, of course, being Plato, Zenophon gets this reputation as a bit of a dullard, sort of a less interesting, dutiful soldier, soldier gentleman who probably didn't understand that much of what Socrates was actually getting at as opposed to the brilliant, more metaphysically oriented Plato. It seems to me the pendulum has swung back a bit on that, not least because of the influence of Leo Strauss, but others as well. Where do you come in amidst Xenophon's access to wisdom or lack thereof? Yeah, well, I think you summarized it very well. And I think that that kind of that image of Zenophon is a kind of a rather sort of, you know, not the brightest to continue the analogy of the student, not the brightest of those students, holds itself to some degree to an abbas's,

and it's sort of seeming obsession with marches and parasangs and kind of at some point's bland detail. So these kind of everyday details contrasts quite sharply with Plato's higher-level things. and expression. So I think that that sort of maybe confined xenophon to a particular bracket in the mindset of the time. And he very much was in the shadow of Plato. And I think to a degree he still is, but no question, no question that he has emerged

as a very substantial figure in the classical world and is taken very seriously. I would think it's a rare scholar today who doesn't afford him the sort of importance that some of us would have argued for a long time. How bad have things at Athens become for a well-born member of the elite, a relatively young man still right, about 30 years old? Maybe that's not so young by Athenian standards of the day, but seems young today, to leave his city behind and go off on a military, expedition in Asia to compete within the politics of the Persian Empire. It seems to me that there must be several levels of failure prior to one making those sorts of life decisions.

Yeah. Yeah. And especially for somebody like Xenophon who had been school to take part in the successful running of the state, it must have been the circumstances quite compelling for him to leave. And the fact does, has led to much. much thought, speculation maybe better as to the reasons why he would have left. And there's just no, there's no shortage of them, but equally there's no concrete evidence

to point to one particular reason as to why he might left. Perhaps, perhaps looking forward at the execution of Socrates, that might indicate the sort of environment that that was, was, that Sennephon was living in, in, in, in, in, in, in, 401 when he took the decision to leave, having famously consulted Socrates. So I think, I think, you know, they're positive and negative reasons as to why he probably left, and the negative ones would be probably lack of opportunity for somebody with his backgrounds and his affiliation with, with Socrates who had very much fallen out of favor. And then on the positive side, I guess, like young men always.

he sought out adventure, new lands, fortune perhaps. He wanted to learn. So I think there was a nice mix of circumstances that probably inevitably led somebody with ambition to leave their shores and see the world. And this is an enormous theme of the book, is it not, is the tension between Xenophon's personal ambition. And he certainly by his own account,

He is an extroar, becomes, you know, comes from, you know, obscurity in this army to command it, essentially. He is a man of extraordinary talent and ability and also extraordinary ambition. And yet, he has this education from Socrates, but also the broader cultural conditioning of Athens at the time, to have a care for the good of the whole. And this is the drama, right? This is what drives the story is Xenophon's desire to, to rule and do, do deeds that are hard to suppress on the one hand and on the other hand to be true to his obligations to this little community that's, you know, bouncing around Asia sort of on the brink of death daily. And, you know, it's, I'm first of all, I'm curious,

you know, your response to that. And second of all, I think the direction I'd like to drive in here, if we can, is what, what either officers serving today or those who have a care for, for the military one way or the other can learn from from from this book which in certain respects is a kind of leadership manual but in other respects is much deeper and richer and stranger than that there's sort of disconnected thoughts for me but i i'm curious to know how you would how you would take that theme i suppose i i there is there is this tension this this perennial tension in in an abbasis about xenophon on the one hand being an exemplary leader and doing very little wrong in the course of his leading of these Greek mercenaries back homeward.

And somehow, somehow a sort of a sense of, maybe he's overdoing it a little bit here. I mean, could he have been that faultless? And is there no sense that, you know, because there was a cultural thing, certainly, in the classical world, that it wasn't seen as a good thing to overplay yourself. So there's always been this question, Mark. What is, why is he, you know, so forthcoming about his successes? And that's a question that I have always carried with me. And my, that the perspective that I offered on it is that what Xenophon, in fact,

gives us is an exemplary Socratic student. Somebody who's been trained by Socrates to be a leader in the state. and who suddenly finds himself in the most challenging of circumstances. And so this is the real test of the Socratic education. It's one thing to talk about, have discussions about leadership on the streets of Athens, quite another in the mountains of Kurdistan, long, long way from home. So what I argue is that the book is about it's showcasing the value and the quality of the Socratic education.

And so the Xenophon we see is not really Xenophon, the historical figure. He's an exemplar. He's this Socratic leader who shows what it means to be a leader who follows the precepts of Socrates. What does Socrates think about Xenophon going off to fight as a mercenary on behalf of a Persian prince in Asia? Yeah, yeah. well, that's a very, that's a very kind of, maybe the most read part of the entire book, if I might put it like that. So, Socrates's way was that if he himself felt it was within his own capacity in terms of

his own knowledge to advise somebody, if they'd come to him to look for advice, if he believed he could offer them a good course to take, he would give it. But if he had any uncertainty, his recourse, his default mode was to send them to the God to ask what should be done, because he himself couldn't answer the question. So he duly sent Zenephon off to the oracle at Delphi to inquire as to whether or not he should go on this expedition with Cyrus. But Xenophon famously didn't ask that question. He rather asked to which God he should sacrifice

in order to ensure the success of the journey he was about to undertake. So when he arrived back in Athens and reported this to Socrates, Socrates was upset. And he had, we were fair to say that this is interesting. We don't get anything in the narrative about what exactly Socrates said.

But he concluded by saying, that's what the goddess told you to do, then you better do it. And who is this man Cyrus that he goes off in service of? I confess, going back through just reminding myself of the facts of the case in preparation for this interview, I couldn't help but think of the main character. And the very excellent, by the way, series that's currently on television here in the United States on Hulu, the television of the television of Shogun, which I don't know if you've had the pleasure of the Clavel novel or either of the two televisions now.

But there's the central Japanese figure whose fortunes we follow through the course of the story is a Cyrus-like figure. in the sense that he is a man who is a player in Japanese politics and has ambitions to be much more, but conceals those ambitions and plays a very complicated strategic game, you know, always kind of on the razor's edge of complete failure. And that's sort of the Cyrus that's presented here. It's sort of anyone who thinks that grand strategy is the kind of thing that can be, you know, understood according to political science theory as opposed to the decisions of actual sovereigns with the full range of choices and complexity before them,

I think would benefit from reading an account of Cyrus's decision-making and appreciating the extent to which these sorts of decisions are maybe a little bit more complicated than an analysis of data can show. But please, Cyrus, who was it? Well, it's probably useful to start by differentiating him from Cyrus the Grey. Somebody might kind of conflate the two. So we had Cyrus the Great, who would be the more well-known Acamin. or Persian king, the founder of the Persian Empire,

who was about 200 years before, well, not quite, maybe 150 years before our Cyrus, who's known as Cyrus the Younger. And he was a very ambitious prince. I think that's kind of can be said with fair certainty. And he wasn't, when the father passed away, the father passed, appointed his older brother to be his successor. And the story is that Cyrus plotted against him in Persia and that his brother got wind of the plot through a character in an

abysus called Tisifernas, a very imminent and very capable Persian satrap. And Cyrus was arrested and about to be put to death only for the intervention of his mother who pleaded for his life and eventually succeeded in having him returned to his satrape in western Asia Minor, Western Anatolia. And it was there that he greatly hurt by his treatment and still at the view that he was the best place to lead the empire. He started to recruit Greek mercenaries with a view to going and seizing the throne for himself. And so that's the context in which Xenophon and the 10,000 other Greek mercenaries are recruited to join Cyrus in this attempt on the Persian throne. The mercenaries don't know that that's why they're being recruited for the most part, correct?

Yes, yes, exactly, yeah. Because if they had known, it's very unlikely they would have joined. The idea of marching into the Great King's backyard would have seemed foolhardy, even to mercenaries who historically have a tendency to be tempted into anything. I can remember just as a slight aside, a few years ago, if you recall, Colonel Gaddafi was holed up in some part of Libya, but he apparently paid an unfeasible amount of money to some local African mercenaries to get him out of there, but as we know, they weren't successful.

But it nicely illustrated the point, I think, that, mercenaries, if the money is right, they'll try their hand at anything. So, so yes, these, these soldiers believed that they were going to subdue a tribe in the interior of Anatolia, and it was only when the journey was well advanced, and it became pretty obvious that Cyrus had greater ambitions, that they began to, that they began to be uncomfortable. But sure enough, when Cyrus addressed them, he offered them a significant amount more of money, and they agreed to go on. So just to kind of skip forward to the part where Xenophon really comes to prominence, and this is,

there's no real spoiler alerts here. This all happens essentially in the first chapter of the book, but they make it to the heart of the empire. There's a big battle. Battle actually goes pretty well, but then Cyrus dies. And then how do the Greeks, what happens to our Greeks at this point? So the Greeks consider that they have won the battle and the Persians on their site consider they've won the battle. And so they come to a discussion, the heralds from the king come to the Greek camp, and the Greeks famously turn them away until the Persians provide them with breakfast. And then they do negotiate. And eventually it's agreed that the Persians will escort the Greeks back to where they came from.

And so they begin this journey out of Mesopotamia, which becomes increasingly fraud. suspicion grows between the two sides, and then eventually the Greek leader, Cliarcos, agrees to come to the tent of the Persian satrap. I mentioned him earlier to Saffernas, and he brings with him several of the other leading Greek generals. They're captured in a ruse and executed or imprisoned. So the Greeks are left leaderless in the heart of northern Mesopotamia. and it looks like the Persians have succeeded in bringing about their destruction, because the army being leaderless, it will be very difficult for them to mount any credible defense of themselves. But it is at this point that Sennephon emerges, and in a serious speech is first to his own troop,

the group he had been a part of, to the captains of that group, and then finally to the entire assembly, army assembly, he succeeds quite remarkably in re-reviving them and instilling them a sense of belief that they can manage to escape from the Persians and that they can get back to Greece and that the gods will help them at every turn because of the treachery of Tisapherness.

Well, say more, if you will. I mean, this is where I'd really like to linger is the ways in which Xenophon comes to prominence and then remains, you know, the controlling force, even when he's not titularly the sole leader of this army. What are the Socratic virtues? What has he learned from Socrates that helps him through one just extraordinary episode after another where it's hard in the modern military, you know, context to sort of imagine. the complete absence of net at all times with which Sennephan is operating. You have, and for months and months, not for a short period, where you have not only all the people all around you who would be happy to see you and your army dead, but you have the army itself at all times threatening to come apart, threatening different parts to go their own separate ways.

You have this ongoing debate of whether or not, you know, once they get it, make it all the way back up to the Black Sea, do we even need to go back to Greece, you know, shouldn't we stay here and start our own enterprise, our own city? How does, how does Xenophon, how could anybody possibly navigate through such a series of challenges? Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. Well, to answer the first, your kind of initial query as to how, you know, what's Socratic about Xenophon's leadership? So he famously has dreams on the journey. And the first of these occurs. that night the generals have been seized.

And so he asks him, he wakes from the dream and he asks himself a series of questions. Questions like, you know, why am I lying here? Why am I waiting for somebody else to come and sort out this problem? That's already very Socratic,

the act of questioning, the act of self-reflection. So he's immediately signaling what his approach is going to be. It's that critical self-examination leading to logical outcomes and courses that he's going to follow. So I think that that's really important.

And then in his various speeches to the captains and to the army as a whole, there's a logical strain runs through it. He lays out reasons why the Persians won't want to keep that where they are. It's in the Persian interest to let them go. Otherwise, you know, why would they want to have 10,000 hostile mercenaries in the heart of their territory.

It doesn't make any sense. So there's a continuous appeal to logic and common sense. That's, I would say, of course, not exclusively Socratic. But it does bear that hallmark of Socrates's relentless questioning and self-examination. Another quality, I mean, because there's the famous Homeric paradigm of the leader being a sayer of words and a doer of deeds. and it's not enough for Xenophon to be highly persuasive, which he is. He also has to lead on the ground.

And he does that. But what I always find very interesting, initially he makes a big mistake. The very early stages of the retreat, when the viability of the army is in question, the enemy is harassing them, and Xenophon leads a group to chase them. But the enemy is on horseback, and they easily run away, and Xenophon leaves the rearguard exposed. And so that evening, the other generals are very annoyed with them. But his response is what's instructive here,

is responses to acknowledge that he made a mistake. And thereupon to fix it by creating a cavalry. He commandeers forces and they set up a makeshift cavalry so that they're now able to defend the rearguard against future harassment from the enemy. So I think we see this steady buildup, this continuous reference. to a kind of a, to what I refer to as a, a Socratic approach to leadership.

But, but again, equally, I have, you know, it has to be said, you could identify it. You could root it in his Athenian heritage as well. It's quite subtle. But, but I do think that he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, the quality of the Socratic leadership. And what's what's, what's striking about his leadership and what, you know, makes this such a rich and complicated book, if one is trying to see it as a sort of leadership manual, is that he's just right a lot, right? He, he, for the, for the mistake that you cite, I mean, what's striking about Xenophon is, is among, among what striking is judgment, again, in the face of one sort of puzzle after the next, whether it's a strategic puzzle in terms of,

you know, who they're fighting and how, or, or a small P political puzzle in terms of the management of the army itself and how to how to you know keep his head on his shoulders and and keep the army together and time and time again somehow according to his own account he seems to end up at a judicious path typically the best path of the available options and that's why you know that's why it would be hard to use this book as a leadership manual because you can't learn how to do that from one book it might take a socratic education of a sort and this this is just challenge, I mean, just to just to riff for a second, I'm curious to know what you think about this. You know, in the military, certainly the American military, leadership is a major theme of education,

sort of for all ranks, certainly for junior officers. And you're sort of taught, you know, these sort of tricks. It's not described as tricks, but that's actually what they are, you know, sort of ways of being just, being decisive. You know, but in reality, you only have, you know, a few months to teach young men these things. And so what you're really doing is sort of teaching them how to appear just and how to appear, self-sacrificing, you're sort of showing the models of what right looks like and then sort of, you know, in trying to screen out the ones who are really obviously going to fail. And then you're kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that reality teaches them the depth of those things.

But it's not, you know, it's not an education per se. You're getting these young men when they're already college graduates in the officer context. And you're trying to teach them some quick, some quick summaries of what you think is right and then sending them off, you're sort of punting or, you know, you're begging the giant question of their actual education and their upbringing and their parents and everything else, which is actually going to matter tremendously. And Xenophon somehow has, again, by his own account, access to the deep knowledge required to lead, which is ultimately about being right, about having the good judgment.

And that's the thing that you can't teach in a series of formulae. Can you say, I mean, how is he so right so often? How does that come to pass? Maybe that's one way into the issue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose, you know, one has to be somewhat wary of reading the text as straightforward history. And putting in a historic graphic context, history writing is very new. And it's a genre that's still forming.

So I think reading it as we would, maybe a more up-to-date text, our expectations maybe shouldn't be the same. And so I believe there's truth in all of his descriptions, but they might not necessarily always be historical truths. It may be a case of a moral truth trumping a historical one. So there's also an awful lot, Aaron, that he doesn't tell us. And that's one of the, one of the, the intriguing things about the book. What are we not told? What has he left out? And that's, that's something we need to keep to the

four of our minds when we read through the narrative. Maybe if I can give one particular example to try and illustrate this, on their, on the retreat northwards, they're following, they're following, they go down a valley and they come to a junction, but they should come to a place, they should come to the Euphrates, and they should be looking to cross that river if they want to get back to the Mediterranean. It would be the direct route. In other words, there's no reason that they should ever have gone way up into the mountains of Armenia and eventually come out at the Black Sea. But something happened, something, you infer that something, happens, one of the Persian sat traps was around and he had a substantial army and you have to infer

that there was a negotiation or a recognition that they couldn't pass him and cross the river. But it's just something he doesn't tell us and it's so you just want to know what were you doing. Why did you not, you know, why did you suddenly go off in the opposite direction to where you should be going? And then there are whole kind of phases whereby we just get, you know, maybe a line that the Army spent 15 days doing something without too much more detail. And so one is left with the deep desire to know more. And so what I'm saying is that that silence might mask events that don't perhaps paint Xenophon as a leader in a very flattering way. And one of the reasons he might not want to have revealed them could be that it would undermine his Socratic mission

to showcase the model, Socratic leader. So I think that my answer is, but one answer to one part of your question is a need to be aware that there's a huge amount that we're not told for all the detail we get. And in a way it kind of lulls us in. When Xenophon tells us they traveled three days here, 10 parasangs there.

It kind of lulls us into a sense that we know everything that happened. But actually, I don't think we do. Talk about this tension that emerges when they make it up to the Black Sea about whether or not there's a need or whether or not it's to their advantage to ultimately go back to Greece or whether or not it might not be better to stay. How does that dilemma play out? What is Xenophon's role in those debates? So there is at least one location on the Black Sea that there's consideration given to the Greeks founding a colony.

And Xenophon is said to be to the fore of that project. And he describes this particular place and how exceptionally the location is and how much benefit it could bring both to the settlers and to Greece. So there is, there's certainly, there's certainly that episode whereby there is thought given to founding this colony and Xenophon is, is prominent in the, in the supposed machinations behind it. But it doesn't come to pass, and the soldiers decide that they don't want to stay in the Black Sea and that they want to return to Greece. So that kind of, it does leave. Xenophon is said to not have, he said to have consulted the gods about whether or not there should be a settlement. And this angered the men because they possibly, possibly knew of his previous on this. And you might recall we talked about him going asking a leading question to the Oracle at Delphi.

And possibly the soldiers felt that he was manipulating the situation because he wanted to have a settlement and it angered them. And that may have really turned them off the idea because certainly some of them were interested in it, but it turned out in the end that most of them decided that they wanted to return to Greece. You know, your discussion of Xenophon silences, it puts me in mind of a contemporary American novelist, a guy named Cormorlante, I don't know if you ever come across his work. He wrote a very good novel about Vietnam called Matterhorn. And, you know, his experience is, I mean, it's based on, it's fiction, but it's based very closely on his experiences as a young officer there. And in that novel, and I remember reading, I taught it at the Naval Academy for a few years,

but I remember wincing as I read it because he's so hard on himself, like the character and the protagonist of the novel, who's very clearly Marlantis, is portrayed, you know, have access to his inner voice in sort of good 20, 21st century. novelistic fashion. And this young man, it wants glory. He wants to win a medal. It's an explicit goal. It's a very unattractive picture of a kind of young ambitious glory hound lieutenant, who then, of course, encounters, you know, the reality of war and, you know, Marines die because of his ambition, essentially, or at least he fails to save them. And, you know, you watch his education over the course of the novel. And I still, I remember.

I actually remember in exchange with my students talking about the novel at the academy where they all just trashed this guy. They said they would never want to serve with such an officer. And they're very hard on them in our class discussion. I remember asking them, well, what if I had access to your inner voices? What if everything you thought was on a page in front of me? Like, how do you think you would come off looking? And it was good. It was productive conversation.

But it strikes me that that's sort of the, almost the opposite of what we're talking. For Marlantis, his ambition is something that he had to struggle with and wrestle with. and come to terms with. And Xenophon's treatment of it is, well, it's not a confessional 21st century treatment in a straightforward sense, is it? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

And that points to what I said about the birth, the very newness of this genre. And, you know, I mean, the great question for Anabas is glad the opportunity to come up to ask it is, what is it? It's just, you know, what is it? So, you know, it's not straightforward history, and it's not just travelogue, and it's not just leadership or philosophy. It's all of those things, and it's more, and it's maybe none of those things.

So it's a devilishly hard quest, it's a really hard thing to pin down. And what you say about getting into the mind of somebody, Xenophon is so slippery, you know, it's so hard to get inside his head. and try to really understand, you know, what is he thinking? So, yeah, I think that's a huge factor in trying to, you know, appreciate these, is appreciating their different literary contexts, or different historical contexts. He ends up writing this book much later in his life, does he not? I mean, he's exiled.

There's a decree of exile past, which for somebody who, you know, I don't think we have evidence that he was particularly, prominent in Athenian life, except perhaps the decree itself. But while he's away, it turns out he can't come home. And he ends up living near Sparta, right, in the Peloponnesus, and engaging in this literary career, of which the analysis is one of the books. So this is after we think years and years of reflection, right, that he finally puts pen to paper here. What might we infer from that? Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. And it's one that's really important to make. You know, going back to the book you referenced there, presumably that had been written in fairly short

order after the experience. I mean, I don't know what the publication, the gap between the war and the publication of the book was, but, you know, you imagine it to have been following on, not to, you know, allowing for riserly procrastination, the book probably appeared, you know, in a respectable time after the event. And you'd think the same. him with Annabuses. If Zendifan wanted to write about his experiences, a young man in Asia with some extraordinary figures, and let's not forget he was with the Gesselows after, after an abys, after he remained in Asia Minor. He had, you know, he had an extraordinary life. You would think that he would have put pen to paper, so to speak, pretty soon afterwards.

And of course, if he had, we wouldn't, this wouldn't be the book we'd be reading. It would be something inevitably quite different. But he didn't. And it was many, many years later, upwards, possibly 40 years later, certainly 30 years before he wrote the account. And that's, of course, a huge, that's something that has to make us stop. And, you know, if a listener is wondering, well, you know, maybe we're reading too much into this text, then that should be paused for thought that there's this huge gap in time. And at that time, he's beginning his literary, he's beginning to write, and he's writing about Socrates. Socrates is the outstanding character, the outstanding feature of his writing. And so you begin to, you know, you're compelled to bring

an Abbas's into that frame and at least to see it as, as part of Xenophon's major writing phase. So, so again, it's, it's, it's a really important literary context to appreciate that there's this, this very substantial gap between the experience and the actual publication of the book. Well, there's this disciple-like quality to the students of Socrates, right, and his effect on them. I mean, it's the, it's the, it's the right word, too, because there is a parallel. It feels like I'm about to see something controversial, but I don't, I don't think it is. I think this is a commonplace, but that, you know, if, if the fact, Foundations of the Western tradition are, on the one hand, Judeo-Christianity, with Jesus as a kind of central figure there.

The other foundation and sources is Athens and Reason and Greece, of whom Socrates is clearly A, if not the central figure. And so this strange memoir, war story, harrowing tale of daring due tied up with all these odd, specific details, is this vindication of a charismatic, not a religious leader, but philosophic leader, and his approach to life played out on the battlefield. And is it the first, it's not the first book in the Western tradition to treat leadership, of course. I mean, that in a sense goes back to the Iliad. But is it the first book itself. Or is it on himself.

I mean, his cyropedia, although admittedly written from the Western offices, is, you know, very much interested in leadership. Is he the first author to take it as an explicit, it theme as a central theme, I guess, maybe is the question? You know, like you say, I mean, you could read the whole of Homer as a kind of instruction on leadership in, but Homer's poetry and Xenophon, if we've established anything in this conversation, it's something more than just storytelling. There's something analytic behind it.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, you know, again, on the time that Xenophon is writing about Socrates and he's in his writing phase, he's not the only person who's writing about Socrates then. And it's possible to think of almost a Socratic literary industry at this time where there are numerous different people competing for the memory of Socrates. And so I'm inclined to see Xanophon as being, maybe seeing the pictures of Socrates that emerge before his eyes and the writings of others, not to be quite what he remembers or would

like us to remember. And in some sense, his Socratic writings are correctives to the writings of others. And so he may lay emphasis on different aspects of Socrates in his writings that he feels are not given due weight in the writings of others. So I think that's very important. But it's also important to say, as a counter to all of this, that Socrates only appears once in an abysus. So, you know, it's been a bit adventurous of me to pin a whole thesis on the book being about Socrates when he's only in it once, somebody might say. But my thesis is built on this wider cultural literary context in which I believe Xenophon was seeking to embed the image of his Socrates into the literary record and indeed into the minds of his contemporary. readers. Or an audience of military officers and NCOs and policy types in D.C. thinking about international relations and defense policy. Any closing thoughts? Anything about Xenophon you would want

such an audience to walk away with, whether it's about the analysis or his other works? You won't get tired of reading him. There's always something there. There's always, every time I pick up Xenophon, I learn something. I can say no better thing about. a writer or a person than that. Shane Brennan, author most recently of Xenophon's Anavisus, a Socratic History, also the co-editor of the Landmark Anapis, which if folks are not familiar with the landmark series, I mean, it is this magnificent series of books taking texts like the Anabasis

that really, you know, it is hard to just work your way through the text. There's so many references to strange places and so many references to, you know, detailed military affairs. It's just hard to make heads or tails of it if you're just looking at text. So these volumes have these rich maps and guides and summaries and appendices that help you make sense of these things. So there's a landmark Thucydides. There's a landmark Herodotus. There's a landmark haliticus.

And now, thanks to Shane, a landmark analysis. Thank you so much. David Thomas as well, my wonderful co-editor on the book, on the landmark analysis. Well, thanks to you both and thanks for your work on Xenophon. And thanks so much for making the time today. It's a great conversation. Thank you very much, Aaron. It's been a pleasure.

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