Please don't let this lecture dissuade you from reading Anabasis... the book is actually interesting and insightful. There is so much more in it than comparisons to the idiocy and hubris of contemporary military planning and politics. The leadership the Xenophon showed in rallying 10,000 mercenary soldiers whose officers had all been murdered is simply astounding. His ability to negotiate with them, his rivals for control, and the various adversaries the army encountered could be a masters class in leadership and persuasion.. His descriptions of the various peoples in northern Anatolia that they had to negotiate with, or fight their way through, are poignant, poetic and insightful.. The very idea of this ragtag mass of men fighting their way home through completely unknown territory with no hope of help or rescue is simply epic and should be made into a major big-screen film.... (I know..... "the Warriors"... LOVED that movie...🙂 but I mean a REAL movie about the book..) It's not all about us and our current stupidity and lack of vision... You can just read books from the past to learn about the past. They were just exactly like us, only long dead.
I have read Anabasis at least three times, and as a veteran, would say that the context that the speaker is trying to place it just does not strongly fit, because our biggest mistake is trying to look at books like the Illiad, Oddesy, and Anabasis for inspiration and guidance . . . Sure there is at least some value in it, that I won't deny, but what is being missed is far larger . . . We are not living in an age were wars can be fought on a large scale, as they were in World War I and World War II . . . In this age, with the weapons now available, we are most certainly heading for complete mutual destruction, destruction of the entire planet and of the human race. The tribalism of Xenophon's time, acted upon today, could very well end us all. The lesson is not the similarity between our situation and that of Xenophon's time, but the difference!
I think that's a fair enough comment; although I've read The Anabasis it was a long time ago, but whether or not are any, "lessons," to be taken from it for today conflicts other than the perennial problem of unpaid mercenaries preferring banditry to going home and earning an honest living is questionable ? The most profound lesson that I can think of from Greek history comes not from Xenophon but from Thucydides's, History of the Peloponnesian War. "By the end of the war both sides were routinely doing things that would have been considered utterly unthinkable when the war it began." That perhaps more than any other has been a lesson from both Vietnam and Afghanistan.
I think there is something there when the book describes the reasons the mercenaries are there, they are not that different from why kids today join the military. They fall in line with all the people I knew in the Army. That said it does ask the question "What does a soldier do when the war is over?" Moreover what does a soldier do when the war is lost. I think there is tendency after a long time fought and struggled for something, and in the case of the 10,000 they didn't know what or why after a while, indistinct, but you know deep down you failed to achieve, to just struggle with purpose. That is the dilemma many veterans today face. I really feel a lot of contradiction about my time in service fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I feel like I was part of one of the greatest injustices of the last 20 years. Nothing I did or my friends did has made anything but a worse world and like the 10,000 you have to just go home and deal with it or turn you back on the sea and fight for nothing, whether metaphorical or "defense contracting" for other countries...
This was pleasant to listen to but not particularly informative. Which, maybe that was the point, and the audience he was speaking to was already knowledgeable about the subject. As someone interested in the subject but with no existing knowledge, what I got out of it was "they fought Persians, their leaders got killed, they walked back". I knew that much from a quick Google search.
“They were crying out for war.” That makes thematic sense, but it doesn’t sense in the story’s internal logic. Why would the Sirens cry out for war? Did they want war? Did they want to lead men to commit to war? Wouldn’t it make just as much sense to promise sexual favors before swallowing them into the water?
I think you need to fully grasp just how bloodthirsty and how warlike the Classical Greeks were, (Spartan society was in fact organized entirely to breed and to train elite Hoplites; heavy infantry,) and how macho Greek males were; we get a wrong picture of their society if we think of them just as garrulous old men in togas. Socrates was old an soldier and immensely proud of his military service and the only epitaph for Aeschylus, (arguably one of greatest playwrights who who have ever lived,) was that he had fought at the battle of Marathon. War, (apart from being a lucrative source of income for Greeks working as mercenaries,) was above all was an opportunity for free Greek men prove their, "virtue." not so much arete, as what we'd probably now call machismo. That at least is my own understanding ?
@@Eris123451 please no. You are confused. Anyways for greeks there is the glory after death witch called υστεροφημια men who excell at war gain Κλεος and Κυδως from which the word Kudos comes from. The exact opposite of the returning is the initial verge to war started in iliad. Why would odysesus in his right mind would want to go back and rot peacfully in an island. Why syrins would talk to odyseas about sexual favours he just left cyrcis island, he obviously does not care about sex. The only temptationnis to go back to war. When in the 20 century celebrate the peacefull return on the banal ordinary we get the exiatensial melancholy. This is premodern. There was no remaning Epos about being home doing farming work
My dear lupus. Love your name homo hominus lupus. Men in their deepest disire is to destroy, this always will remerge again and again and again no matter how much civilization and the polis wants to eliminate that tendency. Bellum Omnium contra omnes
Xenophon ancient Greek Greek: Ξενοφῶν, PRONOUNCED ˈzɛnəfən OR ˈzɛnəfɒn STRESS ACCENT ON THE FIRST SYLLABLE with 'e' IPA ɛ as 'e' in Zen Buddhism, and not the long 'e' sound in magazine or scene. the first 'o' IPA ə as 'o' in button the second (final) 'o' either IPA ə OR IPA ɒ as 'o' in John. Anabasis ancient Greek ἀνάβασις = anábasis, 'a going up, an inland (up from the sea) march' PRONOUNCED əˈnæbəsɪs STRESS ACCENT ON THE SECOND SYLLABLE with first and third 'a' as IPA ə as above with second (stressed) 'a' as IPA æ as 'a; in 'bat' or the first 'a' in 'bastard' and 'i' IPA ɪ as 'i' in sister.
In fact the rules for pronouncing Greek, (which even in it's written forms had several major dialects,) as it was supposed to have been spoken during the classical period were written down about 600 years after the fact in Byzantium; so although there's much erudite and even brilliant speculation about what it may really have sounded like and those are the conventions which are still used to teach it; we don't actually know with very much confidence what it actually sounded like, I've even heard it suggested that it used pitch accents the same way that say Chinese still does. In fact over the years I've only gradually come to realize just how much we don't know, (and never will,) about that culture and just how strange and how alien it is to us and always will be.
@@surfingonmars8979 The book is available for free as Xenophon's copyright expired 2000 years ago. Its a thousand pages covering hundreds of tactical and political situations. To discuss one in detail, rather than an overarching analysis, bespeaks a simplistic, "Read one chapter" mentality as encouraged in the 3rd grade or The Infantry
