I just finished reading a translation of Xenophon’s Hellenica by Rex Warner, it’s the third “historical” classical greek work I’ve finished in the last year and I think I’ve had enough for now. I enjoyed all three don’t get me wrong, Herodotus’ The Histories, Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War (which was by far the most enjoyable and worthwhile in my opinion) and of course Xenophon’s Hellenica as I just said, and I’m glad I read them. Some parts were just a bit of a slog to get through, and I think I’d like to find something easier to read next before going back for more classical works. I have this Oxford World Classics collection of surviving fragments from various pre-socratic thinkers which is translated by and includes commentary from Robin Waterfield who translated the version I have of The Histories. He also translated the four surviving works about Socrates by Xenophon and I have a copy of that collection as well. I’m not sure which to read first, but both will have to wait a little while.
I’d like to talk about these three historical accounts a bit though, and of course as I’ve been doing with this series I’d like to talk about whether it’s worth owning an actual physical copy of these or not. Now in one way they are all very similar, rather than fitting the idea of what we might think a work of history looks like today all three of these books could be described as a deliberately crafted narrative. However instead of using fictional events and characters to tell a story like a novel would, or to try and explore certain themes and ideas, they use actual events and real individuals. Each one of them is telling a story, with life, and about it.
That isn’t to say that anything is made up, or that these works are dishonest. For the most part they’re very factual accounts, Thucydides making the most effort to be objective and detached, but these works are not simply a listing of dates or a dry description of life in this period. Which is contrary to what I said in the last post in this series where I did actually say I’ve been reading a lot of dry history lately. I regret that wording, sure in comparison to an easy genre novel they are a bit slow moving but for the most part these books are very engaging once you get into the right mindset. I had to stop reading The Histories because I was not adjusted at first, but then after about a year roughly I picked it back up and I found myself really getting into it. I wrapped it up really quite quickly and then finished all of Thucydides’ account in just over a week, I was reading for an hour or more every night.
Xenophon is a little bit tricky with some of the facts to be fair, the introduction to the copy I have goes into quite some detail about it and I’ll talk about that later, but at no point does he just make stuff up. There are just some rather glaring omissions, but if you understand what he’s specifically trying to accomplish with his work then maybe that’s not such a problem. Now Herodotus does make a lot of pretty wild claims, he’s often referred to as the father of history but another very common epithet that has been given to him is the father of lies. The last few hundred years has been nothing but wins for the H man though, archaeological finds and information gathered thanks to newer technology has validated his claims on everything from the designs of Egyptian trading boats to the unusual customs of various different peoples and even the existence of an entire civilisation in the eurasian steppe. He did also report stories he heard on his travels of winged snakes and griffins guarding pots of gold and stuff like that, but at least he always expressed scepticism regarding them.
See what Herodotus is most famous for are his asides or tangents, the general overarching structure of the work is to tell of the rise of the Achaemenid empire (the first Persian empire) and their unchecked growth until they came against the Greeks, but he talks about so much more than that. I know that a video game analogy is going to make me look a little silly, but it’s like an elder scrolls game. In a game like Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim there’s the “main quest”, but along the way you’ll be sidetracked over and over again by innumerable “side quests”. It’s a lot like that, at least the first half/ two thirds certainly are. As we go along with Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius and Xerxes and see their seemingly infinite appetite for consuming their neighbours, we get to hear the stories, myths and customs of these many different places and peoples they conquered.
Herodotus of course was writing this almost a century after Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, in fact he was a contemporary of Thucydides although Herodotus being a couple decades older did complete his work first. Now it’s hard to date these works precisely because they didn’t have a publishing system like we have today obviously, Herodotus in fact originally used his writings for giving presentations at festivals across the greek world, and Thucydides claims that he started writing his account very early in the war that he was talking about. Which seems suspect to me, I think it’s more likely he began writing after his exile, but I have no good reason to believe that other than that it makes sense to me and the actual academics and researchers seem to take him at his word. You should trust them, not me.
Anyway what I was going to say was that Herodotus therefore was visiting these areas and describing them and the people there a century after the time period he was trying to talk about. The thing is, ancient history moved a whole lot faster than people generally seem to think it did. You often hear expressions like “the romans wore X style of clothing” or “the Egyptians worshipped Y” but think about it for a second. Imagine if you read in a history book of the future that “the americans wore the mullet hairstyle”. Sure for a period in the 70s and 80s that was very common, that’s all though. New clothing styles, a new religion or at least new gods, new material culture, all of these things and more changed constantly.
Of course deliberate traditions and very important ancestral stories were maintained, but life changed quite noticeably just as it has over the most recent century. So while you get a lot, and I really mean a lot, of that “this group do Z” talk in the book it’s a bit hard to keep track as he’s moving back and forth in time. He’ll get to a new region as the narrative moves forward, and then talk about the customs they have in that area in his own day. Even though by this point they may have changed quite a lot.
In fact people were often completely shifted around and displaced so as to be more easily controlled and taxed. This isn’t just something the Persians did, it’s pretty standard procedure for empires throughout history. You’ve probably heard of the Babylonian captivity, well believe it or not that wasn’t anything particularly unusual it’s just that jews are the only people capable of holding a grudge against an empire that died two and half thousand years ago. Amusingly, Cyrus the Great actually returned the jews to their homeland after conquering the Babylonians. He’s still considered a messiah by religious jews today. Weirdly Herodotus doesn’t actually mention this at all, he briefly mentions a group of people in Palestine who practise circumcision but that’s about it.
This is actually one of several pieces of “evidence” used to suggest that Herodotus didn’t travel to a lot of the places he claimed to have. I think it’s likely that he did travel to the places he claims he did, perhaps not quite as distantly (for example, instead of going deep into southern Egypt he may have simply visited some cities on the northern coast) as he claimed but a little embellishment isn’t such a crime in my opinion. Especially if you appreciate the real purpose of this work, which as I said is the telling of a grand narrative. These asides, even though they’re what he’s most famous for, are not the reason he wrote The Histories. At least it doesn’t seem that way to me, but as I’ve already said and I’ll probably feel the need to say again later my opinions are entirely unqualified.
People say that The Histories was a pioneering work in various disciplines, geography, ethnography, theology, anthropology, etc. and sure he certainly dabbles in all the things those areas of study focus on, but it is just dabbling. He has some cute ideas about the nature of the seasons and how the continents are all balanced perfectly which he talks about at one point for example, but these are just more of his asides. However much of a debt these various disciplines might owe to him, he was not engaged in rigorous study of any of these things. It’s a lot like this blog in fact, I talk about all kinds of things but I’m mostly just having fun. I’m simply engaging my curiosity, take this very post for example. I’m not a historian. I never went to university, I didn’t even study history at school after the age of 12. If you actually want to learn something you’re in the wrong place. When it comes to any of Herodotus’ personal “hot takes” on how things work or even on simple geography it’s a good idea to dismiss them, maybe appreciate them for the direction they led us in but that’s all.
The ultimate purpose is to tell the story of this civilizational clash between Greece and Persia though, in a way it’s closer to the epic cycle of poems (of which only Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey survive unfortunately) than to any history book that would be published today. After all the Greeks of Herodotus’ time took the Homeric epics as “history”. Sure they didn’t take them at face value completely, in fact Herodotus himself has a very weird idea that the entire Trojan war was a misunderstanding as Paris and Helen actually got lost and ended up in Egypt. This just goes to show that the trojan war was seen as a very real event and not merely some kind of myth or allegory or whatever. These people really believed in Achilles and Agamemnon and Hector and so on, they might have had theories about the specifics but the premise was taken as fact.
Not only that, but some seemingly believed that the accounts of literal divine intervention in the Homeric poems were accurate as well and not just a literary device or something. There’s a lot of talk about how pre-Christian religion was all figurative and the gods were simply seen as representations of certain concepts not as literal anthropomorphic beings, but that’s clearly not true. Perhaps there was disagreement, maybe like how today you have biblical literalists and also Jordan Peterson types who think the bible is just fiction that has a “truth” if you simply read between the lines.
If that’s the case, then Herodotus is certainly in the first category. He clearly believes the gods to be very real, in fact there’s another aside where talks about how old he thinks some gods are. See in Egypt he finds that Dionysus is considered to be one of the oldest gods, whereas in Greece Dionysus was considered to be one of the youngest. After all he wasn’t in Homer’s poems and therefore must have been born after that right? Now in fact the Egyptian priest he was arguing with was closer to the truth, as Dionysus and the gods in other cultures that he’s evolved from might be one of if not the oldest gods ever worshipped. He was certainly worshipped in Mycenaean Greece, although depicted rather differently than during the classical period, which was before the Trojan war. Or whatever events inspired that story at least.
I know what you might be thinking by the way, the Egyptians worshipped a completely different pantheon of gods so why would they care or know about Dionysus or Zeus or any of the Greek gods. It’s actually a lot more complicated than that, Herodotus basically assumes that most of the Egyptian gods were just analogues for the Olympians and seeing as there were priests in Egypt willing to get into debates about the age of these gods I think we can assume they probably had a similar view in turn. Think of it like how the roman gods were basically just the same as the ones the greeks worshipped but with latin names. We were all taught about that in school.
This is another misconception that a lot of people seem to have about the ancient world, probably in this case because of Christianity. Because this kind of way of looking at religion and the gods was basically the norm across the world or at least Europe and Asia until the spread of the Abrahamic faiths. Of course the gods weren’t perfect parallels with one another, as within any culture a god would evolve and change over time just like how in Greece Dionysus was “demoted” for a quite a long period of time before returning to his position as one of the primary gods. He was certainly worshipped a whole lot less for quite a few hundred years, around the time of Homer, and then seems to have become quite a lot more popular again. So the living “canon” (if you can call it that) of the greek religion (again, if you can even call pre-Christian spirituality “religion” in the strict sense) interpreted this as him being one of the youngest.
This evolution of the “canon” is another example of what I was getting at earlier in that to say “The Greeks believed in this rigid pantheon” is misleading. Not only did the gods that were worshipped change over time but even within a given period there were differences in different regions. This is just within the greek world, but Aphrodite for example (later syncretised with the Roman goddess Juno) was quite a different figure in the eyes of the classical era Spartans than their Athenian contemporaries, characteristically being more of a martial figure. The further apart in both space and time any two cultures were therefore, the more they would have diverged. They can only differ so much though, after all gods were generally associated with some particular aspect of human experience, and there’s a pretty finite list of those. Which is why in the Egyptian figure of Isis Herodotus saw Demeter, or in Amun, Zeus and so on.
Now Thucydides on the other hand, seems to be the more on the side that sees the gods as perhaps figurative, not that he was an atheist (again, if you can really use such a term in a pre-Christian context) but he certainly doesn’t seem to believe in the gods as material beings that interfere in the affairs of men. His account, unlike The Histories, focuses entirely on the corporeal realm. He talks about rites and sacrifices and religious belief as one of the things which motivates people sure, and he gives his opinion that certain acts that took place were sacrilegious a couple times if I’m remembering correctly, but he never once talks about divine involvement or the gods himself.
In fact the real purpose of this work, as he says early on, is to try and find the real causes of this war. In doing this, he builds a case for his view of human nature. This view is probably most clearly expressed in the passage that is now referred to as the Melian Dialogue. This is a discussion which supposedly happened between some representatives from Athens and the small island city of Melos. Now it’s quite unlike anything else in the book, laid out almost like a script this exchange between the heralds goes back and forth for several pages.
The Athenians start with the ultimatum that the Melians should either submit and be brought under Athenian control or be destroyed. The Melians respond with various ways that they might somehow both survive and keep their freedom, including that the gods will intervene to help them actually. These suggestions are dismissed one by one by the Athenians who by the end are almost begging the Melians to see reason and drop this idealism which will see them destroyed. See throughout this back and forth the Athenians are remarkably frank about how they see things, which is essentially if you don’t have an empire you’re part of someone else’s. There’s no pretext for this attempted conquest, no flimsy justification, they’re there because no one can stop them. Everything is expressed in this one quote from the dialogue that you’ve probably heard before as it’s so famous.
The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must
In the translation I read it was actually “the dominant exact what they can and the weak concede what they must” but even if that’s maybe more accurate it doesn’t sound as poetic or have the same gravitas as the more well known version. The difference is pretty insignificant anyway, the point that Thucydides was making is pretty clear in both translations. It’s something that comes up over and over again, and I would say is the primary theme, the idea that life is nothing but the pursuit of power. If you’re wondering, Melos was sacked, all the inhabitants were killed or enslaved, and the city was resettled with Athenian colonists. The thing about the Melian dialogue is it’s the only time where Thucydides presents this perspective as something shared by others.
See there are a lot of speeches in this book, speeches that go on for several pages, and some are quite fascinating but others are rather dull. Regardless, in none of them are any of the people he claims to be quoting as shameless as the Athenian heralds at Melos supposedly were. Actually he doesn’t claim to be quoting the speeches presented in the book word for word, what he says is that every speech he gives is based on a real speech and covers most of what was said in that real speech. Now for the speeches from before his exile from Athens this means he very possibly is recreating ones he heard first hand, but the later ones he will have only heard of through interviews with other people who did or through reading transcripts.
Transcripts of particularly important speeches definitely were made in this period, as there are still some of which there are surviving copies of to this day. Pericles’ funeral oration (probably the most famous speech in the book, depicted in the painting I chose for the header image) is in fact seen as one of the most reliable speeches in Thucydides’ account because other transcripts from speeches at the same festival in different years are able to confirm both the existence of the festival (the funeral for the dead soldiers) and the tradition of a speech being given at this festival. At least that’s what I read on Wikipedia.
What I was saying though was that the other speeches might hint at this attitude, but ultimately present the usual pretexts and smokescreens you can expect from an imperial power. Of course I’m just talking about the speeches given by the various demagogues that Athens goes through during the war, there are also speeches given by generals before major battles and of embassies and so on. See after Pericles dies, fairly early on during the war thanks to the plague that hits Athens, there are a lot of men trying to fill his role. These are the demagogues, I suppose the most famous is Cleon, and they love to give speeches. I will say that even though Cleon was a complete cunt, assuming Thucydides is being accurate in his representation of him (which is hard to say, Cleon seems to have played a role in his exile from Athens so the two were far from friends), when it came down to it he was willing to do what had to be done. Read the book if you want to know what I mean.
The Melian dialogue therefore, an exchange that Thucydides couldn’t possibly have been around to witness, is the only example of an official on behalf of the Athenian state openly admitting that they were simply engaged in the naked pursuit of power. Every speech, is “we need to help this small city, we’re doing this for the sake of freedom, to spread democracy” (sound familiar). Now it is true that throughout the war there is this revolutionary undercurrent throughout the Greek world. It only seems to come up when it directly ties in with the war, but essentially in every city big and small there were attempts to wrest control away from the oligarchies and establish democracies similar to Athens. In turn, there were “reactionary” movements attempting to stop these democratic parties from seizing control. The impression you get from the book is that it was like hundreds of very small civil wars breaking out all across Greece, and the war between Athens and Sparta was like a big metaphor for this struggle.
Athens of course represented democracy, and Sparta oligarchy. Oligarchy is not meant in the very specific way it’s used today, at least in the English speaking world, but to describe any kind of system with a small group openly holding power. Today the term is generally used to describe a corrupt system where an economic elite hold the “real” power, despite there being a government that appears democratic in place. Yet some of the “oligarchies” of classical Greece were quite unlike this. Sparta being the perfect example, they had a very unusual system of government and in fact if it wasn’t for Xenophon we’d know far less about it than we do. My point is that the war between Athens and Sparta seemed to be representative of a greater ideological struggle that was going on in Greece at the time. See, every time a democratic faction took over a city ruled by an aristocratic elite they switched allegiances to Athens, and in turn whenever an oligarchic regime was established they tended to switch over to supporting Sparta in the war.
So the spreading of democracy was not entirely a façade, but it was definitely an excuse and the Delian League was absolutely just an Athenian empire in all but name. The small island states wouldn’t have been rebelling at the first chance they got if they didn’t feel like they were under Athenian dominion. I think that’s what really turned the war, more so than the failure of the Sicilian expedition. The war continued on for quite some time after that, and while Athens lost her total naval supremacy thanks to it she was still the primary maritime power, winning more battles than she was losing. It’s also what started the war, Sparta feeling they needed to pre-emptively put a stop to the growth of Athenian power before even they lost their freedom (although most of the inhabitants of the spartan area of control were enslaved).
This at least is the state of things that is presented by Thucydides, and he does have his biases. I think more importantly though, you get the feeling that he went into this project with an already established idea which he was looking to prove, rather than trying to analyse what happened in order to find out why it did. It seems like he had this Machiavellian conception of how states really worked (Machiavelli wasn’t born until nearly two thousand years later of course, but I would not be surprised if he read Thucydides) in mind and then went around trying to prove it. The Melian Dialogue stands out because it’s where he overplays his hand and all but addresses the reader directly with his own personal theories.
Again though I will stress that for the most part the account seems very careful to present what happened as accurately as possible, and from what I’ve read even to this day it is considered a very reliable one. You’re probably noticing that I’ve used the word “account” a lot to refer to what Thucydides wrote, and that’s because from what I understand he never actually gave his work an official title, but also because that really does best describe what it was. It has a very rigid structure, and it does it’s best to get the order of everything perfectly accurate so you can see exactly what events influenced what other events. Xenophon puts far less effort into this, which makes it a lot harder to keep track of who’s who and where they are and all those sorts of things, especially for someone who doesn’t know the region or the people involved.
The version I read was actually titled, it was simply called “The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides, and I think that he’s earned that. I’ve noticed with the Oxford World Classics line they tend to do this and also they give different titles to things that already have one. For example, the Anabasis of Xenophon which is another work covering his time with the mercenary army known as the Ten Thousand is renamed The Expedition of Cyrus. Anyway when you read this, you are not reading a grand moral tale like Herodotus wrote, or the memoir of an old soldier like Xenophon left us, you’re reading an account (or report, if you prefer) on the war between Athens and Sparta that took place between 431 and 404 BC. Well most of it anyway. The Peloponnesian War is a perfect title, because that is exactly what you will find between those two covers.
I say most of it because Thucydides never got to finish what he was writing, he cuts off abruptly just a few years before the end of the war. Xenophon in the Hellenica then picks up almost exactly where he left off, which implies that Thucydides’ works were spread around quickly and were considered valuable right away. Xenophon wasn’t even the only person to write a follow up that continues from the point that Thucydides’ account cuts off. The introduction to the Hellenica I read actually suggests that another Hellenica (the term just means something like “concerning the greeks”, and was given to many different works) which only exists in fragments is more accurate and closer in style to Thucydides than Xenophon’s.
See while Xenophon claims to be writing a continuation of Thucydides’ account, and he even ends by saying that he expects someone will pick up where he leaves off possibly suggesting this as the start of a running history by multiple authors. The Hellenica of Xenophon is a lot less accurate and well structured. He doesn’t really keep to the rigid chronological ordering of events that Thucydides maintained and instead jumps back and forth in time quite a lot. Most glaringly of all though, and this is something I was only able to see thanks to the supplementary material in the copy I had, he omits a shocking amount.
Unlike Thucydides it doesn’t seem that Xenophon made any effort whatsoever to go out and interview or find out the details about various events, rather he just reports how they appeared to him at the time. See he was born to an aristocratic family in Athens either during or just before the Peloponnesian War started, and so he was living in the city when the war ended and during the civil war between Thrasybulus and the democrats and the thirty tyrants established by Sparta and it shows. The first portion of the book which covers the end of the war Thucydides didn’t cover and the immediate aftermath is very focused on what is going on with Athens. We get a lot of mentions of people that Xenophon would have known and admired, including Socrates actually which I thought was really cool.
Then, Xenophon goes off to fight with the Ten Thousand in Persia with the rebellious prince Cyrus and is exiled from Athens as Cyrus had funded the Spartans during the war and working for him was seen as a betrayal. So of course the history of what is happening in Greece during this time that he gives is very sparse. After that he somehow ends up fighting with the Spartan king Agesilaus with whom he went on to develop a very close relationship (even being given land and an estate in spartan territory) and from then on the book is basically completely written from the Spartan perspective. A perfect example of this is that we know from other contemporary writings and archaeological findings that in the decades following the war the Athenians eventually went on to found a second Delian league and were slowly rebuilding their empire, but Xenophon doesn’t even mention this once.
He also deliberately refuses to name individuals he considered dishonourable, and doesn’t mention dishonourable things that those he did admire did in an attempt to clean their memory up. There are footnotes at the bottom of almost every page correcting the record so to speak, it really does kind of ruin the experience of reading it actually. The man who wrote the introduction (a different man to the one who actually did this translation, but the translator himself isn’t much friendlier) seems to have no respect for Xenophon at all and at one point there’s a very passive aggressive remark comparing him to Diodorus (a later historian of the Hellenistic period) who was apparently a “real” historian unlike Xenophon. It really does take away from the experience when the very translator seems to have a disdain for the man he’s translating.
You see, this wasn’t made clear in the copy I bought (Penguin Classics version) but I read elsewhere that Xenophon only ever really intended to share his Hellenica with friends and people he knew personally. It was much more like a memoir, his history. Now on the one hand I have some doubt about this, I mean the one time he mentions himself he uses a pseudonym, even Thucydides was willing to mention himself by name when he had to, but it is true that the narrative basically follows his life. It starts during the end of the Peloponnesian War as he was becoming an adult, and it ends in the 360s BC not long after Spartan hegemony over mainland Greece is broken by the Thebans and with him as an old man.
I also like how in a way you can piece together a sort of narrative arc that covers all three works, from the wars with Persia and the start of the era that is referred to by historians as the classical period until only a couple of decades before Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great were to usher in the Hellenistic era. It really is the tale as well, of Athens and Sparta in particular, the two cities who together led the opposition to the Persian invasion. In the aftermath of that war they both rose to prominence as the two major powers in Greece, Sparta on land and Athens at sea, eventually leading to the huge clash that was the Peloponnesian War. When the war ended and the Thebans insisted on the destruction of Athens, the Spartans refused.
Athens then went on to rebuild itself, in large part thanks to the work of the great military general Iphicrates, soon fighting against the Spartans again as an ally in the Corinthian War. Yet later, after the treacherous Thebans smashed the Spartan force at Leuctra and were ravaging the countryside of Laconia (The region where Sparta was located) the Athenians were the ones who came to help them. The Thebans really do seem to have been almost inherently treacherous by the way, all three of the works I’ve talked about make them seem this way. From fighting on the side of the Persians during Xerxes’ invasion, to refusing to hand back the enemy dead under truce as was custom multiple times, sneaking into Platea early during the Peloponnesian War and so on.
Xenophon finishes off his account with the battle of Mantinea, a battle which weakened all the Greek states and probably left them open to the conquest by Macedon that followed soon after. In it, Xenophon’s own son fought and died, and the Spartans and Athenians fought side by side once more. So there you have it, three different ways of telling history. An epic multi-generational overarching view, a detached eyewitness account, and a personal memoir from someone who lived in the thick of it all that together tell the story of classical Greece.
All three are incredibly important for their role in the development of history as a study, even Xenophon’s Hellenica. After all, for all the snark from the translator there’s a reason that it has survived to this day when so many writings from the classical world have been lost. I’m really glad I read all of these, I know that this post is a bit all over the place and I’m sure that an actual scholar of the subject who read it would be cringing at how much I’ve probably misunderstood or got wrong, but I wanted to talk about them. I’ve really enjoyed my time with the Greeks over the last year or so, ancient Athens and Sparta have been nice to escape to.
The real question though, is whether it is worth actually buying a physical copy of these in this day and age when you can probably find a PDF for free online. Well, I can certainly say that I’ve had to return to all three already to find certain passages while writing this post up, and it’s very possible that events in these books might be referenced in the books I plan to read soon which might give me another reason to return to them. I also plan to read through all the endnotes for The Peloponnesian War. See I mentioned before that the copy of the Hellenica I have had footnotes at the bottom of every page, but for the other two books the notes were all at the back. Now I already read through the notes for The Histories a while ago, as a sort of recap because I had read the first half of the book and then dropped it for a year, and I think it will be useful to do the same for The Peloponnesian War. So I think it is worth holding on to these.
Now I started this series to talk about books I already owned when starting part 1, I don’t want it to be a running series like the “Alternate states” one I’ve just started probably will be, so even though I did actually buy one or maybe even two of these since that first post from now on if I buy a new book and talk about it here it won’t be part of this series. Not that you probably care, I’m just saying that for me. Anyway, if you enjoyed this post or found what I talked about interesting then I highly recommend you find a translation of the three books I talked about if you haven’t already.
Ramblings of a neurotic mess 