Ep 124: Shane Brennan on Xenophon and Leadership
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 (https://a.co/d/gFWWW3m)
Aaron MacLean:
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, Xenophon'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.
Aaron MacLean:
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Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm 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 too. Last time you came on the show, you were in Dubai, correct, Shane?
Shane Brennan:
That's right. That's right, Aaron.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, welcome back. Last time you were here discussing your editorship or co-editorship of the magnificent Landmark Xenophon's Anabasis. 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 Anabasis. And now you're back to continue the conversation because you've written a book called Xenophon's Anabasis: A Socratic History.
Shane, thank you so much for joining the show.
Shane Brennan:
Thank you for having me, Aaron. It's a pleasure.
Aaron MacLean:
What took you from Dubai to Bangladesh?
Shane Brennan:
I guess a life change. 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 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 aim is to give girls who, for whatever the circumstances, be it 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 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 why I'm here. So a big contrast from Dubai.
Aaron MacLean:
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, really a good portion of your career because this is your third book on Xenophon, right?
Shane Brennan:
Yes.
Aaron MacLean:
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 as a consequence?
Shane Brennan:
No, but it's a good question. 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. He never... 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 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?
Aaron MacLean:
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, 100 years ago, I think we would've expected anyone who is getting a "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 the set curriculum for kids growing up? What was his contribution to the story of the West?
Shane Brennan:
Yes. So I describe him as one of those young men that Socrates was interested in. I think that's his entry points to history, if you 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, well, he 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 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, at least according to Xenophon, his great mission in life to identify promising young men who would contribute to the state in a positive way. And he evidently saw in Xenophon the qualities that he wanted to develop, he wanted to bring to nurture.
So I like to see Xenophon's origins as a significant figure in that Socratic frame.
Aaron MacLean:
And then for a long time, even during the time when he would've 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, Xenophon 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?
Shane Brennan:
Yeah. Well, I think you summarize it very well, and I think that that image of Xenophon is a rather not the brightest, to continue the analogy of the student, not the brightest of those students owes itself, to some degree, to Anabasis and its seeming obsession with marches and parasangs and, at some points, bland detail. So these kind of everyday details contrast quite sharply with Plato's higher level thinking and expression.
So I think that maybe confines 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've argued for a long time.
Aaron MacLean:
How bad have things at Athens become for a well-born member of the elite, a relatively young man still, 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.
Shane Brennan:
Yeah, yeah. And especially for somebody like Xenophon who had been schooled to take part in the successful running of the state, it must have been the circumstance is quite compelling for him to leave. And the fact has led to much thought, speculation may be better, as to the reasons why he would've left. And there's no shortage of them, but equally, there's no concrete evidence to point to one particular reason as to why he might have left. Perhaps looking forward at the execution of Socrates, that might indicate the sort of environment that Xenophon was living in in 401 when he took the decision to leave having famously consulted Socrates.
So I think there are 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 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.
Aaron MacLean:
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, comes from obscurity in this army to command it essentially, 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 rule and 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 bouncing around Asia on the brink of death daily.
And first of all, I'm curious to 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 either officers serving today or those who have a care for the military one way or the other can learn 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? They're disconnected thoughts from me, but I'm curious to know how you would take that theme.
Shane Brennan:
I suppose there is this tension, this perennial tension in Anabasis 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 a sort of 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... 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, why is he so forthcoming about his successes? And that's a question that I have always carried with me and the perspective that I offer offer 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. It's quite another in the mountains of Kurdistan, a 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.
Aaron MacLean:
What does Socrates think about Xenophon going off to fight as a mercenary on behalf of a Persian prince in Asia?
Shane Brennan:
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's maybe the most-read part of the entire book, if I might put it like that. 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 Xenophon 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 it would be fair to say that he... 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 God has told you to do, then you better do it."
Aaron MacLean:
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 in the very excellent, by the way, series that's currently on television here in the United States on Hulu, the televisation of ShÅgun, which I don't know if you've had the pleasure of the Clavell novel or either of the two televisations 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, always on the razor's edge of complete failure.
And that's sort of the Cyrus that's presented here. Anyone who thinks that grand strategy is the kind of thing that can be 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 he?
Shane Brennan:
Yeah. Well, it's probably useful to start by differentiating him from Cyrus the Great. Somebody might conflate the two. So we have Cyrus the Great, who would be the more well-known Achaemenid 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 can be said with fair certainty. And when the father passed away, the father 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 Anabasis called Tissaphernes, 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 satrapy 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.
Aaron MacLean:
The mercenaries don't know that that's why they're being recruited for the most part, correct?
Shane Brennan:
Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah. Because if they had known, it's very unlikely they would've gone, they would've joined. The idea of marching into the Great King's backyard would've 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 yes, 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 be uncomfortable. But sure enough, when Cyrus addressed them, he offered them a significant amount more of money, and they agreed to go on.
Aaron MacLean:
So just to skip forward to the part where Xenophon really comes to prominence, and 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. The battle actually goes pretty well, but then Cyrus dies. And then how do the Greeks... What happens to our Greeks at this point?
Shane Brennan:
So the Greeks consider that they have won the battle, and the Persians on their side 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 fraught. Suspicion grows between the two sides, and then eventually, the Greek leader, Clearchus, agrees to come to the tent of the Persian satrap. I mentioned him earlier, Tissaphernes. 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 would be very difficult for them to mount any credible defense of themselves.
But it is at this point that Xenophon emerges, and in a series of speeches, 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 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 Tissaphernes.
Aaron MacLean:
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 the controlling force, even when he's not titulary 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 context to imagine the complete absence of net at all times with which Xenophon is operating? And for months and months, not for a short period where you have not only all the people all around you who'd 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 once they make it all the way back up to the Black Sea, do we even need to go back to Greece? Shouldn't we stay here and start our own enterprise, our own city?
How does Xenophon, how could anybody possibly navigate through such a series of challenges?
Shane Brennan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. Well, to answer the first, your initial query as to what's Socratic about Xenophon's leadership, he famously has dreams on the journey, and the first of these occurs that night the generals have been seized. And so he asks himself, he wakes from the dream and he asks himself a series of questions, questions like, "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'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 them where they are, that it's in the Persian interest to let them go. Otherwise, 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 in 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 him, but his response is what's instructive here. His response is to acknowledge that he made a mistake and dare upon 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 what I refer to as a Socratic approach to leadership. But again, equally, it has to be said, you could identify it, you could root it in his Athenian heritage as well. It's quite subtle. But I do think that he's referencing for us the quality of the Socratic leadership.
Aaron MacLean:
And what's striking about his leadership and what 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. For the mistake that you cite, I mean, what's striking about Xenophon, among what's striking is his judgment, again, in the face of one puzzle after the next, whether it's a strategic puzzle in terms of who they're fighting and how, or a small-p political puzzle in terms of the management of the army itself and how to keep his head on his shoulders and keep the army together. And time and time again, somehow, according to his own accounts, he seems to end up at a judicious path, typically the best path of the available options.
And 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 is to challenge. I mean, just to riff for a second, I'm curious to know what you think about this. In the military, certainly in the American military, leadership is a major theme of education for all ranks, certainly for junior officers. And you're taught these tricks. It's not described as tricks, but that's actually what they are. Ways of being just, being decisive. But in reality, you only have a few months to teach young men these things, and so what you're really doing is teaching them how to appear just and how to appear self-sacrificing, you're showing the models of what right looks like and then trying to screen out the ones who are really obviously going to fail, and then you're crossing your fingers and hoping that reality teaches them the depth of those things.
But 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 summaries of what you think is right and then sending them off. You're punting or 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, how is he so right so often? How does that come to pass? Maybe that's one way into the issue.
Shane Brennan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose one has to be somewhat wary of reading the text as straightforward history. And putting it in a historiographical 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 intriguing things about the book. What are we not told? What has he left out? And that's something we need to keep to the fore of our minds when we read through the narrative.
Maybe if I can give one particular example to try and illustrate this. On the retreat northwards, they're following, they're following, they go down a valley and they come to a junction. Well, 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, you infer that something happens.
One of the Persian satraps 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 you just want to know, what were you doing? Why did you suddenly go off in the opposite direction to where you should be going? And then there are whole phases whereby we just get maybe a line that the army spent 15 days doing something without too much more detail. 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, 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 lulls us in. When Xenophon tells us they traveled three days here, 10 parasangs there, it lulls us into a sense that we know everything that happened. But actually, I don't think we do.
Aaron MacLean:
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?
Shane Brennan:
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 exceptional the location is and how much benefit it could bring both to the settlers and to Greece. So there's certainly that episode whereby there is thought given to founding this colony, and Xenophon is prominent 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 it does leave... Xenophon, he's 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.
Aaron MacLean:
Your discussion of Xenophon's silences, it puts me in the mind of a contemporary American novelist, a guy named Karl Marlantes, I don't know if you've ever come across his work, but he wrote a very good novel about Vietnam called Matterhorn and his experiences. 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 it, 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 Marlantes is portrayed, you have access to his inner voice in good 20, 21st century novelistic fashion, and this young man wants glory. He wants to win a medal. It's an explicit goal. It's a very unattractive picture of a young, ambitious, glory hound lieutenant, who then of course encounters the reality of war and Marines die because of his ambition essentially, or at least he fails to save them. And you watch his education over the course of the novel.
And I remember, I actually remember an exchange with my students talking about the novel at the Academy where they all just trash this guy. They said they would never want to serve with such an officer, and they were very hard on him 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? How do you think you would come off looking?" And it was good, it was productive conversation.
But it strikes me that that's almost the opposite of what we're talking about. For Marlantes, 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?
Shane Brennan:
No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And that points to what I had said about the birth, the very newness of this genre. And I mean, the great question for Anabasis, I'm glad that the opportunity's come up to ask it, is what is it? Just what is it? So 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 question, a really hard thing to pin down.
And what you say about getting into the mind of somebody, Xenophon is so slippery, it's so hard to get inside his head and try to really understand what is he thinking? So yeah, I think that's a huge factor in trying to appreciate these is appreciating their different literary contexts, their different historical contexts.
Aaron MacLean:
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, 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 in the Peloponnesus and engaging in this literary career, of which the Anabasis is one of the books. So this is after, we think, years and years of reflection that he finally puts pen to paper here. What might we infer from that?
Shane Brennan:
Yeah, no, I think that's a great point, and it's one that's really important to make. Going back to the book you referenced there, presumably that had been written in fairly short order after the experience. I mean, I know what the gap between the war and the publication of the book was, but you imagine it to have been following on, not to, allowing for writerly procrastination, the book probably appeared in a respectable time after the event.
And you'd think the same with Anabasis. If Xenophon wanted to write about his experience as a young man in Asia with some extraordinary figures, and let's not forget he was with the Agesilaus after Anabasis, after he remained in Asia Minor, and he had an extraordinary life. You would think that he would've put pen to paper, so to speak, pretty soon afterwards. And of course, if he had, 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 if a listener is wondering, well, maybe we're reading too much into this text, then that should be pause 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. So you begin to... You're compelled to bring Anabasis into that frame, and at least to see it as part of Xenophon's major writing phase.
So again, it's a really important literary context to appreciate that there's this very substantial gap between the experience and the actual publication of the book.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, there's this disciple-like quality to the students of Socrates and his effect on them. I mean, it's the right word too because there is a parallel. It feels like I'm about to say something controversial, but I don't think it is. I think this is a commonplace, but that if the foundations of the Western tradition are, on the one hand, Judeo-Christianity with Jesus as a 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 do, 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.
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 that self-
Shane Brennan:
Or Xenophon himself. I mean, his Cyropaedia, although that was admittedly written-
Aaron MacLean:
Fair point, fair point.
Shane Brennan:
... probably after Anabasis, is very much interested in leadership.
Aaron MacLean:
Is he the first author to take it as an explicit theme, as a central theme, I guess maybe is the question? Maybe this is [inaudible 00:42:03]-
Shane Brennan:
Like you say, I mean, you could read the whole of Homer as a kind of instruction on leadership in some-
Aaron MacLean:
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.
Shane Brennan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think 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 Xenophon 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. 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 Anabasis. So 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.
Aaron MacLean:
For 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 Anabasis or his other works?
Shane Brennan:
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, and I can say no better thing about a writer or a person than that.
Aaron MacLean:
Shane Brennan, author most recently of Xenophon's Anabasis: A Socratic History, also the co-editor of The Landmark Anabasis, which if folks are not familiar with The Landmark Series, I mean, it's this magnificent series of books taking texts like the Anabasis that really... It is hard to just work your way through the text. There's so many references to strange places and so many references to 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 Hellenika, and now thanks to Shane, a Landmark Anabasis.
Thank you so much.
Shane Brennan:
I should add, David Thomas as well, my wonderful co-editor on the book on The Landmark Anabasis.
Aaron MacLean:
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.
Shane Brennan:
Thank you very much, Aaron. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Aaron MacLean:
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