The History Doctor

This is part of a larger project I am working on. These are just raw reactions to the text as I read it. For the final discussion, check out my Substack.

The first half of the Anabasis is the story of how Xenophon and The Ten Thousand marched into the heart of the Persian empire, how the Persians defeated the larger army they were apart of, and how the 10,000 Greeks escaped north and eventually to the Black Sea. Unfortunately for the 10,000 or so Greeks, and for many of the people living along the Anatolian coast, they were not home and safe yet.

Xenophon and his companions spent about a month in what is now the city of Trabzon, Türkiye. While there, they raided into the interior of Anatolia for supplies. The Anabasis describes increasingly complex maneuvers by the Greeks. I will be exploring this more in a piece in the weeks to come, because these maneuvers were highly influential to military writers in the 18th century looking to avoid the static firefights of Frederickian linear doctrine, and had tremendous influence on the Napoleonic French armies. Xenophon describes linear columns of heavy infantry, the use of light infantry and skirmishers to screen between the columns and protect their flanks, and rapidity of action as the primary goal.

Despite numerous attempts to gain ships, Xenophon’s group fails repeatedly to find enough to move the group all at once. This is a problem both out of an idea of fairness but also because as much of a burden the size of their force is, it is also their protection. They worried repeatedly about splitting up and the force that remained being too small to protect itself. So, they proceeded regularly overland, only on occasion being able to get short lifts by water, normally financed by cities that wanted them to move along out of their territory.

However, the closer they got to Greece, the more the internecine Greek rivalries reemerged. The politics of the war between Sparta and Athens came into play. The petty disputes over language and Greek cultural groups come back to the fore. Without a common enemy, discipline became harder for the leaders. At one point, the army splits into three parts which go their separate ways, but when one of the parts almost gets annihilated, they vow to never do that again. The second half of the book has a lot of good material concerning servant leadership, conflict resolution, and navigating internal group dynamics, though obviously Xenophon would not have phrased the concepts like that.

They do eventually arrive back in Greece. However, Xenophon then sets out again on another expedition. Overall, the work is a short read that moves along quite briskly. It reads more like an adventure novel than a book on military theory, but then again it was not meant to be one, however much military theorists have loved the book over the past two millennia. Its timelessness is primarily from the leadership concepts discussed. However, there are also the dynamic troop movements I mentioned above. Those would have been extremely intriguing to military theorists in the age of linear warfare, and like I said, I will explore that in a separate piece at a later date.

If you’re interested in the final discussion of the book, check out my Substack.