Lessons from Xenophon's Anabasis
What an extraordinary tale unfolds in Xenophon's recollections of the Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries who, in 401 BC, joined Prince Cyrus (the brother of the Persian King Artaxerxes) and became part of the force which sought to overthrow the King. When Prince Cyrus was killed in the battlefield, the Ten Thousand Greeks were confronted with a demand to submit to the King. Instead they chose to use the threat of their numbers to demand safe passage back towards their homelands, the Greek city states. The Persians cleverly allowed them initial safe passage northwards from Babylon until they were less of a threat but the uneasy truce was broken by the time the Greeks reached the upper reaches of the Tigris river.
Following the journey of the Ten Thousand through the mountains to the Black Sea is a lesson in forging political alliances, foraging for food and finding a way through hostile geography. It is as much a lesson in leadership of Greek mercenaries as it is in the politics and economy of the city states found along the way. Let there be no mistake; the Ten Thousand were a group to be feared by Greeks and non-Greeks alike as they made their way back to mainland Greece.
Let us explore some of these lessons because to the modern military strategist they may not be as obvious as to those steeped in the military lessons of the Greek and Roman times. (Just for the record, the version I have read of Xenophon's Anabasis is the translation by Rex Warner (1949) Anabasis literally means "the journey up" and presumably means the journey up from Persia to Greece. However it could also have a play on words as Anabasis also has the meaning of "uplifting" and could refer to an uplifting of the Greek mercenaries and the inspiration derived thereof from their exploits).
One of the most telling lessons for me was the need to acquire food for the troops along the way. This could be accomplished in two ways: either the food was purchased or it was basically stolen from the local population.
In the narrative of Anabasis we come across a number of instances where the local leadership of cities and provinces along the way had a choice to make: either allow passage to the Greek mercenaries and allow them to purchase food supplies from the local merchants or deny them passage and force them to forage for food. This seems like an easy choice. Grant them passage and allow them to buy food! Surely it cannot be that difficult a choice? Yet, it was! Can one trust such a large force of mercenaries? Having opened the doors to the cities, would these mercenaries use their force to steal anyway? How long would they stay in the city or region? After they left, how much food would be left for the local population? Was it better to be cautious and not offer them safe passage in order not to offend the Persian forces following the Greek forces? What would stop these mercenaries from taking over the leadership of cities along the way and just settle there? After all, they were mercenaries who likely had nothing of value in Greece itself!
The Armenians in the mountains chose to fight the Greek mercenaries. Others, it seems those on plains and in cities with less defensible positions, chose to accommodate the Greeks and even turn their presence into an advantageous position by using them to attack traditional enemies. After all, these mercenaries were for hire as well. With no paymaster, whatever they spent from their own hoarded earnings was just that much less available when they returned to their homes in Greece. Remember, these mercenaries had not expected to be fighting King Artaxerxes but to be in what we now call Turkey. They were much further from home than they may have expected.
For the Greek mercenaries, the choice was easy. A speedy and safe transit through the area alleviated the need for earning income through plundering local assets. Any delays only increased the need to earn, either through becoming hired mercenaries again or through the spoils gained from capturing a town or some regional area.
There was another complicating factor, seasonality! In winter time, progress would be much slower through the areas travelled. One can imagine the fear of local residents would be greater and the available food would be less. What does one do then? Welcome the soldiers and face the possibility they would stay or hurry them along by providing the bare necessities and face the possibility of a backlash from the mercenaries? In the fertile plains and valleys where the spring would bring new crops, you wanted the mercenaries well and truly gone so they would not steal your crops and leave you to face the year without food! One can imagine how difficult the decision would have been for the local citizenry and leadership!
Towards the later stages of the journey another interesting lesson surfaced! Not all of the mercenaries had homes and families to return to in Greece. The reasons for becoming a mercenary are not easy to identify; it could be poverty, some estrangement from the family, possibly a criminal action, the love of adventure, maybe a failed love affair. It would be difficult to pinpoint why these mercenaries had joined the Persian army. No one ran surveys of the motivations for becoming a mercenary to my knowledge. (In fact the whole science of running surveys to assess motivations, public opinion and behaviours appears to be a very modern and contemporary phenomenon). Many would feel apprehensive about returning home under the best of circumstances.
It is thus understandable that some would feel that establishing a city somewhere along the way home would be an attractive proposition. Why go home to share the spoil and booty when one could establish their own families and cities along the way? Why not establish a city wher there was ample arable land available for free and one could settle with companions who had endured the hardships and joys of the journey, people with whom one had a common bond formed in battle and companionship along the way? Even Xenophon himself was tempted by that proposition.
For the modern reader it is not something we are used to. Can you imagine this? Imagine whole colonies of American soldiers settling and forming their own cities in Italy or Germany? can you imagine Australian soldiers settling in Turkey following Gallipolli? Can you imagine Japanese troops settling in the Philippines or Papua New Guinea in the aftermath of WWII. Can you imagine British troops forming wholly British colonies in India? Can you imagine Spanish troops forming wholly Spanish colonies in the Americas. Of course, you can argue that this is ridiculous, these modern troops were not mercenaries to a foreign power! However, this was also a practice followed by Alexander the Great in forming Greek colonies, many of them called Alexandria, as he conquered and settled the Persian Empire. Not so ridiculous after all.
(Almost as an aside, this raises the interesting fact that Greece exported its people precisely because their land was relatively unproductive and barren compared to the fertile valleys of the Nile and Mesopotamia. The gift of the Mesopotamians and Persians was bringing water to the desert and making it fertile (much as the modern Israelis claim in the Negev Desert and other parts of the country). The gift of the Greeks was that brought by Athena (the olive tree) and that of Poseidon (a calm sea). Where others created large cities around rivers and fertile valleys, the Greeks created new cities by exporting their most valuable resource, people, and creating trade across regions.)
The third lesson, and a most important one, was that the Ten Thousand Greeks were also unwelcome in Greece itself. At that time the Spartans controlled the cities and territories. They had real difficulties in accepting a large army that had the potential to upset their control and power across mainland Greece and in the parts of Asia Minor they controlled. It was a random and unpredictable factor in a complex web of political relationships they had built.
Can you imagine how the Ten Thousand Greeks felt when they realised, after having traveled across hostile Persian territory, that they were also unwelcomed by the Spartans! They joy they must have felt when when they saw the sea for the first time must have evaporated quickly with this realisation. They may be heroes but they were a problem as well to the ruling class of Spartans across the Greek network of cities and colonies.
Something similar happened, by the way, in Australia following WWI. The soldiers who returned back to Australia following WWI had a great difficulty settling back into civilian life. The first decade was not such as problem as these were the Roaring Twenties and economic growth brought with it jobs. However, the Depression years were another story. In his book entitled "1932" , Gerald Stone talks about the great numbers of disaffected ex-military citizens who became members of para-military organisations in Australia, some on the right and some on the left of the political spectrum. They proved to be a great destabilising force in Australian politics. If you have read "Kangaroo" by D.H. Lawrence then you will have seen these forces at play in Sydney in 1922. I was quite surprised to learn of something similar at play in the anti-Greek riots in Kalgoorlie, Australia in 1916 (Yiannakis, 1996). Undoubtedly there are many similar stories across Europe and South America that could be raised.
Was this perhaps a lesson that Alexander the Great had learned, that it would be difficult to repatriate large numbers of the Greeks who had joined the battle against the Persian Empire? Did he also fear the consequences of sending back large numbers of battle-hardened troops to Greece while they were still in their fighting prime? We may never know how he felt but it is a lesson well learned.
The fourth lesson was the importance of local geographic knowledge that Anabasis conveyed to later military planners. In particular the lesson about the Cilician Gates, the entry point from modern Turkey to Syria is important. Local geographic knowledge provides considerable advantage in planning military logistics and campaigns. My own knowledge was considerably heightened by going to Google Earth and viewing the terrain associated with that campaign. Then it all began to make sense.
For Alexander the Great, it is quite possible that some of his knowledge was gleaned from books like Anabasis. Knowing where sources of water are, what local conditions prevail, how to deal with the impact of geography on logistics is quite important to one's success. Contrast this with the relative lack of knowledge that Alexander the Great faced in his campaigns in the eastern parts of the Persian Empire, in modern Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, where his lack of knowledge cost him dearly in campaigns against the locals. Something as simple as the timing of the monsoons created a major logistic problem for Alexander in the final march from India back to Persepolis.
While there are good lessons from Anabasis that surely Alexander had learnt, despite not having any concrete evidence that Alexander had read Anabasis, it is unlikely that Anabasis was the only source of local information. There were many Greek mercenaries in the Persian army at all times, even when Alexander was actively fighting them. These Greek mercenaries at different times would have fought on both sides of the conflicts and therefore we can presume that local information was readily available in various parts of the Persian Empire. There is also some evidence from written sources that other books on travel through the Persian Empire had been written, even going as far as India, though these books have been lost.
The fifth, and for me possible the most interesting lesson, was the image of mercenaries electing their leadership and debating aspects of their strategy through the whole of the journey. Therein lies the most paradoxical lesson for the student of human affairs. We are so used to the stereotype of military leadership being led from the top, of orders cascading from the politicians to the generals and through the military hierarchy to the troops that reading of something different makes quite an impression.
Grass-roots democracy at the local government level is not difficult to understand. In the United States we have examples of grass-roots democracy in the north-eastern states where town-hall meetings are taken seriously, where the voice of the local population is heard with respect by elected town councillors who, in turn, take their role of representing the citizen quite seriously. This has been a feature of local government from the very beginning. It is very interesting to read Alexis de Tocqueville discussing The Powers of the Township in New England (Penguin Books, 2003 pp. 74).
Grass roots democracy in a military organization is something quite different! When the traditional sources of authority are removed (in this case both the political and the military leadership of the Persians) we have an unusual and interesting situation. What is it that keeps the mercenaries together, what is the common factor in other words, and how do they exercise leadership in this circumstance. It would be so easy for the mercenaries to split into many factions of self-interest. Yet, to a large extent, this did not happen with the Ten Thousand mercenaries. Why? How? Very significant questions not only for students of military leadership but also for those of human social organization (sociologists, social psychologists and political scientists).
The common cause could quite easily be postulated to be the fear of mistreatment at the hands of the Persians. The army under the leadership of Prince Cyrus was composed of many types of mercenaries and professional soldiers. Amongst the mercenaries were a large number of Greeks. (There would also have been Greek mercenaries within the armed forces King Artaxerxes as well). With the death of Prince Cyrus, the rebellion was over and there is no sense that King Artaxerxes faced another threat. The Persian forces were welcomed back into the fold. But you can imagine that in searching for a possible scapegoat, the Greek mercenaries could become a target for revenge. That, plus the desire to return to Greece, was most likely the force that bound the Ten Thousand in a common cause. Remember, they had not joined up with Prince Cyrus to fight King Artaxerxes. They had been slyly misled into that position.
A common cause however does not provide leadership, especially the leadership to protect themselves and, if necessary, fight their way to back to freedom. The first group of elected leaders tried to negotiate, apparently in good faith, their way to safe passage through the Persian Empire back to their Greek home cities. (It would be quite irresponsible to even suggest that such a thing as Greece existed, in the sense of a nation. There were Greek cities bound by loose and quite radically shifting strategic alliances and coalitions, nothing more and nothing less). These leaders were imprisoned and executed. One can imagine the next set of elected leaders were far more cautious and suspicious of Persian motives.
Here's the interesting point. The open forum meetings held by the Ten Thousand featured quite open discussions (as far as we can tell from the written records surviving) where a political concensus was first formed and then leadership elected to implement that concensus tactically. The political concensus also sought guidance and advice from the gods, with appropriate sacrifices and readings of the entrails, before making a decision. But, it was made, and that's the most interesting point.
As the Ten Thousand achieved their objectives, particularly in reaching safe haven on the northern sea coast of modern Turkey, i.e. the Black Sea, the common cause disintegrated and we begin to see a fragmentation of the Ten Thousand into different groups and a much more difficult process of electing common leadership. Grass roots democracy, by itself, does not provide the commonality of purpose. What it seems to have provided is a means for exploring the common wisdom in both formulating and assessing strategic options before deciding what to do.
Interestingly, there is a lesson here also for Alexander the Great. Initially he had the backing of the Macedonian and (other) Greek troops in striking into the heart of the Persian Empire. While the reasons of different factions may have differed, they had a common cause. Alexander the Great provided the leadership but, even there, it was not autocratic or despotic in nature. While Alexander obviously had the respect and support of the troops, he seems to have worked hard to build that degree of rapport and respect. He certainly was not democratic but he certainly seems to have had the "populist touch" which may be as far as we can get to a truly democratic forum.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
It has to remain a matter of conjecture whether Alexander the Great read Anabasis and, if he had, was his imagination fired more by The Iliad or by Anabasis. What remains indisputable is that logistics was an important variable to consider in the planning of war and warfare. For more on Alexander and military logistics, tune into the next blog!
Bibliography:
Bevan, G.E. (translator) "Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America and Two Essays on America" Penguin Books, 2003
Lawrence, D.H. "Kangaroo" Cambridge University Press 2002
Stone, Gerald "1932: The Year that Changed A Nation" Pan Macmillan 2005
Warner, Rex (translator) "Xenophon: The Persian Expedition" Penguin Classics 1949
Yiannakis, J. "Kalgoorlie Alchemy: Xenophobia, Patriotism and the Anti-Greek 1916 Riots" Early Days Vol. 2, No. 2 1996.
Following the journey of the Ten Thousand through the mountains to the Black Sea is a lesson in forging political alliances, foraging for food and finding a way through hostile geography. It is as much a lesson in leadership of Greek mercenaries as it is in the politics and economy of the city states found along the way. Let there be no mistake; the Ten Thousand were a group to be feared by Greeks and non-Greeks alike as they made their way back to mainland Greece.
Let us explore some of these lessons because to the modern military strategist they may not be as obvious as to those steeped in the military lessons of the Greek and Roman times. (Just for the record, the version I have read of Xenophon's Anabasis is the translation by Rex Warner (1949) Anabasis literally means "the journey up" and presumably means the journey up from Persia to Greece. However it could also have a play on words as Anabasis also has the meaning of "uplifting" and could refer to an uplifting of the Greek mercenaries and the inspiration derived thereof from their exploits).
One of the most telling lessons for me was the need to acquire food for the troops along the way. This could be accomplished in two ways: either the food was purchased or it was basically stolen from the local population.
In the narrative of Anabasis we come across a number of instances where the local leadership of cities and provinces along the way had a choice to make: either allow passage to the Greek mercenaries and allow them to purchase food supplies from the local merchants or deny them passage and force them to forage for food. This seems like an easy choice. Grant them passage and allow them to buy food! Surely it cannot be that difficult a choice? Yet, it was! Can one trust such a large force of mercenaries? Having opened the doors to the cities, would these mercenaries use their force to steal anyway? How long would they stay in the city or region? After they left, how much food would be left for the local population? Was it better to be cautious and not offer them safe passage in order not to offend the Persian forces following the Greek forces? What would stop these mercenaries from taking over the leadership of cities along the way and just settle there? After all, they were mercenaries who likely had nothing of value in Greece itself!
The Armenians in the mountains chose to fight the Greek mercenaries. Others, it seems those on plains and in cities with less defensible positions, chose to accommodate the Greeks and even turn their presence into an advantageous position by using them to attack traditional enemies. After all, these mercenaries were for hire as well. With no paymaster, whatever they spent from their own hoarded earnings was just that much less available when they returned to their homes in Greece. Remember, these mercenaries had not expected to be fighting King Artaxerxes but to be in what we now call Turkey. They were much further from home than they may have expected.
For the Greek mercenaries, the choice was easy. A speedy and safe transit through the area alleviated the need for earning income through plundering local assets. Any delays only increased the need to earn, either through becoming hired mercenaries again or through the spoils gained from capturing a town or some regional area.
There was another complicating factor, seasonality! In winter time, progress would be much slower through the areas travelled. One can imagine the fear of local residents would be greater and the available food would be less. What does one do then? Welcome the soldiers and face the possibility they would stay or hurry them along by providing the bare necessities and face the possibility of a backlash from the mercenaries? In the fertile plains and valleys where the spring would bring new crops, you wanted the mercenaries well and truly gone so they would not steal your crops and leave you to face the year without food! One can imagine how difficult the decision would have been for the local citizenry and leadership!
Towards the later stages of the journey another interesting lesson surfaced! Not all of the mercenaries had homes and families to return to in Greece. The reasons for becoming a mercenary are not easy to identify; it could be poverty, some estrangement from the family, possibly a criminal action, the love of adventure, maybe a failed love affair. It would be difficult to pinpoint why these mercenaries had joined the Persian army. No one ran surveys of the motivations for becoming a mercenary to my knowledge. (In fact the whole science of running surveys to assess motivations, public opinion and behaviours appears to be a very modern and contemporary phenomenon). Many would feel apprehensive about returning home under the best of circumstances.
It is thus understandable that some would feel that establishing a city somewhere along the way home would be an attractive proposition. Why go home to share the spoil and booty when one could establish their own families and cities along the way? Why not establish a city wher there was ample arable land available for free and one could settle with companions who had endured the hardships and joys of the journey, people with whom one had a common bond formed in battle and companionship along the way? Even Xenophon himself was tempted by that proposition.
For the modern reader it is not something we are used to. Can you imagine this? Imagine whole colonies of American soldiers settling and forming their own cities in Italy or Germany? can you imagine Australian soldiers settling in Turkey following Gallipolli? Can you imagine Japanese troops settling in the Philippines or Papua New Guinea in the aftermath of WWII. Can you imagine British troops forming wholly British colonies in India? Can you imagine Spanish troops forming wholly Spanish colonies in the Americas. Of course, you can argue that this is ridiculous, these modern troops were not mercenaries to a foreign power! However, this was also a practice followed by Alexander the Great in forming Greek colonies, many of them called Alexandria, as he conquered and settled the Persian Empire. Not so ridiculous after all.
(Almost as an aside, this raises the interesting fact that Greece exported its people precisely because their land was relatively unproductive and barren compared to the fertile valleys of the Nile and Mesopotamia. The gift of the Mesopotamians and Persians was bringing water to the desert and making it fertile (much as the modern Israelis claim in the Negev Desert and other parts of the country). The gift of the Greeks was that brought by Athena (the olive tree) and that of Poseidon (a calm sea). Where others created large cities around rivers and fertile valleys, the Greeks created new cities by exporting their most valuable resource, people, and creating trade across regions.)
The third lesson, and a most important one, was that the Ten Thousand Greeks were also unwelcome in Greece itself. At that time the Spartans controlled the cities and territories. They had real difficulties in accepting a large army that had the potential to upset their control and power across mainland Greece and in the parts of Asia Minor they controlled. It was a random and unpredictable factor in a complex web of political relationships they had built.
Can you imagine how the Ten Thousand Greeks felt when they realised, after having traveled across hostile Persian territory, that they were also unwelcomed by the Spartans! They joy they must have felt when when they saw the sea for the first time must have evaporated quickly with this realisation. They may be heroes but they were a problem as well to the ruling class of Spartans across the Greek network of cities and colonies.
Something similar happened, by the way, in Australia following WWI. The soldiers who returned back to Australia following WWI had a great difficulty settling back into civilian life. The first decade was not such as problem as these were the Roaring Twenties and economic growth brought with it jobs. However, the Depression years were another story. In his book entitled "1932" , Gerald Stone talks about the great numbers of disaffected ex-military citizens who became members of para-military organisations in Australia, some on the right and some on the left of the political spectrum. They proved to be a great destabilising force in Australian politics. If you have read "Kangaroo" by D.H. Lawrence then you will have seen these forces at play in Sydney in 1922. I was quite surprised to learn of something similar at play in the anti-Greek riots in Kalgoorlie, Australia in 1916 (Yiannakis, 1996). Undoubtedly there are many similar stories across Europe and South America that could be raised.
Was this perhaps a lesson that Alexander the Great had learned, that it would be difficult to repatriate large numbers of the Greeks who had joined the battle against the Persian Empire? Did he also fear the consequences of sending back large numbers of battle-hardened troops to Greece while they were still in their fighting prime? We may never know how he felt but it is a lesson well learned.
The fourth lesson was the importance of local geographic knowledge that Anabasis conveyed to later military planners. In particular the lesson about the Cilician Gates, the entry point from modern Turkey to Syria is important. Local geographic knowledge provides considerable advantage in planning military logistics and campaigns. My own knowledge was considerably heightened by going to Google Earth and viewing the terrain associated with that campaign. Then it all began to make sense.
For Alexander the Great, it is quite possible that some of his knowledge was gleaned from books like Anabasis. Knowing where sources of water are, what local conditions prevail, how to deal with the impact of geography on logistics is quite important to one's success. Contrast this with the relative lack of knowledge that Alexander the Great faced in his campaigns in the eastern parts of the Persian Empire, in modern Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, where his lack of knowledge cost him dearly in campaigns against the locals. Something as simple as the timing of the monsoons created a major logistic problem for Alexander in the final march from India back to Persepolis.
While there are good lessons from Anabasis that surely Alexander had learnt, despite not having any concrete evidence that Alexander had read Anabasis, it is unlikely that Anabasis was the only source of local information. There were many Greek mercenaries in the Persian army at all times, even when Alexander was actively fighting them. These Greek mercenaries at different times would have fought on both sides of the conflicts and therefore we can presume that local information was readily available in various parts of the Persian Empire. There is also some evidence from written sources that other books on travel through the Persian Empire had been written, even going as far as India, though these books have been lost.
The fifth, and for me possible the most interesting lesson, was the image of mercenaries electing their leadership and debating aspects of their strategy through the whole of the journey. Therein lies the most paradoxical lesson for the student of human affairs. We are so used to the stereotype of military leadership being led from the top, of orders cascading from the politicians to the generals and through the military hierarchy to the troops that reading of something different makes quite an impression.
Grass-roots democracy at the local government level is not difficult to understand. In the United States we have examples of grass-roots democracy in the north-eastern states where town-hall meetings are taken seriously, where the voice of the local population is heard with respect by elected town councillors who, in turn, take their role of representing the citizen quite seriously. This has been a feature of local government from the very beginning. It is very interesting to read Alexis de Tocqueville discussing The Powers of the Township in New England (Penguin Books, 2003 pp. 74).
Grass roots democracy in a military organization is something quite different! When the traditional sources of authority are removed (in this case both the political and the military leadership of the Persians) we have an unusual and interesting situation. What is it that keeps the mercenaries together, what is the common factor in other words, and how do they exercise leadership in this circumstance. It would be so easy for the mercenaries to split into many factions of self-interest. Yet, to a large extent, this did not happen with the Ten Thousand mercenaries. Why? How? Very significant questions not only for students of military leadership but also for those of human social organization (sociologists, social psychologists and political scientists).
The common cause could quite easily be postulated to be the fear of mistreatment at the hands of the Persians. The army under the leadership of Prince Cyrus was composed of many types of mercenaries and professional soldiers. Amongst the mercenaries were a large number of Greeks. (There would also have been Greek mercenaries within the armed forces King Artaxerxes as well). With the death of Prince Cyrus, the rebellion was over and there is no sense that King Artaxerxes faced another threat. The Persian forces were welcomed back into the fold. But you can imagine that in searching for a possible scapegoat, the Greek mercenaries could become a target for revenge. That, plus the desire to return to Greece, was most likely the force that bound the Ten Thousand in a common cause. Remember, they had not joined up with Prince Cyrus to fight King Artaxerxes. They had been slyly misled into that position.
A common cause however does not provide leadership, especially the leadership to protect themselves and, if necessary, fight their way to back to freedom. The first group of elected leaders tried to negotiate, apparently in good faith, their way to safe passage through the Persian Empire back to their Greek home cities. (It would be quite irresponsible to even suggest that such a thing as Greece existed, in the sense of a nation. There were Greek cities bound by loose and quite radically shifting strategic alliances and coalitions, nothing more and nothing less). These leaders were imprisoned and executed. One can imagine the next set of elected leaders were far more cautious and suspicious of Persian motives.
Here's the interesting point. The open forum meetings held by the Ten Thousand featured quite open discussions (as far as we can tell from the written records surviving) where a political concensus was first formed and then leadership elected to implement that concensus tactically. The political concensus also sought guidance and advice from the gods, with appropriate sacrifices and readings of the entrails, before making a decision. But, it was made, and that's the most interesting point.
As the Ten Thousand achieved their objectives, particularly in reaching safe haven on the northern sea coast of modern Turkey, i.e. the Black Sea, the common cause disintegrated and we begin to see a fragmentation of the Ten Thousand into different groups and a much more difficult process of electing common leadership. Grass roots democracy, by itself, does not provide the commonality of purpose. What it seems to have provided is a means for exploring the common wisdom in both formulating and assessing strategic options before deciding what to do.
Interestingly, there is a lesson here also for Alexander the Great. Initially he had the backing of the Macedonian and (other) Greek troops in striking into the heart of the Persian Empire. While the reasons of different factions may have differed, they had a common cause. Alexander the Great provided the leadership but, even there, it was not autocratic or despotic in nature. While Alexander obviously had the respect and support of the troops, he seems to have worked hard to build that degree of rapport and respect. He certainly was not democratic but he certainly seems to have had the "populist touch" which may be as far as we can get to a truly democratic forum.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
It has to remain a matter of conjecture whether Alexander the Great read Anabasis and, if he had, was his imagination fired more by The Iliad or by Anabasis. What remains indisputable is that logistics was an important variable to consider in the planning of war and warfare. For more on Alexander and military logistics, tune into the next blog!
Bibliography:
Bevan, G.E. (translator) "Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America and Two Essays on America" Penguin Books, 2003
Lawrence, D.H. "Kangaroo" Cambridge University Press 2002
Stone, Gerald "1932: The Year that Changed A Nation" Pan Macmillan 2005
Warner, Rex (translator) "Xenophon: The Persian Expedition" Penguin Classics 1949
Yiannakis, J. "Kalgoorlie Alchemy: Xenophobia, Patriotism and the Anti-Greek 1916 Riots" Early Days Vol. 2, No. 2 1996.
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