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In Xenophon's Anabasis?

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In Xenophon's Anabasis? chapter nine MIND THE GAP: A ‘SNOW LACUNA’ IN XENOPHON’S ANABASIS?* Shane Brennan Introduction The question of the march chronology in Anabasis, Xenophon’s account of the expedition of Cyrus the Younger and the retreat homeward from Baby- lonia of his Greek mercenaries, has drawn the interest of several scholars in recent decades.1 While Xenophon’s march framework provides a fairly com- prehensive relative chronology, there are no absolute dates in the work to which this framework could be anchored. In the nineteenth century a date of 6 March 401 was put forward for the start day and this convention has been widely adopted by editors since.2 In this scheme the army crosses the Euphrates on 27 July 401, ghts at Cunaxa on 3 September, and sees the Black Sea from Mount Theches on 27 January 400. However, concerns about the feasibility of sustained winter marching in eastern Anatolia, aired by at least one early traveller in Xenophon’s footsteps, have grown in the modern era.3 * I am very grateful to the British Institute at Ankara for providing me with the opportu- nity to use their facilities in April 2009, and to the Thomas Wiedemann Fund for the grant of a bursary to attend the Xenophon Conference in Liverpool in July 2009. I would also like to thank Faize Sarıs¸ (University of Birmingham) and Serhat Sensoy¸ (Turkish State Meteo- rology Service) for help in obtaining and interpreting climate data from a range of sources. My thanks as well to Christine Allison, David Thomas, and the Brill referee for their helpful comments on the chapter. All mistakes and any oversights in it are my own. Anabasis trans- lations are from Ambler’s 2008 edition, which I have modi ed slightly in places. All otherwise unattributed references are to Anabasis. 1 Manfredi 1986, Glombiowski 1994, Lendle 1995, Tuplin 1999, Lane Fox 2004, Lee 2007, Brennan 2008. 2 See Koch 1850: 3–12. Koch provided no basis for the start date, other than that it seemed to him to be the most likely one. See Lee 2007: 283–289 for a tabular view of marches. 3 John Kinneir, one of the rst and best regarded travellers to engage with Xenophon’s route, wrote: ‘I also repeat my belief of the impossibility of an army of ten thousand men marching at the rate of ve parasangs a day, for so many days successively, through a country where the snow lay a fathom [1,828 metres] deep on the ground’ (1818: 490). In the 1930s, Gustav Gassner, a German botanist based in Trabzon, made seminal investigations into the adventures of the Ten Thousand in the Black Sea region and one of his conclusions was that it would not have been possible for the army to cross the Pontic Mountains in winter (1953: 3). 308 shane brennan This study does not set out to propose a solution to the chronology prob- lem, but rather to focus on a section of the march which has proved di cult to map in both space and time. The uncertainty surrounding the journey through eastern Anatolia has admitted of some speculation on both counts, and the main aim of this chapter is to set the problem on rmer ground; in so doing an important theory about a gap in this part of Xenophon’s record is addressed: according to this, there are up to three months missing from Book IV, a whole chunk of time which Xenophon chose to omit from his account.4 By establishing a climatic context for Book IV, the ‘snow lacuna’ theory is critically evaluated. My conclusion will be that there may be a small gap in the record but that it is not materially incomplete. The Nature and Purpose of Xenophon’s Travelogue Xenophon supplies two categories of travel information in Anabasis: march details and road descriptions. The rst category includes information about start and nish points, distances (stages and parasangs), and rest days. While every stage of the route is not described in all of these terms, the record furnishes a su ciently full picture of the march to warrant its being characterised as systematic. The second category contains rst-hand de- scriptions of landscapes, natural features, and the natural world, as well as impressions of places and peoples encountered. By its nature this is sub- jective, and it is the case furthermore that large stretches of the journey are passed virtually without comment.5 On the other hand, it has been observed that Xenophon’s attention is drawn by features that were remarkable to him (and his Greek audience), in which case there is a method of sorts in his pro- vision of descriptions;6 extending from this, we may have some con dence that signi cant environmental events are being reported.7 His work has been developed and re ned by several subsequent commentators. See further the section on ‘The “snow lacuna” theory’, pp. 327–332 below. 4 Manfredi 1986, Lane Fox 2004. 5 For instance, the marches across Syria (1.4.9–11), through Media (2.4.27), and through various tribal lands in the north-east of Anatolia (e.g. 4.7.18–19). 6 Cf. Dalby 1992, Brulé 1995, Tuplin 1999, Roy 2007. The following examples illustrate this tendency. 1.5.1–2: Xenophon remarks on the appearance of the Syrian desert, noting its atness and the fact that there was not a single tree (δένδρον δ’ οὐδὲν ἐνῆν), but does not comment on heat; in the same passage he names several types of animal, few of which would have been common sights in Greece. 2.3.15: Xenophon notices dates that are not found in Greece. 4.2.28: extraordinary weaponry of Carduchi. 4.5.25: underground houses of Armenians. 5.4.34: the Mossynoeci, of all the peoples the army encountered, the ‘furthest removed from Greek customs’. 7 Cf. Lee 2007: 19, who argues that, for instance, Xenophon’s mentions of weather epi-.
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