This is a thought-provoking and successful volume. In a number of his works Xenophon seems to have been preoccupied with violence. As in so many other areas, he seems so explicit about the topic of violence and its role in human affairs. Issues arise when comparing the implied or stated definitions found in the essays concerning what violence is for Xenophon: is it limited to the military sphere? Is military defeat a form of violence, or the actions of the state that do not follow procedure? And some questions are not asked that perhaps should have been, chief among these, whether Xenophon was unusual in his treatment of violence, either in terms of substance or degree. The thinking of H. Arendt is important in a couple of papers and highlights a major issue in the collection.
The first two papers, C. Bearzot, ‘The notion of violence (bia, hybris) in Xenophon's work’, and P.A. Tuci, ‘Apronoêtos Orgê: the Role of Anger in Xenophon's Vision of History’, are both annotated surveys of the subjects stated in their titles. Bearzot divides her study into violence in personal relations and the military and, second, violence in actions of the state. Here we might wonder whether military violence ought to have been grouped in the second section of the paper. Tuci likewise divides his paper into violence as a manifestation of orgê on the part of the individual and on the part of the community and concludes his paper with a quick review of orgê-driven actions in the Hellenica, Respublica Lacedaemoniorum, Cyropaedia, Anabasis and De equitandi ratione. It is Tuci's finding that people and groups acting under the influence of orgê behave irrationally and therefore make bad, self-destructive decisions; he believes that this understanding of the role of orgê aligns Xenophon closely with Thucydides.
We sense a change of perspective when we move to P.J. Rhodes's paper, ‘Lawlessness and Violence in Decision-Making in Xenophon's Hellenica’. Rhodes is interested in Xenophon's depiction of governmental procedures and specifically the overriding of those procedures. It is his conclusion that, while we are sometimes given views of how decisions are reached and acted upon elsewhere (Sparta, Arcadia), it is really for the most part at Athens that we are given detailed views of what he calls ‘set pieces’, where lawful procedures are not followed and notorious acts committed: for example, the trial of the generals of Arginusae and the condemnation of the Eleusinians by the hoplites and cavalry under the Thirty. Xenophon also treats Spartan decision-making at the state level, especially in the declaration of war, but in the case of Sparta Xenophon more frequently observes differences in policy between individuals, and he leaves us in the dark as to how those differences were worked out in formal procedures.
F. Pownall contributes ‘Violence and Civil Strife in Xenophon's Hellenica’. It is her contention that stasis-stories in Xenophon's Hellenica amplify important themes: war is violent, but internecine warfare is especially violent; scenes of combat are violent, but those involving civil strife have added emotional content that help to make them at times more important than their military and political significance. Pownall goes the further step to argue that violence in stasis can be related to the disorder and confusion in the Greek world after Mantinea – that Xenophon connects the stasis and extreme violence it brings as connected to the broader issue of interstate conflict in the Greek world. In making this claim Thucydides is (again) brought up as a possible inspiration (the Corcyraean stasis).
E. Foster, in ‘Minor Infantry Defeats and Spartan Deaths in Xenophon's Hellenica’, examines a number of what she defines as minor military actions, in the majority of which the Spartans come off as losers. She argues that these defeats, brought about either because of tactical weakness or failures of leadership, parallel the story of the expansion of Spartan hegemony in the Corinthian War and act as a counterpoint to it. Her reading of the battle of Lechaeum as a Xenophontine problematisation of the ‘beautiful death’ is particularly compelling.
In ‘Violence and the State in Xenophon: a Study of Three Passages’ it is E. Harris's concern to explore three problematic areas regarding violence and what we might style ‘extra-legal’ action: ‘popular’ justice, namely, when informal crowds take the law into their own hands and publicly execute someone; the use of physical force by officials against free persons; and the murder of tyrants. In each case, using passages in Xenophon (An. 5.7 and 5.8, Hell. 7.3), Harris seeks to correct mistaken views: ‘popular’ justice was in fact extremely rare in the Greek world; physical force against free persons was employed by different states, but there were restraints, and it could only be done when there was a clear benefit and it was not done to humiliate; use of deadly force was recognised as belonging solely to the state, but there were exceptions in extreme circumstances, tyrannicide being one of them.
N. Crick's essay, ‘The Rhetoric of Violence in Xenophon's Anabasis’, and that by B. Burliga, ‘Xenophon's βίαιος διδάσκαλος: Thinking War and Empire in the Cyropaedia’, form something of a pair. Both address the issue of Xenophon's own awareness of violence in his writings – the extent to which he himself articulates the role violence ought or ought not to play in human affairs, and where he seems to assume a role for violence without being aware he has done so. Employing the work of H. Arendt on violence, Crick reads several passages in the Anabasis as explorations by Xenophon of the relationship between rhetoric and violence, that Xenophon the character often sees the efficacy of persuasion over violence and tries to get the rest of the Cyreans to act with restraint. Most arresting, though, is Crick's analysis of An. 4.7.1–14, where the Taochi – men, women and children – commit mass suicide rather than capitulate to the Greek soldiers; while Xenophon can label the event ‘a terrible sight’ (δεινὸν θέαμα), the people who perish through the violence of the Greeks and the protest violence upon themselves live in a Arendtian ‘desert’ and are not part of Xenophon's ‘common world’, and therefore an act of profound violence (‘terror’) is elided in the text's relative silence. Burliga approaches the Cyropaedia from a similar perspective, but arrives at a different conclusion. Not surprisingly the central issue of Burliga's paper is the role of violence in leadership, and the broader question whether empires can be just. Unlike Crick, who concludes by pointing out Xenophon's ‘blind spot’ when it comes to the exercise of violence against a people who are functionally not really deserving of the name, Burliga believes that there really are no contradictions in Xenophon's views of good leadership, empire and justice in the Cyropaedia; Xenophon can be both a utopian and a realist, both an advocate for justice and empire, because as a military man he understands that violence is simply wired into the relations that make up our lives.
In ‘The Greek Reaction to the Slaughter of the Athenian Captives at Aegospotami and Xenophon's Hellenica’ Kapellos turns his attention to the notable silence in Xenophon's text to the summary execution of Athenian prisoners by Lysander after Aegospotami. It is his conclusion that there is no registering of Greek reaction to the slaughter because on the whole most Greeks welcomed the defeat of Athens and its punishment; he contrasts the absence of any kind of judgement regarding the aftermath of Aegospotami with Athenian worries about retribution taken against them for atrocities they committed during the Peloponnesian War.
A. Wolpert compares Xenophon's account in the Hellenica of the Thirty Tyrants with the parallel narratives of the Respublica Atheniensium and Lysias in ‘Xenophon on the Violence of the Thirty’. It is his conclusion that, while all three major accounts are largely in agreement (when the Spartan garrison is installed at Athens is a major point of difference), Xenophon is alone in including speeches, and, most importantly, Xenophon's treatment brings more emphasis to the immorality or moral weakness of the Thirty. Wolpert concludes his essay with a thoughtful reflection on the role of violence in authoritarian regimes.
Important themes unite many of the papers. A quiet but persistent criticism of Sparta is front and centre in Foster's essay, but is also registered in those by Tuci and Rhodes as well as elsewhere. The opposition between officially sanctioned or authorised violence and illegal or informal action is a major element in the discussions of Rhodes, Harris, Burliga and Wolpert. This ‘dialogue’ in particular usefully focuses our attention on the question of how or even whether violent behaviour can ever in fact be sanctioned activity by a truly legitimate governing structure. The papers of Crick and Burliga for Xenophon, and more generally the Greeks in the paper by Kapellos, force us to think about where and against whom even sanctioned violence was appropriate – in short, Xenophon's own limitations on where one finds violence. I wish that more would have been made of violence in nature; Bearzot deals with this briefly in her paper (though even the passage she discusses is problematic because the event is characterised as supernatural and ominous: Hell. 5.4.17, violent winds send pack animals and shields over a precipice), and the topic of nature metaphors in the description of the dead comes up in those by Foster and Pownall. The papers of this collection are uniformly good, and the collection as a whole will stimulate further inquiry into the problem of Xenophon and violence.
