θαλασσα, θαλασσα

Ten thousand: there are a few exemplars of it: for instance The Ten thousand Things , a wide ranging music blog: or sam of the ten thousand things who looks like a bit of a kindred spirit; or more crassly here’s a completely sophistic and bogus ten thousand dollar offer for any one who has kept the ten commandments:

Or the ten thousand martyrs , ten thousand bands, ten thousand stances, etc etc etc.

However the number has its original attraction for us classicists, because of Xenophon’s Anabasis

from wiki:

Xenophon accompanied the Ten Thousand, a large army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger, who intended to seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II. Though Cyrus’s army was victorious at Cunaxa in Babylon (401 BC), Cyrus himself was killed in the battle, rendering the victory irrelevant and the expedition a failure.

Stranded deep in enemy territory, the Spartan general Clearchus and the other Greek senior officers were subsequently killed or captured by treachery on the part of the Persian satrap Tissaphernes. Xenophon played an instrumental role in encouraging the Greek army of 10,000 to march north to the Black Sea. Now abandoned in Mesopotamia, without supplies other than what they could obtain by force, the 10,000 had to fight their way northwards through Kurdistan and Armenia, making ad hoc decisions about their leadership, tactics, and destiny.

Xenophon writes in a clear soldierly Greek, which even dullardly second formers like me could slog through relatively easily: not like bloody Thucydides.

Stately plump Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysess says:

“Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother.”

Thalatta! thalatta! being Greek for ‘The Sea! The Sea!’ which was the cry famously uttered by the Greek soldiers when they finally reached the coast. The Anabasis / ten Thousand was also the basis for the eighties movie ‘The Warriors’ where a New york gang has to fight its way back to Conet Island through hostile neighbourhoods:

I watched this movie at the Odeon Haverstock Hill when it came out and all I kept thinking was ‘Why don’t they just steal a couple of cars? ‘

And why the ten thousand? Because I have just clocked up ten thousand hits: which I know is exceedingly modest generally, but hey as we’ve just learned: I’m very easily pleased.

What is surprising is that a thousand of those come from just one post:

there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face

which is about plastic surgery but only a little and about Jocelyn Wildenstein but even less so, and then tails off into some funny aside about Shakespeare. But for some reason the people are nuts for La Wildenstein: especially for some other reason, the people of Central and Eastern Northern Europe, as well as folk from Nigeria, Brazil, Korea: you name it…….Thanks everyone. Hope the disappointment hasn’t been too grievous.

The Greek term anabasis referred to an expedition from a coastline into the interior of a country. The term katabasis referred to a trip from the interior to the coast. Since most of Xenophon’s narrative is taken up with the march from the interior of Babylon to the Black Sea, the title is something of a misnomer.

Well: katabasis doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, does it?

(That’s James Yorkston, by the way, “Moving up country, roaring the gospel’)

~ by bettyslocombe on August 6, 2008.