Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (Penguin Classics) (29 page)

1
.
critical moment
: The author of an extant contemporary treatise on siegecraft, Aeneas, was especially interested in espionage and various modes of cryptic communication (D. Whitehead,
Aineieas the Tactician: How to Survive under Siege
[Oxford University Press, 1990], especially chapter 31). The author may be the politically conservative Aeneas of Stymphalus in Arcadia mentioned by Xenophon at
A History of My Times
7.3.1, and it would not be odd if he and Xenophon were personally known to each other or if either had written his treatise in knowledge of the other’s.

2
.
trick I have just mentioned
: Xenophon is remarkably interested in ambushes, a convenient list of references to which in Greek literature has been collated in W. K. Pritchett,
The Greek State at War
, vol. 2 (University of California Press, 1974), chapter 9.

1
.
fake spears
: Grooms (
hippokomoi
), like the hoplites’ batmen, were typically slaves. An Attic drinking cup from the early fifth century, attributed to the painter Onesimus (itself a slave name), depicts on the interior an African groom sighting along his curry comb for hairs after currying the horse (J. Ober and C. W. Hedrick,
The Birth of Democracy
[American School of Classical Studies at Athens and National Archives, Washington, D.C., Exhibition Catalogue, 1993],
p. 141
, fig. 23.2).

2
.
out of sight
: ‘The enemy will not know (
a
) the number of files when posted one behind another, nor (
b
) the depth of the line when the files have wheeled’ (Marchant, Loeb edition, p. 269 n. 1).

3
.
ability to deceive… work on it yourself
: Ruse or cunning intelligence (
metis
)
had always been an admired, but also a morally questionable, quality, as exemplified paradigmatically by Odysseus ’of the many wiles’ (
polumetis
). Traditional hoplite warfare by and large did not lend itself to deception or even surprise. What we seem to see in this treatise, however, as in Xenophon’s accounts of Agesilaus’ career, are an increasing use and increasingly positive valuation of deception (
apate
) of all kinds (cf. chapter 4 note 2).

4
.
on foot
: Infantry mixed with cavalry had a technical name,
hamippoi
; they were not original to the fourth century, and Xenophon refrains from mentioning that they were a Theban invention and speciality (Thucydides 5.57;
A History of My Times
7.5.23–4). For Athenian
hamippoi
see
Ath. Pol.
49.1, with Rhodes,
Commentary
, p. 566; Spence, pp. 58–9, pl. 10.

5
.
the god
: Here and elsewhere (6.1, 7.3, 7.14, 9.8) Xenophon uses the masculine singular,
ho theos
, without necessarily having any one male god in mind. The characteristically religious note had been struck in the very first sentence of the treatise, recurs throughout and is explicitly sounded again right at the end.

1
.
his will
: The craftsman (
cheirotechnes
) was not a figure of high status in aristocratic Greek eyes, but that did not stop either Xenophon or, more famously, Plato from using craft analogies to illustrate or point their philosophical or didactic theses. The particular craft Xenophon has in mind here is probably that of the bronze statuary who moulded (our ‘plastic’ comes from the Greek verb
plassein
) clay and plaster and wax – cf.
Memoirs of Socrates
3.10, in Penguin
Conversations of Socrates
.

2
.
his men: A History of My Times
4.5.4 (Agesilaus sharing fire in 390) is a classic illustration.

1
.
foot-soldiers
: This is a reference to the Boeotians, and more especially the hated (by Xenophon: see next note) Thebans; see ‘Oxyrhynchus Historian’, chapter 11 (the status quo in 395).

2
.
are just as proud… as Boeotians
: For Xenophon’s own hostility to Thebes, see
Agesilaus
chapter 2 note 5
. Athenian pride of lineage was celebrated notably in the Epitaphios or Funeral Oration pronounced over the year’s war-dead (e.g. Thucydides 2.35–46).

3
.
city walls
: Xenophon follows Thucydides in underestimating the offensive elements (including annual raids across the border against Megara) in Athens’ Peloponnesian War strategy by land. But the cavalry was certainly relatively little used, and least of all for offence.

4
.
of marauders
: Plundering (
leisteia
) was something for which cavalry were particularly well equipped; the economic as well as military importance of plundering was not lost on contemporaries: see Y. Garlan,
Guerre et économie en Grèce ancienne
(Maspéro, 1989); and
Agesilaus
chapter 1 note 31
.

1
.
women against men:
The Greek for the sort of courage, bravery or pugnacity required in combat was
andreia,
literally ‘manliness’. A favourite Greek military insult from Homer onwards was to deride the enemy as ‘womanish’.

2
.
flying… long to be able to do:
This is a rather revealing personal interjection. Would-be high flyers among ancient Greek mortals had of course the awful warning of Icarus to contemplate; but what Xenophon is in effect saying is that riding, or more specifically cavalry training, gave him the sort of divine pleasure that other Greeks derived from sexual intercourse, for which a regular Greek phrase was
ta Aphrodisia,
‘the things of Aphrodite’.

3
.
with prosperity:
At the so-called ‘crown’ games (see
Hiero
chapter 1 note 1
) prizes were purely symbolic tokens (an olive-wreath crown at the Olympics, etc.), but at all the many times more numerous local games value-prizes (e.g. olive oil at Athens, bronze cauldrons at Argos) were awarded. Xenophon, for the sake of his rhetorical point, collapses the distinction between token-prize and value-prize boxing-matches.

4
.
with intelligence:
Xenophon was ever the elitist, a spokesman for, as well as to, the supposedly intelligent (
phronimoi
) few.

5
.
to resist:
True shock cavalry tactics in Greek warfare, however, had to await the discovery – or use – of stirrups.

6
.
unexpected fright:
In this Xenophon was at one with Thucydides, who also placed great emphasis on tales of the unexpected (
to aprosdoketon
). For the morale factor in Xenophon, see note to
Agesilaus
chapter 2 note 3
.

1
.
seen through
: The same point is vigorously urged in the peroration of
Ways and Means
6.2–3.

2
.
of enthusiasm:
This remark sits awkwardly with his disparagement elsewhere of Spartan cavalry: see
Agesilaus
chapter 1 note 18
.

3
.
large estates
: The legal status and welfare of Athenian orphans were the peculiar responsibility of the annual eponymous archon (
Ath. Pol.
, Rhodes,
Commentary
, pp. 629–36). War-orphans constituted a special, and particularly prestigious, subcategory.

4
.
resident aliens
: Resident aliens (
metoikoi
, or metics) were a quite numerous category of the Athenian population, concentrated inevitably in the Peiraeus area (see further
Ways and Means
chapter 2 note 2
). Their status was emphatically second class, marked as such by the requirement to pay a monthly poll-tax. But they had some privileges as well as disabilities compared with non-resident foreigners and of course slaves. If they were of sufficient means, they were already required to serve as hoplites, and some of the poorest among them no doubt served voluntarily as trireme oarsmen. Xenophon in arguing for their recruitment to the cavalry was ranking military effectiveness above the strict maintenance of social boundaries. See generally D. Whitehead,
The Ideology of the Athenian Metic
(Cambridge Philological Society, 1977).

5
.
the time
: Presumably Xenophon has in mind exiles from the enemy city, as at
A History of My Times
5.3.17 (Agesilaus and the oligarchic exiles from Phleious in the late 380s); cf.
A History of My Times
7.2.4, where Xenophon mentions in dispatches the loyalty to Sparta of the Phleiasian cavalry.

6
.
in danger
. Compare
On Horsemanship
11.13.

7
.
dreams
: The treatise began implicitly with divination by extispicy, that is examination of the entrails of sacrificial animals: see
chapter 1 note 1
. Xenophon here adds the other three main forms of divination practised by the Greeks; cf.
Memoirs of Socrates
1.1.3. The most famous oracular shrine was of course Delphi; the most famous site for ‘incubation’ (sleeping overnight in a shrine in order to dream divinely sent dreams) the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus (see
On Hunting
chapter 1 note 4
); at Dodona in north-west Greece one mode of divination was by interpreting the cooing of the doves, but avispicy normally took the form of observing the flight of birds.

1
.
with him
: A ‘Simon’ is invoked in Aristophanes’
Knights
(line 242); the chorus that gives that comedy its name represented the Athenian cavalry, and according to one ancient commentator, this Simon was then one of its two Hipparchs, or cavalry commanders (see e.g.
Cavalry Commander
chapter 1 note 5
). If so, he may be the author of the treatise mentioned here and at 11.6, part of which survives: see D. Whitehead,
Aineieas the Tactician: How to Survive under Siege
(Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 35 n. 101. For the Eleusinium, see
Cavalry Commander
chapter 3 note 2
.

2
.
a war-horse
: As the author will shortly make explicit (3.7), he is talking throughout this treatise about horses for war, rather than for work or leisure (for the contrast, see e.g.
Agesilaus
9.6). Horses apparently cost more to buy than houses.

3
.
the frog
: The author’s word here (and at 4.5, 6.2) is actually
chelidon
, ‘swallow’. Presumably this is because of the V-shape of the horse’s frog and of the swallow’s tail. Later Greek writers, however, do use
batrachos
, the Greek for ‘frog’, for this spongy tissue under the horse’s hoof.

4
.
the pin
: What the author calls the ‘pin’ or brooch (
perone
) is probably the deep flexor tendon at the back of the lower leg, which is the shape of an ancient Greek fibula (similar to a modern safety pin). As the author implies, if the circulation to this part of the leg is blocked off, the horse may suffer from navicular disease, which in turn can lead to lameness.

5
.
better appearance
: The ideal shape and proportions for a nude male statue (the so-called
kouros
type) were thought to have been attained by the fifth-century Argive sculptor Polycleitus in his figure named
Kanon
(‘Standard’); he also wrote a treatise of that title. See also
Memoirs of Socrates
3.10.

6
.
horse’s shoulders
: Another point for the modern reader to bear in mind is that the Greek rider did without stirrups and saddle (see next note; at most he might use a saddle-cloth, 7.5).

7
.
double spine
: The so-called double spine made the saddle-less horse more comfortable to sit on and thus earned the praise of many ancient writers (e.g.
Virgil,
Georgics
3.87). Rather than protruding, the spinal column in a thus favoured horse rests as it were in a slight valley.

8
.
the belly:
Today, we would say that such a horse has a good girth.

9
.
broad line:
Looking at a standing horse tail-on, you should be able to draw an imaginary line straight down from the centre of its rump to its hoof, on both sides. These two lines should be parallel and, as the author says, form a ‘broad line’ between them. This indicates that the horse is not bandy-legged, cow-hocked or sickle-hocked.

1
.
public standing:
This truism gives special point to the story that Alexander the Great himself broke the horse he named Bucephalas (‘Ox-Head’), and after whom he named a city on the banks of the Hydaspes ( Jhelum) (Plutarch,
Alexander
6, 32, 44, 61).

2
.
breaking in colts:
Whether or not Xenophon was the author of the present treatise, this passage refers to topics treated at length by Xenophon in
Memoirs of Socrates, The Estate-manager
and elsewhere.

3
.
notes… be paid:
For ‘notes’,
hypomnemata
, see
Cavalry Commander
chapter 1 note 7
. The practice of employing written contracts was on the increase in the fourth century.

4
.
groom… from distress:
On grooms, see
Cavalry Commander
chapter 5 note 1
.