Mediterranean Travels

Writing Self and Other from the Ancient World to the Contemporary

Noreen Humble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907975073
• eBook ISBN: 9781351192736
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Written by leading scholars in the field, this collection analyses the notion of travel writing as a genre, while tracing significant examples of Mediterranean travel writing that return us to Ancient Greece, to Medieval pilgrimages, to Venetians diplomatic missions, to an Egyptian's account of Paris in the nineteenth century, to French artistic journeys in North Africa and to contemporary narratives of privileged resettlement, death and dislocation."

CHAPTER 1
Xenophon's Anabasis: Self and Other in Fourth-Century Greece

Noreen Humble

Travel, as part of literary narrative, is endemic in ancient Greek literature. What, after all, is one of the earliest extant pieces of Western literature, the Odyssey, at heart but a travel narrative? Though Odysseus is a reluctant traveller and forever yearns for home, the Odyssey does supply an additional model for the travel writer in the sense that it is Homer’s ‘poetic anthropology which provides the basis for the Greeks’ vision of themselves and of others and provides a paradigm for exploring this vision’.¹ The journey in the Odyssey is primarily by sea, as is the journey of another of the Greek heroes, Jason. Both sailed the length and breadth of what we now call the Mediterranean region:² Odysseus from Troy in the East to the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) in the West, Jason as far as the Eastern coast of the Black Sea to Libya and even to the Rhone river in the North. These myths mapped and appropriated the landscape and seascape we now think of as the Mediterranean as being Greek, and are central to constructions of Greek identity.

In terms of scholarly theorizing about travel writing, the earliest ancient Greek work on which focus rests is Herodotus’s Histories.³ The Histories narrate the buildup to and the great wars between the vast Persian Empire and the Greeks in the early fifth century BCE, using the expansion of the Persian Empire as the guiding thread and providing ethnographies of peoples the Persians conquer as their empire grows. The way Herodotus presents his narrative, in particular his insistence on autopsy (i.e. on seeing things for himself), gives the impression that he has travelled widely.⁴ No other extant ancient work provides quite such an extraordinarily broad exploration of identity and ethnicity — indeed it has been phenomenally influential in framing how these issues have been addressed in the West⁵ — and it is in Herodotus’s text that we locate our earliest definition of ‘Greekness’: ‘community of blood and language, temples and ritual, and common customs’ (Histories 8.144).⁶

Herodotus’s exploration of Greek and barbarian identity is complex and defies easy categorization,⁷ as might be expected given his own background.⁸ He comes from Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum in Turkey), an early Greek colony (c. 900 BCE) but fully multi-ethnic by Herodotus’s day, and indeed, at Herodotus’s birth, part of the Persian Empire. He seems to have been of mixed ethnic background (Carian, i.e. barbarian, and Greek); at some point he was exiled when he opposed a Persianbacked tyrant; and later sources inform us that he spent time in Athens and was part of the Athenian colonizing expedition of Thurii in Southern Italy (c. 444 bce). If all this is true, it gives him a complex personal identity and this seems reflected in his rather cosmopolitan outlook in the Histories.⁹

It is frequently asserted that the trigger for exploring what it meant to be ‘Greek’, and its opposite ‘barbarian’, was the defeat of the empire-expanding Persians by a coalition of Greek states in 479 BCE.¹⁰ The reality of the situation is surely more complex.¹¹ For centuries before Herodotus the Greeks had interacted with non-Greek speaking people in both the East and the West through the founding of colonies; that such encounters did not lead to reflection regarding issues of identity seems highly unlikely.¹² Further, the mapping in Greek mythology of a region we recognize as Mediterranean also speaks of far earlier awareness and interest in issues of identity and the Other. Thus while the Persian Wars may have increased polarization (or awareness of polarization, particularly among mainland Greeks), seeing them as the trigger for such polarization over-privileges Herodotus (our earliest extant Greek prose narrative),¹³ and reflects the fact that ‘modern study of Greek history has been fundamentally shaped by the perspectives of Occi dent alism/ Eurocentrism’.¹⁴

Herodotus does not foreground his travels. His attraction to travel-writing scholars is his exploration of Otherness, and particularly influential has been François Hartog’s analysis of this aspect of Herodotus’s work.¹⁵ There is, however, another ancient Greek text, Xenophon’s Anabasis, written within a century of Herodotus’s, which is seldom even mentioned in general discussions of (ancient) travel writing.¹⁶ Unlike Herodotus’s Histories, however, the Anabasis is wholly concerned with a journey in a foreign land, it presents the idiosyncratic view of the author towards the journey, and it explores identity (both of self and Other) on a number of levels — all key elements of travel writing.

The Anabasis chronicles two years of Xenophon’s life, 401–399 bce, which he spends travelling into the hinterland of the Persian empire and back out again.¹⁷ He tells us that he was invited by a friend, Proxenus, to come to Asia Minor to get to know Cyrus the Younger, the brother of the then King of the Persian empire, Artaxerxes (An. 3.1.4). The Persians, at that time, included the Greek cities in Asia Minor in their empire. It transpires that Cyrus is planning to dethrone his brother and is gathering a large mercenary army for that purpose (though Xenophon is at pains to point out that neither he, nor Proxenus, nor indeed most of the Greeks with Cyrus knew that at the outset). Book 1 of the Anabasis recounts this, as well as the march eastwards from Ephesus, and the battle with Artaxerxes at Cunaxa (near Baghdad), in which Cyrus is killed. The second book deals with the increasing isolation of the Greek portion of Cyrus’s mercenary army as Cyrus’s Persian troops disperse or join Artaxerxes, and ends with the death of the major Greek generals. Book 3 starts with the election of new generals, of whom Xenophon is one, and the remainder of the work recounts the journey of the Greek mercenaries back to Asia Minor. They travel north, through Armenia, towards the Black Sea, then west along the coast until they reach Byzantium. A short spell in the pay of a Thracian king, Seuthes, precedes notice of employment under the Spartans for a campaign now against the Persians in Asia Minor.

Xenophon flashes forward briefly a few times in the Anabasis to provide snippets of personal information outside the chronological framework of the journey: that he will be exiled (5.3.7, 7.7.57), and that he does not return to mainland Greece until 394 BCE (and then with the Spartan king Agesilaos for the expedition against the Boeotians and others with whom his own polis (city state), Athens, was allied); his arrangements regarding his mercenary booty; and that the Spartans gave him an estate at Scillus, near Olympia, after he was exiled (5.3.4–13). There is much debate over the date of and reasons for his exile but campaigning with Cyrus (who had allied with Sparta against Athens) and with the Spartans are given as reasons in later ancient sources and can reasonably be inferred from the Anabasis itself.¹⁸ Other details about his life are, like those for Herodotus, derived from later sources whose veracity is difficult to check. On the basis of them it has been argued that he spent time in Sicily as a mercenary of the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius, c. 393–391 bce,¹⁹ that he had to leave Scillus in 370 bce when the Spartans lost control of that area, and that he ended up then either in Corinth or Athens.²⁰ If we work on the assumption that most of this is accurate, then throughout his life Xenophon, like Herodotus, had to adapt to changing circumstances, including exile, and experienced life in different parts of the Mediterranean world. Unlike Herodotus, however, his own ethnic background was not complex: he was an Athenian born at a time when citizenship laws required both parents to be Athenian.

Xenophon wrote prolifically (fourteen works are extant) and experimented widely in terms of literary genre. He was writing in a period when generic boundaries were still fluid and thus there is debate about the generic categories of many of his works. The debate is most heated concerning the Anabasis. Though there is no doubt that it recounts a journey and that it is autobiographical (despite being written in the third person — see further below),²¹ examining the work under the rubric of travel writing is not common. Paul Cartledge comes closest when he provocatively labels it ‘reflective autobiographical travelogue’, though he never fully elaborates on what he means by this.²² It has more often been generally tagged as either memoirs or history or some combination thereof. Much of it focuses on Xenophon’s experience,²³ hence the former tag, yet the work starts out as though it is going to recount the history of a power struggle for the Persian throne, hence the latter. Most recently, under the impetus of Samuel Hynes’s 1997 study of contemporary personal war narratives, two scholars independently proposed that the label ‘war memoir’ be applied.²⁴ This is an attractive option as it covers the twin facts that throughout we are dealing with an army on the move and that from Book 3 on there is a concentration on Xenophon’s experience of this journey, as one of the commanding generals. It is thus no surprise that those who found themselves lost in the Armenian hinterland attempting to escape during wartime in the early twentieth century drew parallels between themselves and the Greek mercenaries of Xenophon’s tale.²⁵ More immediately, that similarities have been drawn between the Anabasis and the recent American invasion of Iraq confirms the work’s appeal in this regard.²⁶

Whether we are to regard war memoir as akin to travel writing,²⁷ or as a subgenre within travel writing, or neither, it certainly has an easier set of identifiable characteristics. The negative aspect of this is that it is a more restrictive categorization and inevitably there are aspects of the work which do not conform. Thus analyses of the Anabasis as war memoir focus on showing how Xenophon’s personal experience drives all aspects of the narrative, and so are required to downplay the fact that although a journey is undertaken right from the start of the text (by Cyrus and his mercenary army) Xenophon is not the central character until the third book. Further they also tend to neglect broader explorations of identity outside the realm of the military context, and thus they overlook the richness of the text in this regard. For while a text’s reception need in no way reflect the intended purpose of the author, it is notable that the Anabasis has had as broad an appeal among non-military as among military adventurers. For example, the earliest excerpt which Eric Newby, himself a popular travel writer, included in his 1985 collection A Book of Travellers’ Tales comes not from Homer or from Herodotus, but from Xenophon’s Anabasis (pp. 251–52).²⁸ The passage he chose to include comes from Book 4 as the mercenary army makes its way through Armenia in the depths of winter, battling snow-blindness and frostbite. Given that focusing on the hardships of travel, which the intrepid traveller overcomes, is a feature of Newby’s own writing (e.g. Journey through the Hindu Kush, The Last Grain Race, etc.), the choice of passage is not surprising.²⁹ Newby undoubtedly first came across the Anabasis as a schoolboy learning ancient Greek,³⁰ and was far from the only one among generations of European schoolboys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries weaned on Xenophon’s ‘adventure’ (for thus it was presented) to feel its influence. During this period, the An...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction: The Mediterranean Turn
• 1 Xenophon's Anabasis: Self and Other in Fourth-Century Greece
• 2 Pausanias's Description of Greece: Back to the Roots of Greek Culture
• 3 The Inception of Oriental Doxology: European Pilgrimages to the Holy Land, before and during the Crusades
• 4 Renaissance Travellers in the Mediterranean and their Perception of the Other
• 5 The Fleeting Concept of the Other in the Turkish Letters of Augerius Busbequius (1520/1—
• 6 Writing the Mediterranean in Italian Baroque Travel Literature: Pietro Delia Valle's Viaggi
• 7 'Extracting Gold' from Paris: A Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Journey in Search of Knowledge
• 8 Encounters with Self and Others: Some English Women Travellers to Italy in the Nineteenth Century
• 9 Eugène Fromentin: Travel, Algeria, and the Pursuit of Aesthetic Form
• 10 'Already familiar and yet fantastically new': Jacques Lacarrière and the Mediterranean
• 11 The Mediterranean Diet: Consuming the Italian Other's Culture in Travel Writing by Frances Mayes and Gary Paul Nabhan
• 12 Deciphering the Past, Interpreting the Present: Self and Identity in Mediterráneos by Rafael Chirbes
• 13 Grave Unquiet: The Mediterranean and its Dead
• Bibliography
• Index