Military organization and community in Xenophon's 'Anabasis'.

摘要

This dissertation employs ancient testimonia, archaeological evidence, and comparative sociological material to investigate social organization in the mercenary army of Xenophon's Anabasis. Conventional opinion holds that this army constituted a single abstract political community. Analysis, however, reveals that a soldier's everyday life in the Anabasis army was most shaped by his participation in two smaller social structures. One, the lochos ("company"), was a formal, largely self-contained tactical and administrative unit with an established strength of one hundred men. Two years of constant marching and fighting together fostered cohesion and mutual identification amongst the men of each lochos. The other structure, the suskenia, was an informally collected group of comrades numbering perhaps no more than twenty, focused on the performance of the daily tasks of life on the march: foraging, cooking, eating and sleeping. Suskenia formed within each lochos to make up for the army's lack of a developed logistical apparatus. The mercenaries of Cyrus, then, constituted not one large imagined community, but a multiplicity of small societies. Further analysis shows that, contrary to accepted views, very few slave attendants accompanied the army. Even so, what few slaves there were, along with male and female companions originally taken as captives, were to some degree able to participate in the social life of the suskenia. Finally, examination of eating and drinking behavior in the Anabasis reveals a pattern of non-elite Greek commensality which has long been neglected in studies of aristocratic symposion culture. By tying together recent scholarly interest in ancient logistics, in battlefield experience, and in the study of small social groupings, this dissertation illuminates several central aspects of Greek society, culture and warfare.