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 HUMBLE and ROSS
CROWLEY,
Across time the Mediterranean has been a zone of variable legenda is a joint imprint
intensities, alliances and tensions: it is where the continents of the Modern Humanities
of Europe, Africa and Asia meet, it is where North faces Research Association and
South in an asymmetrical relationship. Its histories — of Routledge. Titles range
Greece and Rome, of Christianity and Islam, of modernity from medieval texts to
and tradition — have evolved through exploration, trade, contemporary cinema and
pilgrimage, imperial expansion, imaginings, vacation form a widely comparative
view of the modern

Mediterranean Travels
and migration. Travellers to this compelling region have
recorded their journeys and their encounters with the Other humanities.
in a variety of modes that have also revealed as much about
themselves.

Written by leading scholars in the field, this collection

analyzes the notion of travel writing as a genre, while tracing
significant examples of Mediterranean travel writing that
Mediterranean Travels
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
Writing Self and Other from the
North Africa and to contemporary narratives of privileged
resettlement, death, and dislocation. Ancient World to Contemporary Society
Patrick Crowley teaches French and Francophone literature
at University College Cork. Noreen Humble teaches Classics
at the University of Calgary. Silvia Ross teaches Italian
Literature at University College Cork.
Edited by Patrick Crowley,
Noreen Humble and Silvia Ross

ISBN 978-1-907975-07-3

cover illustration: Detail from Guillaume

9 781907 975073 Brouscon’s nautical map of the world (France, 1543) Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

CHR-9781907975073-cover.indd 1 7/7/11 14:17:04

 Mediterranean Travels
Writing Self and Other from the
Ancient World to Contemporary Society
 lEgEnda
legenda , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of
the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities
Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to
contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern
humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, English, French, german, greek,
Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an Editorial Board of
distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly
bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative literature
association.

The Modern Humanities Research association (mhra ) encourages and promotes

advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially
modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema.
It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different
disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of
increasing specialization. The association fulfils this purpose primarily through the
publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the
humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest
thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell,
Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today
Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities
and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving
scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide.
www.routledge.com
 Editorial Board
Chairman
Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)
Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)
Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English)
Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret,
Queen Mary University of London (French)
Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)
Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)
Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)
Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)
Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)
Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English)
Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German)
Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German)
Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French)
Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)
Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)

Managing Editor
Dr Graham Nelson
41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK

[email protected]
www.legenda.mhra.org.uk
 Mediterranean Travels
Writing Self and Other from the
Ancient World to Contemporary Society

Edited by
Patrick Crowley, Noreen Humble and Silvia Ross

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

2011
 First published 2011

Published by the
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2011

ISBN 978-1-907975-07-3 (hbk)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including
photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
copyright owner and the publisher.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
 Contents
❖

Acknowledgements ix
Notes on the Contributors x
Introduction: The Mediterranean Turn 1
patrick crowley, noreen humble and silvia ross
1 Xenophon’s Anabasis: Self and Other in Fourth-Century Greece 14
noreen humble
2 Pausanias’s Description of Greece: Back to the Roots of Greek Culture 32
maria pretzler
3 The Inception of Oriental Doxology: European Pilgrimages to the
Holy Land, before and during the Crusades 47
suha kudsieh
4 Renaissance Travellers in the Mediterranean and their Perception of the
Other 61
daria perocco
5 The Fleeting Concept of the Other in the Turkish Letters of
Augerius Busbequius (1520/1–1591) 77
zweder von martels
6 Writing the Mediterranean in Italian Baroque Travel Literature:
Pietro Della Valle’s Viaggi 96
nathalie hester
7 ‘Extracting Gold’ from Paris: A Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Journey
in Search of Knowledge 114
roxanne l. euben
8 Encounters with Self and Others: Some English Women Travellers to
Italy in the Nineteenth Century 134
susan bassnett
9 Eugène Fromentin: Travel, Algeria, and the Pursuit of Aesthetic Form 146
patrick crowley
10 ‘Already familiar and yet fantastically new’: Jacques Lacarrière and the
Mediterranean 162
charles forsdick
11 The Mediterranean Diet: Consuming the Italian Other’s Culture in
Travel Writing by Frances Mayes and Gary Paul Nabhan 180
silvia ross
viii Contents

12 Deciphering the Past, Interpreting the Present: Self and Identity in
Mediterráneos by Rafael Chirbes 197
martín veiga
13 Grave Unquiet: The Mediterranean and its Dead 209
derek duncan
Bibliography 223
Index 240
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
v

This book is the fruit of a long and happy conversation between the three editors,
who first began to collaborate through teaching an interdisciplinary module on
travel writing at University College Cork in 2004.
The editors would like to thank first and foremost the contributors for their
patience as this project developed. We also gratefully acknowledge the support
of colleagues, friends and family, including Bruce LaForse, Keith Sidwell, Mark
Chu, and Siobhán Mullally. We also wish to thank our editor at Legenda, Graham
Nelson, for his unfailing encouragement and positive support throughout, our
copy-editor, Richard Correll, for casting such a keen eye over the manuscript, as
well as Susan Forsythe, for all her work on the index.
We are very grateful for support from the Grant towards Scholarly Publication
of the National University of Ireland Publications Scheme and from the College
of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences Research Publication Fund, University
College Cork, which have made this book possible.
p.c., n.h., s.r., July 2011
 NOTES ON the CONTRIBUTORS
v

Susan Bassnett is Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural
Studies at the University of Warwick. She has authored over twenty books, among
them, Translation Studies (1980), Comparative Literature (1993), The Translator as Writer
(2006, co-edited with Peter Bush). Her book on Ted Hughes in the ‘Writers and
Their Work’ series, was published in 2008. Her most recent book is Translation in
Global News (2008), written with Esperança Bielsa.
Patrick Crowley teaches French at University College Cork. He is the author
of Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names (2007). Together with Paul Hegarty he is
co-editor of Formless: Ways In and Out of Form (2005) and, with Jane Hiddleston,
edited Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form (2011). He has published in a range of
journals that include Expressions Maghrébines, French Forum, Paragraph, and Romance
Studies.
Derek Duncan is Professor of Italian Cultural Studies at the University of Bristol.
He is author of Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality (Ashgate, 2006), and is
co-editor of Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the 1930s (Berghahn,
2002), and Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory (Peter Lang, 2005). He is currently
working on contemporary Italian culture and migration.
Roxanne L. Euben is the Ralph Emerson and Alice Freeman Palmer Professor
of Political Science at Wellesley College and the author of several publications,
including Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern
Rationalism (Princeton, 1999), Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers
in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, 2006), and (with Muhammad Qasim Zaman)
Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin-Laden
(Princeton, forthcoming).
Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of
Liverpool. He is author of Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity (OUP, 2000),
Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures (OUP, 2005) and Ella
Maillart, ‘Oasis interdites’ (Zoé, 2008); and co-author of New Approaches to Twentieth-
Century Travel Literature in French: Genre, Theory, History (Peter Lang, 2006). He
is also co-editor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies (Arnold, 2003) and Postcolonial
Thought in the French-Speaking World (Liverpool University Press, 2009).
Nathalie Hester is Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages
at the University of Oregon and is the author of Literature and Identity in Baroque
Italian Travel Writing (Ashgate, 2008). She is currently preparing an edition and
translation of Marie Gigault de Bellefonds’ letters from Spain.
 Notes on the Contributors xi

Noreen Humble is Associate Professor in the Department of Greek and Roman

Studies at the University of Calgary. Her interests lie mainly with issues of
genre and representation of the Other, particularly fourth-century bce Athenian
literary constructions about Sparta. She has published chapters in a number of
major publications on Sparta in the past ten years, recently edited a volume of
papers, Plutarch’s Lives: Parallelism and Purpose (2010), and is currently completing a
monograph entitled Xenophon on Sparta.
Suha Kudsieh is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, College of
Staten Island — CUNY. Her research and publications focus on the theme of
cultural encounters between the East and the West during the Crusade period and
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is currently preparing a monograph on
this topic. She works with texts written in Arabic, English, French, Latin, Spanish
and Hebrew.
Daria Perocco is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Venice Ca’
Fos­cari. She is the author of several essays and volumes mainly about Italian
Renaissance Literature. One of her research interests is travel literature: she has
edited Itinerario da Vienna a Costantinopoli, by Marc’Antonio Pigafetta (Il Poligrafo,
2008) and has published Viaggiare e raccontare. Narrazione di viaggio ed esperienza di
racconto tra Cinque e Seicento (Edizioni dell’Orso, 1997). Her new volume «per desiderio
di vedere...». Relazioni di viaggio tra Cinque e Seicento, is forthcoming.
Maria Pretzler is a lecturer in Ancient History at Swansea University. During the
last ten years, Pausanias and ancient travel writing has been the main focus of her
research. She is the author of Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece (Duckworth,
2007), and articles on Second Sophistic culture as well as ancient travel and
geography. She is also working on Peloponnesian history, with a particular interest
in Arcadia from the Archaic to the Roman period.
Silvia Ross is Senior Lecturer in Italian at University College Cork. Her research
concentrates on the representation of central Italy in modern and contemporary
literature, the subject of her monograph, Tuscan Spaces: Literary Constructions of Place
(University of Toronto Press, 2010). She has published in a number of scholarly
journals such as Studies in Travel Writing, Italian Studies, Annali d’italianistica, Italian
Culture and The Italianist, and has co-edited the volume Gendered Contexts: New
Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies (1996).
Martín Veiga is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at University College Cork, where
he is also the Director of the Irish Centre for Galician Studies. His published works
include books, chapters in books and articles in research fields such as contemporary
Galician and Irish poetry, literary translation and travel writing in the Hispanic
world. He has also published four poetry collections, including As últimas ruínas
(1994) and Fundaxes (2006).
Zweder von Martels teaches Classics and Neo-Latin at the University of Groningen.
He has written on humanist travel, Renaissance alchemy and Neo-Latin literature
and culture. He is the editor of Augerius Gislenius Busbequius. Legationis Turcicae
xii Notes on the Contributors

epistolae quatuor (1994) as well as Alchemy Revisited (Leiden, 1989), and Travel Fact
and Travel Fiction (Leiden, 1994). He is co-editor (together with Victor Schmidt) of
Antiquity Renewed (Leuven, 2003) and (together with Arjo Vanderjagt) Pius II — el
più expeditivo pontefice (Leiden, 2003), and (together with A. A. MacDonald and J.
R. Veenstra) Christian Humanism (2009).
 I N T RODUC T ION
v

The Mediterranean Turn

Patrick Crowley, Noreen Humble and Silvia Ross
My expansive use of ‘travel’ goes a certain distance and falls apart into non­
equi­valents, overlapping experiences marked by different translation terms:
‘diaspora,’ ‘borderland,’ ‘immigration,’ ‘migrancy,’ ‘tourism,’ ‘pilgrimage,’
‘exile.’ ( James Clifford)1

The attempt to inscribe the experience and goals of one’s travels has taken on such
a range of differing forms (pilgrimage, diplomatic reports, diaries, epistolaries,
and fictions, among others) that ‘travel writing’ as a genre remains difficult to
map.2 The borders of the Mediterranean, like those of travel writing, also remain
porous. It exists as a conceptual, geographical and political space, at the same time
as incorporating within itself a multitude of recognizable cultural identities, not
always reconciled and never entirely fixed.3
The Mediterranean as a site of encounter between Self and Other that can both
accentuate and attenuate identity, whether personal or national, is central to this
volume. As a travel zone in which explorations of identity and alterity take place,
the Mediterranean was, and still is, compelling. It is an unstable space of variable
intensities, alliances and tensions: it is where the continents of Europe, Africa
and Asia meet. It is where Rome met Carthage, where Christianity meets Islam,
where relative European prosperity attracts migrant workers travelling across the
Mediterranean and beyond to seek employment.4 Travel across this sea has inspired
traders, adventurers and writers for centuries, at the very least since Ancient Greece,
when it drew the imagination and acted as a spur for both fiction and history. One
of the earliest pieces of Western literature, the Odyssey, recounts a journey across
the breadth of the Mediterranean region, and presents a poetic ‘basis for the Greeks’
vision of themselves and of others and provides a paradigm for exploring this
vision’.5 The basis for the Greek self-portrayal can be found in the constant contrasts
between humans (i.e. eaters of bread and cultivators of land, worshippers of gods,
law abiders) versus non-humans (i.e. eaters of meat, cannibals even, non-cultivators
of land, the lawless). Over time this opposition develops into Greeks versus Others
who were seen as inferior because uncultured by Greek standards. The story of
Odysseus, though in form a fictional epic poem, can, as François Hartog has noted,6
be read as a paradigm of European self-exploration. The Odyssey, thus, provides a
parable, albeit a Euro-centric one, by which the Mediterranean Sea can be read as
a zone within which identities are encountered, constructed, and inscribed within
relationships of Self and Other.7
2 Introduction

Equally inf luential in this regard is Herodotus and his fifth-century bce Histories.8
His work is most obviously about the Greco-Persian wars (490–479 bce) and how
they came about. But Hartog, in his magisterial structuralist analysis of Herodotus’s
work, Le Miroir d’Hérodote, has argued that it is also an extended exploration of the
cultural differences between Greeks and barbarian Others.9 Hartog’s work, despite
its f laws,10 has proved to be nearly as inf luential as its subject in terms of providing
a base from which to explore alterity.11 It is this powerful trope of the Other
which continues to inform much of how Europe sees its neighbours to the east and
south of the Mediterranean. These stories of travel provided a starting point for a
humanist tradition that sought to know more about humans beyond the pale.
Travel writing, because of its engagement with other cultures, is therefore,
perhaps more than any other genre, inherently preoccupied with the relationship
between Self and Other. And through critical reading of such writing we have
become more aware of the mechanisms of Othering. Above all we have become
aware of persistent ‘myths and stereotypes’,12 which have in too many cases been
used to justify hierarchies and expansion.13 Indeed, Johannes Fabian, in Time and
the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Subject, outlines the various ways in which the
Other is ‘denied coevalness’: through a series of techniques, the observed culture
is described in such a way that it is perceived as fixed and is thus distanced and
relegated to a different time by the observer.14 Similarly Edward Said’s investigation
into the archaeology of Western ‘Orientalist’ knowledge and how it sought to
understand the East has shown how such knowledge also served to enable and
justify European expansion.15 Ryszard Kapuściński puts it well:
the [...] problem in contacts between us and them, the Others, is that all
civilizations have a tendency towards narcissism, and the stronger the
civilization, the more clearly this tendency will appear. It spurs civilizations
into conf lict with others, triggering their arrogance and lust for domination.16
Such views and perceptions of the Other, therefore, have played and continue to
play a role within the political domain. Indeed, the Mediterranean remains very
much controlled by the nation state. In July of 2008, President Nicolas Sarkozy of
France sought to revive the Barcelona Process for Euro-Mediterranean relations
(1995) and officially inaugurated the Union for the Mediterranean. The gathering of
EU and Mediterranean heads of nations and of government that took place in Paris
on 14 July saw forty-three nations represented at a series of events that attracted
much commentary. Sarkozy’s intentions may well have been informed by a mixture
of short-term political gain and the long-term economic strategy of the EU.17
However, many commentators, particularly those from the southern shoreline of
the Mediterranean, were cautious. Indeed, one of the concerns raised about Nicolas
Sarkozy’s Union for the Mediterranean was precisely the issue of the movement
of peoples across the Mediterranean and the sense that at stake in the new project
was a strengthening of borders. The title of Ali Bensaad’s opinion piece, which
appeared in Le Monde, asks whether the project was about a Europe opening itself to
the southern and eastern Mediterranean or a Europe which sought to contain it by
controlling immigration.18 Such attempts to police the movement of peoples across
the Mediterranean and the North–South asymmetry that they make manifest have
 Introduction 3

been partly responsible for the turn towards the Mediterranean as a site of thought
on the Other, on the non-European, and on what is understood by ‘European’.
Such concerns had been expressed even before the meeting in Paris. The
Tunisian writer Hélé Béji, writing in an edition of the journal La Revue des Deux
Mondes entitled ‘Nous autres, Méditerranéens’, identifies the colonial legacy and the
asymmetry of power and development that exists between the European nations of
the Mediterranean and its eastern and southern coastlines. Béji too raises the issue
of mobility, noting in particular that the youth of North Africa and the Middle East
are prisoners of a difference that restricts travel to Europe. For Béji, the antiquity
and layered complexity of the Mediterranean remain as antidotes to a project that
she suspects is hegemonic. She argues that it is to this Mediterranean antiquity that
those who live on its shores need to return if ‘humanism’ is to be salvaged. And
central to her humanist argument, inspired by Montesquieu, is ‘le droit au voyage’
[the right to travel].19
Béji is but one of many intellectuals and writers who have returned to the
Mediterranean in an effort to counter prevailing ideologies.20 Artemis Leontis argues
that the Mediterranean serves as an ‘important counter-topos of critical thought’,
given that its shores have provided stories and histories that have converged on
common themes for centuries. As such, these narratives ‘deserve further exploration
both from a comparative historical perspective and from a theoretical standpoint
that contemplates how people inhabit separate worlds together’.21 Franco Cassano’s
Mediterranean is also conceived in terms of its counter-hegemonic possibilities.
He develops these thoughts in his exploration of the Mediterranean as a ‘sense
of measure’ between a ‘fundamentalism’ of the land — such as doctrinal market
capitalism or Islamist identitarianism — and a ‘fundamentalism’ of the sea that
negates the idea of return to the shoreline, of refuge, of a bounded horizon.22 For
Cassano the Mediterranean offers ‘measure and balance’ that counter such funda­
mentalisms.23
This recent return to the Mediterranean as a way of interrogating hardening
identi­tarian accretions — whether Western or Eastern — is also a feature of
Kapuściński’s series of essays that ref lect upon his itinerant life as a journalist
accompanied by Herodotus’s Histories.24 In one essay, he recalls how, on arriving
in Algiers, he read the port city as an intersection between two great conf licts of
the contemporary world, the first being the conf lict between Christianity and
Islam and the second being a conf lict at the ‘very heart of Islam, between its open,
dialectical current — [he] would even venture to say “Mediterranean” — and its
other, inward looking current, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-
à-vis the contemporary world’.25 Perhaps too simplistically, Kapuściński names
this latter version ‘the Islam of the desert’. Nevertheless, the Mediterranean is
presented as a counter-balance to the desert; it is a place in which is found the ‘faith
of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom
openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary
to life itself ’.26
A focus on the Mediterranean as a single liquid plane and on travel across its
waters as a form of enlightenment can be seen too in the writings of the Italian
4 Introduction

novelist and essayist Vincenzo Consolo, which have been described as constituting
a ‘Mediterranean paradigm’ that ‘emphasi[zes] the dialectic between land and sea,
between reason and chaos’.27 Consolo draws on history to disturb the congealed
truths of the present. He returns his readers to past travellers such as Ibn Jubayr
(1145–1217), whose pilgrimage between 1183 and 1185 saw him travel across the
Mediterranean from Grenada to Ceuta and on to Alexandria, Mecca, Baghdad,
Aleppo, Damascus and Acre before beginning the journey back to Spain via Sicily.28
By drawing up to the surface of the present moments in the past Consolo creates
salutary ironies often related to the treatment of immigrants in Italy. His invocation
of Ibn Jubayr’s narrative acts as a spur; indeed it is an important counterpoint to
what Iain Chambers describes as
the Renaissance idealization of the Greek and Latin world, which resulted in a
humanist intent on classical purity [... and which] has persistently excluded the
momentous historical and cultural contamination of the interceding centuries
and, in particular, the centrality of Arab and Islamic culture in treasuring and
transmitting that very same inheritance.29
Chambers’s work suggests a different humanist genealogy or, better again, a richer
and more complex one.
Indeed it is this diversity of cultural interactions over time and across the sea
which makes the ‘Mediterranean’ difficult to define precisely. Thomas K. Schippers
is, for example, sceptical of an ‘anthropology of the Mediterranean’: ‘nice to think,
hard to find’, he writes.30 Schippers suggests that the ‘Mediterranean’ is, in part, a
nineteenth-century academic construction.31 Predrag Matvejević, in his evocative
and beautifully illustrated work Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, explores the
physicality of the Mediterranean not in an attempt to delimit it but as a tool
to explore its strata through history, literature and even climate, and in doing
so he meditates on such elements as waves, currents, clouds, rain, gulfs, and even
seagulls. He, too, remains aware of the difficulties of attempting to define the
Mediterranean:
Its boundaries are drawn in neither space nor time. There is in fact no way of
drawing them: they are neither ethnic nor historical, state nor national; they
are like a chalk circle that is constantly traced and erased, that the winds and
waves, that obligations and inspirations expand or reduce.32
Whether one agrees with this point of view or not, it can be argued that the
renewal of interest in the Mediterranean — as form, as paradigm, as a prompt to
tolerance, as a reservoir of the past, as a physical space resistant to definition, and
as a site of confrontation and dialogue — responds to a need for a critical return to
European humanist traditions which, though often complicit with the production
of Otherness, may yet serve to inform how we negotiate alterity.
*****
This collection aims to analyse a range of texts that involve travel and intercultural
ref lection and that are representative of different periods and locations across the
Mediterranean. No attempt is made to anthologize or supply an exhaustive overview,
 Introduction 5

instead this volume seeks to furnish comparative contexts that might contribute to
further debate within the field of travel studies. In particular, we draw attention to
the persistence of narratives of travel across the centuries within the Mediterranean
and to the evolution of a European humanist tradition which, though central to the
construction of the Other, of the Orient, can be used to rethink relations between
peoples across the Mediterranean and beyond. As Dominic Thomas remarks it
is ‘literature that is best equipped to imagine and define the kinds of human
interrelationships that will enable translation and mediation’, that is, the skills that
allow for exchange.33 As such, this transdisciplinary collection revolves around
travel writing and its relationship to the production and mediation of the Other set
in the Mediterranean region. Our contributors come from a number of different
disciplines: Italian, French, Classics, English, Comparative Literature, Political
Science, History, Hispanic Studies, and Neo-Latin. And our aim is not to set
constraints or to delimit generic categorizations or spatial setting rigidly but rather
to investigate how concepts of genre, alterity and the Mediterranean are played out
across different chronological periods and in a variety of cultural contexts. This
range of essays provides a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. And,
through the juxtaposition of one contribution with the next, fruitful tensions and
contrasting interpretations of the Mediterranean emerge.
The volume begins with Noreen Humble’s reconsideration of Xenophon’s
Anabasis (fourth century bce) in terms of travel writing. It is a work rarely mentioned
in discussion of the history of travel writing, despite its vast and inf luential afterlife
which rivals that of the Odyssey, Herodotus’s Histories and Pausanias’s Description of
Greece — familiar names from Greek literature more often linked to discussions
on travel writing. Humble notes that part of the difficulty with interpreting the
Anabasis is precisely the issue of its genre. Though recently scholars have favoured
labelling it ‘war memoir’, she suggests that perhaps this is too narrow an approach
and proceeds to examine the work in terms of travel and its complex textualization.
Drawing together diverse scholarship, she shows how central to the work concerns
with alterity and identity are, and how complex the presentation of the geography
of the Mediterranean is in terms of how the Greeks viewed it. In particular there is
a tension between the way in which we can observe the whole of the Mediterranean
world being mapped as ‘Greek’ through mythology, and the insistence in the work’s
internal rhetoric upon a narrow definition of what, topographically, Hellas (i.e.
Greece) actually was.
The notions of centre and periphery are brought to the fore when we read the first
two chapters. While in Chapter 1 the fringes of the Greek world are mapped by a
Greek from the centre of Hellas (i.e. Xenophon from Athens), in the second chapter
Maria Pretzler examines a work in which the centre of Hellas (the Greek mainland)
is mapped by a Greek from the fringes (i.e. Pausanias from Asia Minor). Pausanias
is writing seven centuries or so after Xenophon and travelling around a Greece
which has been firmly under Roman rule for several hundred years. His Description
of Greece, whatever his original intentions, came to be used as a guidebook for those
travelling to Greece particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed,
he has been (in)famously dubbed ‘the Greek Baedeker’ — after the travel guide
6 Introduction

series set up by Karl Baedeker in the early nineteenth century34 — and whatever
one’s particular view on the appropriateness of this nickname, the fact remains that
Pausanias as Baedeker continues to be a frequent starting point for discussions of
his work.35 Another fruitful strand of scholarship, led by Jas Elsner, has looked at
Pausanias and his work from the angle of pilgrimage, comparing his work to that of
later Christian pilgrims like Egeria (cf. Chapter 3 of this volume), though carefully
noting important differences, particularly in the way Pausanias presents ‘conf licting
myth-histories’ rather than tying his ‘sense of place’ to one orthodox text as the
Christians did.36 Pretzler moves us away from both these points of debate and asks
us to view the work as a subversion of ethnographic forms of writing. The Other,
rather than being a foreign people, is Pausanias’s own ethnic group, the Greeks. But
the picture drawn is not homogenous. For example, Pausanias clearly favours the
Classical Greek past over the archaic period, and while he enriches his own identity
with unexpected stories and art of the more distant past, he also has a tendency to
regard this earlier period as Other.
In tracking changes of perspective in pilgrimage narratives that date mainly
between the seventh and twelfth centuries, Suha Kudsieh, in Chapter 3, argues that
this particular form of travel writing provides an insight into the acute fracture of
Mediterranean culture into Christian and Islamic spheres of inf luence. She identifies
the Crusaders’ defeat in the thirteenth century as critical to the European perception
of Islam as a threat, not simply to those who wished to travel to Palestine, but to
Christendom itself. Pilgrimage is a form of writing conventionally associated with
Christianity but the tradition was also active within the Islamic world.37 Kudsieh
discusses pilgrimage as a subgenre of travel writing, noting a number of pragmatic
features that generate its specificity, namely those related to the fulfilment of a
religious purpose. She notes too the comparative and self-definitional features
of the genre, elements that it shares with travel writing in general. Prior to the
Crusades, Islam is seen as clearly different and as an impediment to travel but was
not perceived as a threat. Pilgrims’ accounts begin to change after the beginning of
the Crusade wars and the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Theodorich’s account of his
pilgrimage of 1187 represents Muslims in a way that suggests that the spiritual quest
of earlier pilgrimage narratives has been replaced by a crusading quest that mirrors
the struggle for military supremacy in the region. This binary perspective dominates
pilgrimage narratives until after the fifteenth century. And while the oppositional
narrative continues, greater interest is given to the physical world and cultural
setting of the inhabitants encountered beyond Christendom. A hermeneutics of the
Other begins to come to the fore.
In Chapter 4 Daria Perocco analyses the shifts in outlook from the medieval
to the Renaissance to the Baroque traveller as regards foreign cultures. Her essay
focuses primarily on Italian travellers during the Renaissance — da Mosto, Carletti,
Vettori, Pigafetta and Ramusio, among others — and how they wrote about their
encounters with other cultures located, for example, in the Ottoman Empire,
which had stretched to North Africa by the sixteenth century. Perocco compares
the attitudes of these travellers, whose journeys more often than not took place
as diplomatic missions for the Venetian Republic, with those of travellers to the
 Introduction 7

New World. Because of travel accounts which described contact with the New
World, Perocco maintains, Venetian travel reports were able to address encounters
with the Mediterranean Other in a more open manner, while at the same time
asserting their presumed cultural superiority. For the Renaissance Venetian
traveller, then, the Mediterranean comprised both the known (familiar territory)
as well as the unknown (places visited less frequently), yet the travel accounts these
emissaries produced did not rely on received knowledge of the auctoritates but rather
furnished their own personal observations about the foreign cultures visited, and
their accounts are characterized, Perocco argues, by a certain ‘objectivity’ and
receptivity towards the Other. This stance changes, however, with the onset of
the Baroque period, typified instead by an involution of vision whereby travellers
see what they want to see, and describe foreign countries accordingly, reading
reality anthropomorphically or even resorting to fantasy in their descriptions. One
interpretation of this might be that these humanist travel narratives are more about
projections and categorizations than enquiry.
Zweder von Martels shows in Chapter 5 how contemporary debate about
whether or not Turkey should be included in the European Union echoes concerns
expressed between European nations and the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth
century. The vehicle for his examination is the writing of the Flemish humanist
Augerius Busbequius, a complex character whose experience of the Turks came
through serving as the ambassador of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria to the
Ottoman court of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566). Attention is focused
primarily upon four letters which Busbequius composed later in his life with the
benefit of hindsight. Von Martels carefully brings out the different viewpoints on
the Turks which emerge in Busbequius’s writings: at times Busbequius seems to
warn of the need for vigilance, at times he seems to advise greater rapprochement
with the Ottoman Empire. An important element in his assessment of the Other on
an individual level was whether or not someone, of whatever cultural background,
shared European humanist values.
Chapter 6 moves us into the seventeenth century with Nathalie Hester’s analysis
of Italian Baroque travel writing. Hester also examines this ideal notion of shared
humanist values but from a different angle, showing how intrinsic it was as a proto-
national cultural characteristic in the Italian peninsula, which, at that time, was
constituted by city states. The focus of her analysis, however, is not a diplomat in
the service of a prince, but an independent traveller, Pietro Della Valle; and though
he too travels through the Ottoman Empire his focus is, in general, more on himself
and his own experiences. Like Busbequius he judges others by humanist values, but
unlike Busbequius, who comes from northern Europe, Della Valle’s Italy, was, at
that point, on the margins of power in European terms.
In Chapter 7 Roxanne Euben examines the work of Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi
(1801–1873) and asks if the view from Islamic Egypt of the European as Other offers
different insights through its inversion of the conventional European travel corpus.
Tahtawi travelled to France as a scholar and as imam to the forty-four other students
sent to the military school in Paris by Muhammad ‘Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt,
to study post-Revolutionary France and to train as a translator. In 1834, three years
8 Introduction

after his return, he published Takhlis al-Ibriz ila Talkhis Bariz [The Extraction of Gold
from a Distillation of Paris]. The purpose of the book was to extract from France the
metaphorical gold that would benefit Egypt, and Tahtawi steers a course ‘between
enthusiasm and scepticism’, between a loss of what constitutes the Self and Nation
and the task of bringing new insights into society and science that could usefully
be incorporated, without appearing too unacceptably alien to the conventions of
his contemporary Egypt. In the end a ‘double perspective’ of France and Egypt
emerge, one that offers a broadened understanding of both and an insight into the
‘dialectical process of acquiring and producing knowledge about others’.
Susan Bassnett, in Chapter 8, examines the relationship between the British
female travel writer and the Italian Other. Her analysis focuses on texts penned
about Italy as a single nation located in the Mediterranean, as opposed to the
conglomerate of nations that border the sea itself. Bassnett examines three particular
cases of upper-middle-class women who wrote about their travels to Italy in a
manner that appealed to British readers of the Victorian era, reiterating a concept
that they would have found reassuring, namely, the superiority of the British vis-
à-vis the Italians. At the same time, Bassnett points out the hybridity inherent
to travel writing as a genre, indicating that the texts by the three women she
examines, though all autobiographical accounts of time spent in Italy, are quite
diverse. Catherine Davies’s Eleven Years’ Residence in the Family of Murat, King of
Naples (1842) is an account of her time spent in Italy looking after Napoleon’s nieces
and nephews, concentrating on people and events, while saying little about the
Italian locations themselves. A Year of Consolation (1847) is the emotionally frank yet
predictable text by the abolitionist Fanny Kemble, aka Mrs Butler, written about the
period she spent in Italy immediately following her divorce from her slave-owning
husband. And Frances Elliott’s wry Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy (1871) provides a
disenchanted and humorous view of the Italy of her time. Bassnett points out that
these texts, while giving us as readers a window onto Victorian Britain’s ideas on
Italy, say much as well about the writers’ identity as women who are unafraid to
make statements that ref lect their own independence of thought.
In Chapter 9 Patrick Crowley’s reading of Eugène Fromentin’s travelogues argues
that they are as much about the pursuit of aesthetic form as they are about the
inscription of his travels through the former Ottoman regency of Algiers, invaded
by France in 1830. Fromentin is largely sympathetic to Islam — its practices of
hospitality for example — but while his familiarity with Greek and Roman history
and culture suggests to him that empires come to an end, his representation of
Muslim Arabs figures them as noble, archaic repositories of pre-modern civilization
and thus no longer a threat but an opportunity, rather, for the artist to re-think
classical form through these contemporary avatars of an ancient world. His writings
draw attention to how his eye framed and sought to capture the world he saw
in French Africa and can be read as metonymic articulations of how European
expansion across the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century privileged the scopic
over the auditory.
Through his reading of Jacques Lacarrière’s travel narrative L’Été grec (1975) as
well as Lacarrière’s accounts of ancient travel in the Mediterranean, En cheminant
 Introduction 9

avec Hérodote (1981), in Chapter 10 Charles Forsdick explores the Mediterranean

as a medium through which identity, both national and individual, has been
constructed, questioned and attenuated. In Lacarrière’s work form is disrupted and
the genre of travel writing is prized open in a way that heightens the subjectivity of
a traveller who seeks to listen rather than to capture spectacle. Lacarrière’s approach
corresponds to a humanist model that goes back to Herodotus: it is not about
access to the Other but about attending to other human beings and the specific
contexts of where they dwell and how they see the world. Lacarrière listens, in
contrast to Fromentin, and sees, and travels in a decelerated manner in order to
understand and counter the ‘growing identitarian, essentializing logic of encounter’.
Travel should unsettle such identities and open them up to identities beyond the
self. Forsdick’s ref lections move beyond a Mediterranean as a de-historicized,
syncretic space of cultural fusion and he argues that encounters between diverse
elements in the Mediterranean are held within a perpetual tension that generates a
re-conceptualization of space in which difference is sometimes accepted and often
refused.
Silvia Ross’s essay in Chapter 11 investigates the role of food and the depiction
of the Other in two contemporary American travel writers who portray central
Italy and, to a lesser extent, other areas bordering the Mediterranean. Her analysis
outlines how the two authors’ works problematize the notion of genre: Frances
Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) and her related, subsequent texts involve a
re-settlement in Italy, thus limiting the paradigm of mobility to a kind of upper-
class migration, while Gary Paul Nabhan’s Songbirds, Truffles and Wolves (1993)
employs the framework of a Franciscan ‘pilgrimage’ to discuss in reality questions
concerning nature and the environment. The two authors’ treatment of roughly
analogous locales diverges quite radically. Mayes uses food as a short cut to
connect with the host culture, without actually confronting the social, economic
and political context in which she resides, all the while distancing the Other and
profiting from the Other’s culture by both ingesting and publishing on the regional
cuisine. Nabhan, on the other hand, as an expert in the field of ethno-botany,
examines the issue of food and identity in a much more nuanced fashion, displaying
a sensitized approach to the local gastronomy and the foodstuffs produced in
the area. His travelogue is enriched, furthermore, by his insistence on the criss-
crossings of seeds, plants and culinary traditions between Italy (representative of the
Mediterranean more generally) and North America, thus constructing a narrative
that, like the Mediterranean itself, is formed by an intermingling of a wide variety
of cultures and gastronomic practices.
Chapter 12 is Martín Veiga’s analysis of Rafael Chirbes’s collection of travel
writing narratives Mediterráneos (1997). In each of these narratives Chirbes travels
through the past and the present of twelve Mediterranean locations as diverse as
Istanbul, Venice, Alexandria, Valencia and Cairo. Chirbes is primarily interested in
Mediterranean cities and how each one provides a text through which he can read
his past as well as the past of absent Mediterraneans: that of his childhood, that of
history and that of myth. Veiga tracks Chirbes’s nostalgia, his search for ‘home’, for
‘belonging’, and for ‘identity’ within the cities that surround the Mediterranean
10 Introduction

shoreline. As Veiga notes, this is not about the strangeness of alterity but about
the replication of the same across different locations and through time. Indeed,
what disturbs Chirbes, what awakens him to change, and perhaps intensifies his
nostalgia, is a Mediterranean shoreline increasingly blighted by development.
Accompanied by Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in
the Age of Philip II, Chirbes draws on Braudel’s view of different temporalities in his
construction of a Mediterranean that palliates the absence of ‘home’.
At one point in his chapter, Forsdick refers to the journeys undertaken by
Algerian workers who travelled across the Mediterranean to work in the factories
that generated France’s post-war economic boom that lasted from the 1950s to
the mid 1970s, and sees such movement as a ‘prizing open of the notion of the
journey’, a prompt to re-think the relationship between travel writing and travel.
The volume’s final chapter, by Derek Duncan, responds to such a spur. Duncan’s
contribution, ‘Grave Unquiet: The Mediterranean and its Dead’, stretches the
definition of travel writing to include the fictional imagining by an Italian
journalist, Giovanni Maria Bellu, of the life and thoughts of a drowned refugee,
the Sri Lankan Tamil Anpalagan Ganeshu, one of the 283 fatalities in a shipwreck
off the coast of Sicily in December 1996. Duncan’s piece richly problematizes many
issues related to travel writing, both in terms of content and of genre, and is the
essay which focuses most directly of all on the Mediterranean Sea as geographical
entity, as the element which provides a thoroughfare between cultures but also
has its victims in the contemporary migration of peoples across its waters. Bellu’s
I fantasmi di Portopalo (2004) recounts the journalist’s own investigation into the
‘forgotten’ tragedy, and also provides a fictionalized account of Anpalagan’s own
journey, reconstructed through testimony provided by his family and friends as
well as survivors of the shipwreck. Duncan illustrates how the text constructs two
visions of the Mediterranean: one as a ‘fractured geopolitical entity’ and another
which is anthropomorphized, archaic, and to which is attributed a sort of agency.
He also highlights the paradoxical and complex situation evoked by Bellu’s text,
whereby the author attempts to voice the thoughts and recount the story of a
deceased ‘subaltern’ migrant (who cannot speak for himself ) in his effort to establish
an archive of ‘memory’ about the event. Despite the ambiguities of the exercise,
Bellu’s text, contends Duncan, ultimately constitutes a ‘revised account of the
Mediterranean as the place of the postcolonial subject whose multiform presence
may yet challenge the space of the nation’.
*****
The Mediterranean has offered the promise of grandeur and gain to traders,
travellers, adventurers, politicians, writers, painters, immigrants and the long-term
result has been to re-affirm and disappoint these possibilities in ways that reiterate
the past differently but return us to individuals, to the human and to geography.
Fernand Braudel’s work cautions against the construction of a Mediterranean entity,
a conceptual identity that would embrace the particulars of its physical and cultural
realities. On one temporal level, he focuses on the reign of Philip II of Spain
(1527–1598) and brings the second volume of his work to a close with a poignant
 Introduction 11

account of Philip II’s final hours that includes the following, salutary, observation:
He was not a man of vision: he saw his task as an unending succession of small
details. [...]. Never do we find general notions or grand strategies under his
pen. I do not believe that the word Mediterranean itself ever f loated in his
consciousness with the meaning we now give it.38
If Braudel’s envoi of the 1946 edition contrasts with Nicolas Sarkozy’s grand strategy,
it also prompts a final ref lection as we bring this collection of articles together. To
construct a Mediterranean and to incorporate Mediterranean writings into such
a structure should not serve to hypostatize the Mediterranean and travel writings
relating to the Mediterranean; rather it should bring to the fore the complexity and
instability that need to be maintained if a contemporary critical humanism is to
have any value.

Notes to the Introduction

1. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 11.
2. For an insightful and rigorous analysis of travel literature and genre see Chapter 1, ‘Travel
Literature and/as Genre’, in Charles Forsdick, Feroza Basu and Siobhán Shilton, New Approaches
to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French: Genre, History, Theory (New York: Peter Lang,
2006). See also Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections
on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 8–9. Jan
Borm problematizes the classification of travel writing as a distinct genre in his ‘Defining
Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology’ and Tim Youngs stresses the
transdisciplinarity of travel writing in ‘Where are we going? Cross-border Approaches to Travel
Writing’, both of which are found in the collection Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. by Glenn
Hooper and Tim Youngs (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 13–26 and 167–80
respectively.
3. Geographer Russell King discusses the difficulty in delimiting the region: ‘To define the
Mediterranean is not an easy task. In some senses it is probably a pointless exercise, for there is
no single criterion which enables one to draw a line on a map which separates the Mediterranean
from the non-Mediterranean. Mediterranean identity is a more nebulous, but powerful, concept
that derives from environmental characteristics, cultural features and, above all, from the spatial
interactions between the two. The Mediterranean is a sea, a climate, a landscape, a way of life
— all of these and much more.’ Russell King, ‘Introduction: An Essay on Mediterraneanism’, in
The Mediterranean Environment and Society, ed. by Russell King, Lindsay Proudfoot and Bernard
Smith (London and New York: Arnold, 1997), pp. 1–11 (p. 2).
4. As Iain Chambers argues (Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham,
NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 39): ‘If Ulysses is the mythical figure of the
traveller, the stranger, with which that history [of migrating cultures] commences, it is once
again with the traveller and the stranger that this history continues.’
5. François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. by Janet Lloyd
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 22.
6. Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, p. ix.
7. In this volume Xenophon (Chapter 1), Sæwulf (Chapter 3), Della Valle (Chapter 6), Fromentin
(Chapter 9), and Lacarrière (Chapter 10) all draw upon this key narrative. See also Javier
Reverte, Corazón de Ulises (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 2006), noted in Chapter 12, note 3; and on
this phenomenon in general H. Henderson, ‘The Travel Writer and the Text: “my giant goes
with me wherever I go” ’, in Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel, ed.
by M. Kowalewski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 230–48.
8. For example, for Xenophon (Chapter 1), Pausanias (Chapter 2) and Lacarrière (Chapter 10).
12 Introduction

And for such modern authors as Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus, trans. by Klara
Glowczewska, (New York: Vintage, 2008), and Justin Marozzi, The Man Who Invented History:
Travels with Herodotus (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008).
9. First published in French, Hartog’s Le Miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur la représentation de l’autre (Paris:
Éditions Gallimard, 1980), was followed not long after by an English translation (The Mirror of
Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. by J. Lloyd (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988)).
10. For a critique see the judicious comments of Carolyn Dewald, ‘Review of The Mirror of
Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History by François Hartog’, in Classical
Philology, 85/3 (1990), 217–24.
11. As a glance at bibliographies in books on travel writing and on the Mediterranean shows.
12. And such stereotypes persist. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, pp. 5–6 note that
despite some contemporary travel writers addressing identity and cultural difference with
subtlety and complexity, ‘Travel writing in the late twentieth century continues to be haunted
by the spectre of cliché: its catalogues of anomalies are often recorded in remarkably similar
terms. The same words and phrases crop up again and again, the same myths and stereotypes,
the same literary analogies.’
13. Theorists and critics have studied the question of stereotyping of the Other at length; some
representative cases include: Homi K. Bhabha’s essay (‘The Other Question: Stereotype,
Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in The Location of Culture (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 66–84); Stephen Harold Riggins’s introduction to his volume
The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 1–20, where
he explores what kind of language is used to categorize the Other; or Tzvetan Todorov, in
particular in relation to the conquest of the ‘New World’ and the concepts such as exoticism
and primitivism, as can be seen in his key texts On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and
Exoticism in French Thought, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993) (originally published as Nous et les autres: La Réflexion française sur la diversité humaine
(Paris: Seuil, 1979)) and The Conquest of America, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Harper
and Row, 1984) (originally published as La Conquête de l’Amérique (Paris: Seuil, 1982)), where he
includes a section on ‘Typology of Relations to the Other’. See also Julia Kristeva, Strangers to
Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
14. Tellingly, as Fabian points out, ‘Somehow the discipline [of anthropology] “remembers” that it
acquired its scientific and academic status by climbing on the shoulders of adventurers and using
their travelogues, which for centuries had been the appropriate literary genre in which to report
knowledge of the Other.’ Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 87.
15. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).
16. Ryszard Kapuściński, The Other, trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (London and New York: Verso,
2008), p. 44.
17. Katrin Bennhold, ‘Will Sarkozy’s Mediterranean union be more than a big photo-op?’, The
New York Times, 14 July 2008, <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/world/europe/14iht-
france.4.14488640.html> [accessed 15 April 2009].
18. Ali Bensaad, ‘Pour les Européens, s’agit-il de contenir le Sud ou de s’ouvrir à lui?’, Le Monde, 11
July 2008, p. 18.
19. Hélé Béji, ‘Méditerranée: La Demeure du temps’, Revue des Deux Mondes ( June 2008), 110–18
(p. 118).
20. For an excellent analysis of the ‘Mediterranean turn’ in Italian thought see Claudio Fogu, ‘From
Mare Nostrum to Mare Aliorum: Mediterranean Theory and Mediterraneism in Contemporary
Italian Thought’, California Italian Studies, 1/1 (2010), 1–23.
21. Artemis Leontis, ‘Introduction’, Thesis Eleven, 67 (2001), iii–v (p. v).
22. Franco Cassano, ‘Southern Thought’, Thesis Eleven, 67 (2001), 1–10 (pp. 4–5, 9).
23. Franco Cassano, ‘Southern Thought’, p. 9.
24. Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus, p. 226.
25. Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus, p. 227.
26. Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus, p. 228.
 Introduction 13

27. Norma Bouchard and Massimo Lollini, ‘Introduction: Vincenzo Consolo and his Mediterranean
Paradigm’, in Reading and Writing the Mediterranean: Essays by Vincenzo Consolo, ed. by Norma
Bouchard and Massimo Lollini (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press,
2006), pp. 3–48 (p. 27).
28. Consolo, ‘Ibn Jubayr’, trans. by Felice Italo Beneduce, in Bouchard and Lollini, eds, Reading and
Writing the Mediterranean, pp. 233–36.
29. Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings, p. 150.
30. Thomas K. Schippers, ‘Nice to Think, Hard to Find’, in L’Anthropologie de la Méditerranée /
Anthropology of the Mediterranean, ed. by Dionigi Albera, Anton Blok and Christian Bromberger
(Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), pp. 725–29.
31. On this debate see Fogu, ‘From Mare Nostrum to Mare Aliorum’, pp. 2–7.
32. Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, trans. by Michael Henry Jeim (Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999).
33. See, for example, Dominic Thomas, ‘The Global Mediterranean: Literature and Migration’,
in Francophone sub-Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts, ed. by Alain Mabanckou and
Dominic Thomas, Yale French Studies (forthcoming 2011).
34. For a succinct overview of the Baedeker guides see Rudy Koshar, ‘ “What ought to be seen”:
Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe’, Journal of
Contemporary History, 33/3 (1998), 323–40 (pp. 330–34).
35. E.g. Christian Habicht, ‘An Ancient Baedeker and his Critics: Pausanias’ “Guide to Greece” ’,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 129/2 (1985), 220–24.
36. Jas Elsner, ‘Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World’, Past and Present, 135 (1992), 5–29
(p. 28 for the quotations).
37. See for example Houari Touati, Islam et voyage au moyen âge: Histoire et anthropologie d’une pratique
lettrée (Paris: Seuil, 2000). Touari argues that unlike the Western European view of travel as a
hermeneutics of the Other, medieval Islamic travellers were more concerned with an exegetical
construction of the Same: the reiteration of an Islamic space (dâr al-islâm) within which Muslims
can live according to the precepts of the Koran (pp. 10–11).
38. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. by
Siân Reynolds, 2 vols (London: Collins, 1972–73), ii, 1236.
 CHAPTER 1
v

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 build-
up 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 inf luential
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
 Xenophon’s A nabasis 15

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 Persian-
backed 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 ref lected 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 ref lection 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 ref lects the fact that ‘modern study of
Greek history has been fundamentally shaped by the perspectives of Occi­dent­a lism/
Eurocentrism’.14
Herodotus does not foreground his travels. His attraction to travel-writing
scholars is his exploration of Otherness, and particularly inf luential 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
16 Noreen Humble

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 f lashes forward brief ly 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 f luid 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 ‘ref lective 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
 Xenophon’s A nabasis 17

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
ref lect 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
inf luence. During this period, the Anabasis was being used as a school text at the
same time as it was being used by European explorers, geographers, and adventurers
who deliberately attempted to follow Xenophon’s footsteps.31
Indeed, that the Anabasis relates a journey which moves from familiar cultural
territory to unfamiliar and back again, that it reveals an exploration of both self
and Other on a number of levels, and that it has defied (and I think continues to
defy, despite the definite appeal of ‘war memoir’) easy generic categorization,32
makes examining it from the broader theoretical perspective of travel writing
attractive and fruitful.33 Further, its geographical location — ancient Asia Minor
and Anatolia, modern Turkey — is still one in which West/East identity issues are
being grappled with. What I want to do, therefore, for the rest of this chapter, is
examine the Anabasis from the perspective of the themes of this volume: alterity and
identity, and the Mediterranean.

(i) Alterity and Identity

There is no doubt that Xenophon views the world through a Hellenic lens and there
has been much work done on the Anabasis to explore Xenophon’s presentation of
the Greek/barbarian polarity.34 For example, in Book 1 Xenophon repeatedly refers
to Cyrus’s troops using the broad terms ‘Greeks’ and ‘barbarians’. Only occasionally
are the Greeks divided by polis identity and even more rarely is any distinction
made between the different ethnicities of which Cyrus’s troops were composed.
18 Noreen Humble

Barbarian customs are measured against Greek. The most egregious example is
Xenophon’s brief description of the Mossynoecians (5.2.32–34) who ‘were said
by the Greeks who served on the expedition to be the most uncivilized people
whose country they traversed, the furthest removed from Greek customs. For they
habitually did in public the things that other people would do in private.’
However, it has also rightly been observed that ‘it would do Xenophon
a disservice to claim that he belongs in a wholly and unreconstructedly or
unqualifiedly ethnocentric mind-set’.35 There are, as there are in Herodotus’s work,
countless complexities and ambiguities in his presentation of the Greek/barbarian
polarity. At a very basic level, the reader is presented right from the beginning
with a Hellenized Cyrus:36 in reviewing his troops ‘Cyrus was delighted to see
how frightened the barbarians were by the Greeks’ (1.2.18), i.e. not how frightened
the Persians, Paphlagonians (and all the other unnamed ethnic divisions in Cyrus’s
army)37 were by the Greeks (and such an observation can only lead us to speculate
whether the Persians too regarded the Greeks as barbaric Other). But the term
‘Greek’ is as sweeping as the term ‘barbarian’. Cyrus may curry favour with his
Greek mercenaries but he is no more presented as distinguishing them ethnically
than he is his barbarian troops.38 And we may here need to factor in the presentation
of Cyrus’s own cleverness in his carefully crafted rhetorical appeals to the Greeks
to keep them onside. He needs them for his expedition against his brother — a
task which he was surely certain they would not have agreed to at the outset, or he
would not have kept it secret from them for as long as possible.
Conversely, at other times we are presented with barbarized mercenaries,
particularly in Book 5, in their dealings with the Greek and non-Greek cities on the
southern coast of the Black Sea. Xenophon several times mentions the good relations
between the various Greek cities and the barbarians in this region, and usually does
so when he is about to relate the mercenaries’ aggressive and unprovoked disregard
for these relations. For example, a contingent of the mercenary army wantonly
attacks barbarian allies of the Greek Cerasuntians even after the barbarians had
been trading readily with the mercenaries. The barbarians respond to this attack
in a civilized (read ‘Hellenic’) fashion, sending envoys to ask for an explanation,
and when the envoys are assured that the attack was made by a rogue group of
mercenaries, they set out in relief to tell the mercenaries that they may pick up
their corpses for burial. They are rewarded for their dignified behaviour by being
stoned to death by some of the rogue Greek contingent (5.7.13–19). The episode
is recounted in direct speech by the character Xenophon, and he attributes to
the Cerasuntians, i.e. fellow-Greeks, the view that the mercenaries are like rabid
dogs (5.7.26).39 Though the standard binary demarcation is thus undermined and
problematized throughout the text by the actions of each side, it bears noting that
the lens through which these observations are made is still firmly anchored in the
Greek world: good barbarian behaviour is measured by Greek standards, bad Greek
behaviour is barbaric.40
The Greek/barbarian polarity is, though, only one of the identity issues at play
in the Anabasis. And while there was clearly a firm notion of Greekness in place
by Xenophon’s time, there was still not a Greek nation as such, and thus all Greeks
 Xenophon’s A nabasis 19

viewed the world through a complexity of identities depending upon the situation
they found themselves in (e.g. deme,41 polis, and broader ethnic, federal, colonial and
even panhellenic affiliations, etc.).42 Xenophon actually provides us with a good
deal of information about his own competing identities in the Anabasis.43 He refers
to himself throughout the work as an Athenian (e.g. 1.8.15, 2.5.27, 3.1.4), Athens
being the polis of his birth. He also tells us he became an exile (5.3.4, 7.7.57)44 and
subsequently a foreign settler at Scillus in the north-west Peloponnese where the
Spartans gave him an estate (5.3.7). Since he lived there for at least twenty years (on
our best guess), this makes him also a Scilluntian, Triphylian (the encompassing
new state)45 and Peloponnesian.46 He also tells us he set up a cult to Artemis of
Ephesus (5.3.7–13), and thus established the first cult site to this Asiatic deity in
mainland Greece.47 This implies some identification with Ephesus or even Ionia
(for this cult was central to the Ionians).48 It is surely significant that Xenophon’s
point of reference as he tries to create a new identity for himself in the north-west
Peloponnese is Ephesus, not Athens.49 He also tells us about his sons’ hunting
during the festival, and thus we might need to consider whether his role as father,
which he highlights, is significant for his self-presentation in the Anabasis.50
Further, the Anabasis at the same time as presenting him in the role of a soldier
and general in a mercenary army, also reveals him as an author, though modern
scholars cannot agree on how Xenophon actually regarded himself in either his
military or literary roles. For example, did he consider himself a philosopher (since
he also wrote Socratic dialogues and clearly portrays himself in the Anabasis as close
to Socrates) or a historian? These are categories which both ancients and moderns
use to pigeonhole him, but do they ref lect the way in which Xenophon regarded
himself? It is certain that they affect the way the Anabasis is read.51 Similarly,
mercenary and retired general are frequent modern descriptors.52 Vince Azoulay
has recently argued, however, that Xenophon is trying, in the Anabasis, to distance
himself from being viewed as a mercenary because it does not sit well with his
self-identification as an aristocrat.53 The observation is an important one. And it
incorporates another way in which Xenophon presents himself in the Anabasis,
i.e. as a xenos (‘guest-friend’).54 Xenia relations were strong, formal polis and extra-
polis bonds between individuals, primarily aristocrats, or between individuals and
states. They carried obligations and were ritually sanctioned.55 Prior to the rise of
the polis they were the equivalent of foreign policy relationships. As the polis came
into prominence as a political unit, it appropriated such relationships for its own
use as far as possible. Nonetheless individual bonds of xenia could and did clash
with deme, polis and even panhellenic loyalties.56 Xenophon explains his presence
in Cyrus’s army as the result of a request from an old guest-friend, Proxenus from
Boeotia (3.1.4):
There was a man in the army named Xenophon, an Athenian, who was neither
general nor captain nor common soldier, but had accompanied the expedition
because Proxenus an old friend of his (ξένος ἐν ἀρχαῖος), had sent him at his
home an invitation to go with him; Proxenus had also promised him that, if
he would go, he would make him a friend (φίλον) of Cyrus, whom he himself
regarded, so he said, as worth more to him than was his fatherland.
20 Noreen Humble

Xenophon is warned by Socrates that association with Cyrus may not be looked
upon favourably by Athens since Cyrus was an ally of the Spartans who had just
defeated the Athenians in the lengthy Peloponnesian War, but Xenophon chooses
to privilege the xenos relationship rather than show loyalty to his polis. It is revealed
later that Proxenos’s reason for embarking on the expedition was that he greatly
desired friendship (philia) with the foremost men of the time and he hoped to gain
a great name, great power and much money (2.6.17).57 We are surely to assume he
lured Xenophon along with similar carrots.
Azoulay’s interpretation does not negate the fact that Xenophon served as a
mercenary but, if true, it does ref lect something about how Xenophon wished
himself to be perceived, and which of his competing identities were to the fore
at the time he composed the work (whatever the case at the actual time of the
expedition). A different compulsion, therefore, may be behind his use of the term
Cyreans (for the remnants of the Greek mercenaries who had fought with Cyrus)
in his Hellenica (his history of Greek affairs from 410–362 bce).58 While it is true
that he never mentions himself in the Hellenica, the very use of the term indicates
the impact of the journey on his self-identification. Whether we view the label in
a positive or negative light depends upon understanding what set of motivations
governed Xenophon at the time he was composing the Hellenica. These may be
entirely different from those under which he wrote the Anabasis.59
Complicating analysis of the work further is our inability to pinpoint when the
Anabasis was composed, for whom, and for what purpose. If the work was written
in the late 360s, as is frequently assumed, Xenophon might have been living
again in Athens, his exile rescinded. Do we then read the story of a frustrated
homecoming differently than if it had been written much earlier, while he was still
living at Scillus under Spartan patronage and possibly with no thought or hope of
living once again in Athens?60 It is not likely that he wrote it before he was exiled
from Athens but does that then make it significant that he calls himself Xenophon
the Athenian, or is he simply recalling accurately his situation at the time?61 The
identity lens through which he would be writing would be different in both these
instances and would again have affected how he looked back on these few years of
travelling. Are we thus hindered in fully understanding his text by not being able to
pin this down, or should we simply regard his perspective a de-territorialized one,
as Friedman argues for Herodotus?62
The lack of an initial programmatic statement has also been seen as a stumbling
block to interpretation.63 Thus while it is clear that plans for a journey (in the
form of a military expedition) are afoot at the beginning there is no indication
that the narrative will end up centring around a character called Xenophon. In
fact, apart from a few short scenes, the character Xenophon really does not feature
much before Book 3.64 The journey initially is that of Cyrus and the mercenary
contingents he calls to his side. Yet as the work progresses Xenophon becomes more
and more central to the story, and the last significant action shows him directing a
raid and enriching himself independently of the main body of the mercenaries and
their new employers, the Spartans. Thus it is clear by the end that Xenophon has
crafted the work around his journey and not that of Cyrus or the other mercenaries
 Xenophon’s A nabasis 21

as a group (most of whom were campaigning somewhere else before being hired
by Cyrus).65
Adding to the confusion surrounding purpose is the fact that Xenophon takes so
much care to distance himself from the text, i.e. he is a character in his narrative
and refers to himself only in the third person. The journey is told by an anonymous
narrator, who gives every impression of being an objective reporter accompanying
the mercenaries on their journey, who also, however, knows a few personal details
about Xenophon himself outside the chronological boundary (both past and future)
of the text.66 The narratorial ‘I’ appears rarely, and when it does, it is not always
clear whether it is a brief surfacing of the anonymous narrator or of Xenophon as
author.67 To complicate matters further, in his Hellenica Xenophon reports that
Themistogenes of Syracuse (otherwise unknown) wrote about what amounts to
most of the first four books of the Anabasis.68 Does Xenophon mean us to view
Themistogenes as the anonymous narrator then? Was he one of the three hundred
mercenaries who arrive with the Syracusan Sosius (1.2.8)? Or are we meant to
imagine that he is the author but not the anonymous narrator, who is then a
further layer in this creation?69 Whatever the case the goal is clearly the deliberate
creation of at least the illusion of distance and objectivity,70 further enhanced if
we consider that the name Themistogenes implies honesty (lit. ‘born of justice’).71
This is diametrically opposed to the way in which Herodotus gains authority,
through autopsy, a very significant feature of travel writing in the modern era.72
Herodotus, however, was not a character in the action he presents,73 nor must we
automatically assume that his narrative persona is necessarily to be equated with his
authorial persona.74 Indeed, Herodotus’s narratological strategy could be as complex
as Xenophon’s.75
Gaining objectivity through this elaborate conceit around the author/narrator/
central character is only one of a number of narratological strategies which make
the Anabasis bear some resemblance to later Greek novels; manipulation of reader
reaction and reader ignorance through predictive devices, dramatic irony, false
climaxes, etc. are all also to be found.76 From this point of view examining the
work as travel writing is attractive, as the boundary between fact and fiction has a
long history of being blurred in this genre. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan
put it well: ‘Travel narratives, like their writers, tend to conceal as much as they
reveal: their “factual” disclosures are screens for cannily structured fictions.’77 If we
are viewing the work in this light, how far are we to equate Xenophon as character
in the text and the events narrated with Xenophon the historical personage and the
events as they actually unfolded?78 A difficult question to answer definitively.

(ii) Hellas and the Mediterranean

The complexities of panhellenic identity are also revealed in the Anabasis. Geo­
graphical Greekness, represented by a physical space, Hellas (i.e. the Greek
world), exists alongside a cultural Greekness which takes its identity from the
broader mythological mapping of the whole Mediterranean region.79 Though the
boundaries of Hellas are difficult to pinpoint precisely, Jim Roy argues from the
rhetoric employed in the text that the ‘army was evidently back in Hellas when
22 Noreen Humble

it came near to Byzantium’ (i.e. Constantinople).80 This is a reasonable enough

conclusion, and remarks such as ‘at the doors of Hellas’ (6.5.24) when passing
Heracleia confirm at least that the Greek communities in the Black Sea region
do not constitute Hellas.81 Even when they are at Byzantium, though, Xenophon
can still appeal to the mercenaries’ desire to ‘return to Hellas’ when things are not
turning out as they hoped (7.1.31).
Indeed the context of the frequent expression of the desire to return home and/
or to Hellas (for home and Hellas should not always be considered equivalent)
is important. In the first instance the rhetoric of returning to Hellas is used as a
deceitful emotional appeal. When the army reaches Tarsus, the Greek mercenaries
begin to suspect that Cyrus is leading them against his brother and they are not
happy (1.3.3). The general Clearchus, who has been exiled from his home polis
of Sparta and so in fact cannot return home (and indeed appropriately only once
mentions returning home in place of returning to Hellas, 2.3.23), whips up in the
army a desire to return to Hellas though his goal is quite the opposite: to keep the
army journeying with Cyrus (1.3.1–21). Clearchus is so successful with this rhetoric
that two other mercenary commanders depart because many of their soldiers
have deserted to Clearchus’s unit (1.4.7). In Book 2, after the death of Cyrus the
Greeks find themselves isolated in the middle of the Persian Empire. We again
find Clearchus at the centre of the rhetoric of a return to Hellas, in his attempts to
convince the Persian satrap (i.e. provincial governor) Tissaphernes to employ them.
Tissaphernes repeatedly picks up on the rhetoric and promises to lead the Greeks
back to Hellas (2.3.26, 29; 2.4.4). Like Clearchus earlier, however, Tissaphernes
is engaging in deceit. He has no intention of guiding the Greeks to Hellas. It is,
therefore, somewhat ironic that the whole notion of a return to Hellas is initially
and repeatedly presented as a deceitful rhetorical strategy to obtain exactly the
opposite. But the very success of the appeal is indicative of the strength of feeling
for this entity called Hellas, even, it appears, for Greek mercenaries from Syracuse
and Southern Italy whose home poleis are also outside the bounds of Hellas.
It is, in fact, the character Xenophon who first equates home and Hellas (3.2.26,
3.4.46) and again he is using Hellas to make a rhetorical appeal, though this time in
order to encourage and motivate rather than to deceive. At this point in the journey
the Greeks are completely surrounded by hostile forces in unknown territory,
whose peoples’ languages they cannot speak. During the long struggle north across
the mountain ranges of Eastern Anatolia, returning to Hellas is subordinated as
a goal to simple survival, until fresh hope is gained when the sea is glimpsed at
the top of Mount Theches (4.7.24).82 The next mention of returning to Hellas is
accompanied by the phrase ‘and we want to reach the sea’ (4.8.6), which they do
shortly thereafter (4.8.22).83 But when they do reach the sea, as Roy rightly points
out, though they sacrifice to Zeus the Deliverer and other gods as if they had
reached their destination, they do not regard the South coast of the Black Sea as
Hellas.84
As they move closer to Byzantium, however, expressions of their nearness to
Hellas increase (e.g. 6.1.17, 6.6.12) in ironic foreshadowing of what awaits them:
when they reach Byzantium, this long-built-up expectation of Hellas being a
 Xenophon’s A nabasis 23

safe haven is immediately quashed. They discover that the ‘rulers of Hellas’, the
Spartans, are prepared to deal with a Persian rather than with their fellow Greeks
and the mercenaries find themselves little better off than they were in the middle of
the Anatolian hinterland. Though in the last book of the text Xenophon is the sole
character still trying to return home (7.1.4; 7.6.11, 33; 7.7.57), this cannot be simply
because home for Xenophon means Athens (as Roy suggests), since the other Greeks
also had equally strong polis affiliations and once in ‘Hellas’ polis loyalty clearly
took precedence over any sense of shared Greekness — as indeed is immediately
evident from the Spartan refusal to bring the mercenaries into their fold. The reason
may be rather, as Bradley suggests, the continuing narrowing of focus of the text
on Xenophon than on an equation of home and Hellas.85 The narrator exploits the
expectations of the reader: home is repeatedly presented as the character Xenophon’s
goal but he never achieves a homecoming, the tension throughout being raised by
the explicit acknowledgement long before the end of his coming exile. Indeed for
most of the mercenaries the Anabasis only brings partial closure on these terms, as
they will continue for several years in the pay of the Spartans.86
In contrast to the rhetorical appeal to Hellas, which functions best when the
mercenaries are under the greatest stress, is the levelling and uniting force of cultural
‘Greekness’. Though the area of the Southern Black Sea is labelled geographically
as Pontus, Rosie Harman has cogently argued that the textual mapping of this
landscape with reference to three heroes of Greek mythology, Odysseus, Jason and
Heracles — all travellers — reveals the mercenaries’ identification of the area as
familiar and Greek.87 This mythological mapping of the landscape shows the same
kind of geographical awareness of the broad reach of cultural ‘Greekness’, if not
of a physical space referred to as Hellas, as that encapsulated by Socrates’ remark
(Plato Phaedo 109a–b): ‘we who dwell between the river Phasis [i.e. east of the Black
Sea] and the Pillars of Hercules’.88 Indeed it is a pleasing coincidence that the false
attribution to the character Xenophon of the desire to lead the mercenaries to settle
in Phasis (5.7.1–9), as well as his own pseudonym situating him as a Syracusan,89
nearly extend the cultural ‘Greekness’ of the Anabasis as far as that suggested in
the Platonic passage. And while it is true that Xenophon, in vigorously defending
himself against the suggestion that he would lead the army east to Phasis, points
out repeatedly that Hellas is to the west, whereas barbarian lands, like Phasis, are to
the east, this rhetoric is employed for the sake of calming the mercenaries and it is
used just after Xenophon had considered that the army should settle where it was, at
Cotyra (5.6.15–16). Indeed the two places Xenophon sees as suitable for the army to
settle (the second being at Calpes Limen, 6.4.1–6) are well outside the geographical
boundaries of Hellas but well within the area mapped as Greek through myth.90
Both these references to myth and the frequent expression of the desire to return
home culturally map the Anabasis on a literary level as well. Xenophon is no less
encumbered and preconditioned by earlier literature than modern travel writers.
And while we may argue about the extent of inf luence of, or Xenophon’s purpose
in signalling his knowledge of and in alluding to, works such as the Odyssey and
Herodotus’s Histories — two significant works of travel which, as noted, explore
identity on numerous levels and whose geographical coverage is far beyond any
24 Noreen Humble

definition of Hellas — both make their inf luence felt explicitly and implicitly.91
Indeed the broad cultural reach of Greekness is captured in the placing of the
following words in the mouth of Leon of Thurii (an Athenian colony in Southern
Italy) as the mercenaries plot their journey onwards from Trapezus on the Black
Sea: ‘what I long for now is to be rid of these toils, since we have the sea, and to
sail the rest of the way, and so reach Hellas stretched out on my back, like Odysseus’
(5.1.3; cf. Odyssey 13.75–118).
The one body of water which many of the mercenaries joining Cyrus would
necessarily have crossed, and which many would likely have crossed again if they
did return to their poleis, is notable by its absence — the Aegean Sea. Xenophon
makes no mention of his own crossing from his home polis, Athens, to join
Cyrus and Proxenus at Sardis, not even in a f lashback. Roy argues that we are not
privy to Xenophon’s initial crossing of the Aegean because ‘[he] does not spend
words on travel so conventional’, but focuses only on things like geographical
features, accommodation and food when they are obstacles or provide relief for
the struggling army.92 Certainly Xenophon does show us that journeying home
by sea is problematic because he and the other mercenaries are at the mercy of the
current hegemonic power, the Spartans, who can and do prevent them from sailing
away (An. 6.6.12; cf. Hell. 3.1.5). The Spartans were no less in control of Hellas’s
waterways in 401 bce when Xenophon sets out on his journey, yet Xenophon
gives no suggestion that they took any notice of him sailing off to join Proxenus
and Cyrus. And it was not as if he could have escaped notice: he had horses with
him (3.4.19) and full cavalry armour (3.4.48; 3.2.7 implies everyday as well as dress
armament). But at that time the Spartans were allied with Cyrus and Xenophon
was on his own, whereas in 400/399 bce, Cyrus is dead and Xenophon heads a large
and potentially dangerous mercenary force. In 401 Xenophon was no threat to the
hegemonic power, in 400/399 he is.
Further, not recounting crossing the Aegean also highlights Xenophon’s own
state of exile. Though he consistently refers to himself as an Athenian, when
writing up the Anabasis he knows what he could not have fully anticipated when
he left Athens, i.e. that he would not be returning to Athens for a very long time (if
at all, depending on which later sources we believe to be true). Indeed he remained
as a hired mercenary of the Spartans for a further five years in Asia Minor after
the end of the journey recounted in the Anabasis, returning, in fact, overland
with them, taking a route he describes elsewhere (Hellenica 4.2.8) as similar to that
followed by the Persian king Xerxes when he invaded Greece in 480 bce, implicitly
casting himself in the role of invader of his own country. I do not think this was an
irony lost on him,93 which is why Cartledge’s labelling of the Anabasis as ‘ref lective
autobiographical travelogue’ is so attractive. Xenophon’s very mode of presenting
himself as a character rather than as the narrator skilfully reveals and exploits the
distance between his naïve younger self, with his expectations of homecoming,
and his more ref lective older self, who with hindsight is able to acknowledge that
he embarked on the journey without heed for the consequences (and despite the
warnings of his mentor Socrates). From whatever later point in life Xenophon is
contemplating and writing up his journey into and out of the heart of the Persian
 Xenophon’s A nabasis 25

Empire, he is not doing so without ref lecting on the unforeseen and complex path
his own life has taken, and indeed on how central his decision to join Proxenus and
become a friend of Cyrus had been in altering his expectations. If we consider his
presentation of broader issues of identity in this light we must surely regard him
as deliberately constructing polarities early on which are then just as deliberately
broken down and deconstructed throughout the narrative with the juxtaposition
of speech and action, past and present. The work is in part a philosophical enquiry
into issues of identity in a world in which the author continually has to re-establish
his own. All of these aspects serve to make the Anabasis an important text in the
history of travel writing.

Notes to Chapter 1
1. François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. by Janet Lloyd
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 22. See also Lynette Mitchell, Panhellenism
and the Barbarian (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007), pp. 48–54.
2. What we mean now by the Mediterranean was not a concept which the ancient authors
to be discussed in this paper would have understood. W. V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the
Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2 asks us to consider whether or not
Mediterraneanism is a reasonable conceptual framework to use when studying the ancient world
or whether it, like Orientalism, obscures more than it helps. His answer is a qualified positive.
3. See for example, Detlev Fehling, ‘The Art of Herodotus and the Margins of the World’, in
Travel Fact and Travel Fiction, ed. by Zweder R. W. M. von Martels (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp.
1–15. Pausanias (analysed in Chapter 2 of this volume) is the other Greek author who is noted
regularly in surveys of travel writing. So, e.g., Travel Writing and Empire, ed. by Eric Clark
(London: Zed Books, 1999), pp. 5, 8–9; Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, Voyages and Visions:
Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 10–15 likewise discuss
Herodotus and Pausanias in their introduction but again place them in a different bracket
(‘transcendental vision of pilgrimage’) by contrast with the ‘open-ended process which typically
characterizes modernity’ (and thus they, like Clark, focus on post-Renaissance and secular
modernity). This view is informed by Elsner’s work on Pausanias as pilgrim (e.g. ‘Pausanias: A
Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World’, Past and Present, 135 (1992), 5–29), but is perhaps too strict a
pigeonhole for Herodotus. Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Travel Writing as a Genre: Facts, Fictions and the
Invention of a Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe’, Journeys, 1 (2000), 5–35 (p. 7) also
mentions Herodotus, Strabo, Lucian and Tacitus. Neither merit mention in the introduction to
The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002) (though Odysseus and pilgrimage are highlighted, pp.
2–3). Nor do they appear in Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (New York
and London: Routledge, 2002; first published 1995), pp. 1–2 who lists Herodotus, Strabo and
Pausanias as nascent travel writers. Xenophon does not appear in Edward W. Said, Orientalism
(New York: Vintage, 1979), though Herodotus does.
4. Scholars disagree, however, on the extent of his travels; some even doubt he travelled at all, e.g.
see O. K. Armayor, ‘Did Herodotus ever go to Egypt?’, Journal of the American Research Center
in Egypt, 15 (1978), 59–73 and Detlev Fehling, Herodotus and his ‘Sources’: Citation, Invention
and Narrative Art, trans. by J. G. Howie (Leeds: Francis Cairns Publications, 1989). See W. K.
Pritchett, The Liar School of Herodotus (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1993) for counter arguments.
5. Starting, for example, in the ancient world itself: Maria Pretzler in the next chapter comments
frequently on how inf luential Herodotus was in this regard during the period in which Pausanias
is writing.
6. It would be wrong, however, to assume that this broad statement necessarily ref lected
Herodotus’s view (the words are put in the mouths of Athenians), as Tim Rood, ‘Herodotus
and Foreign Lands’, in The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, ed. by Carolyn Dewald and John
Marincola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 290–305 (pp. 302–03) notes.
26 Noreen Humble

7. For every seemingly stark division (e.g. ‘For the Persians regard Asia and the barbarian people
living there as their own, but think that Europe and the Greeks are separate’) there is an opposite
blurring of the edges: e.g. Spartan kings are decidedly Other (see Rood, ‘Herodotus’).
8. Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.
52–53 gives a succinct overview.
9. Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 11 notes that at 8.132.3 Herodotus (who is frequently and
mistakenly called ‘Athenian’ in some scholarship) seems at one point to be chastising Greeks
from the mainland for their ignorance about Asia Minor.
10. e.g. Cartledge, The Greeks, p. 54; J. M. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 17, and A History of the Archaic Greek World (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), p. 261; Rachel Friedman, ‘Location and Dislocation’, in Dewald and
Marincola, eds, Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, pp. 165–77 (p. 174); Justin Marozzi, The
Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008), pp.
13–19. At the end of the fifth century we find the Greek historian Thucydides saying (1.3.3): ‘He
[Homer] does not even use the term ‘barbarians’ and this, in my opinion, is because in his time
the Hellenes were not yet known by one name, and so marked off as something separate from
the outside world.’
11. As judiciously shown by Christopher Tuplin, ‘Greek Racism? Observations on the Character
and Limits of Greek Ethnic Prejudice’, in Ancient Greeks West and East, ed. by Gocha R.
Tsetskhladze (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 48–75, and by Mitchell, Panhellenism, pp. 39–75.
12. Archaeology, in particular, is revealing of cultural interaction; see, for example, Katarzyna
Hagemajer Allen, ‘Becoming the “Other”: Attitudes and Practices at Attic Cemeteries’, in The
Cultures within Ancient Greek Culture: Contrast, Conflict, Collaboration, ed. by C. Dougherty and
L. Kurke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 207–36.
13. Herodotus’s view fits nicely with our modern construction of East/West polarity but does not
ref lect, for example, how Greece was viewed during the period of the Roman Empire. And a
more blatant rejection of historical circumstances which are unfavourable to the construction
of Western superiority could scarcely be found than the Hellenism movement in eighteenth-
century Germany, when contemporary Greeks were rejected as backward and barbaric (i.e. as
oriental Others) in favour of their fifth- and fourth-century bce ancestors. Yet that we (in the
West) have (mis)used Herodotus to inform, legitimize, explain, or reinforce our construction
of East/West polarity is certain and is nowhere more clearly seen than in the debate over
Turkey’s application to the EU. Turkey (Asia Minor to the ancient Greeks, Herodotus’s
homeland) identifies itself and is identified as the point where East and West meet. Consider
the following: <http://hcmideast.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/at-east-west-crossroads-turkey-
presses-ambitious-agenda/> (22 May 2009, American journalist Helena Cobhan’s blog on
the Middle East), and <http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-183531–102-davutoglu-
turkey-a-crossroads-of-global-energy-transportation.html> (10 August 2009, from an English-
language Turkish newspaper).
14. K. Vlassopoulos, Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2.
15. Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus. See also Mary Baine Campbell, ‘Travel Writing and its Theory’,
in Hulme and Youngs, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, pp. 261–78 (pp. 267–
68).
16. See note 3 above. This silence is compounded by the tendency for Classicists not to engage
with travel writing as a genre in its own right, as noted by Jas Elsner, ‘Structuring “Greece”:
Pausanias’ Perigiesis as Literary Construct’, in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, ed.
by Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jas Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.
3–20 (p. 3).
17. The word anabasis at its base level literally means ‘going up’; more specifically in this case it
means a going up and away from the coast, i.e. inland. Some find the title problematic as much
of the work describes a katabasis (a ‘going down’, i.e. back to the coast’).
18. There is an enormous amount of literature on the question of Xenophon’s exile. Christopher
Tuplin, ‘Xenophon’s Exile Again’, in Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed. by
 Xenophon’s A nabasis 27

Michael Whitby, Philip Hardie and Mary Whitby (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), pp.
59–68, provides the most judicious account.
19. M. Sordi, ‘Senofonte e la Sicilia’, in Xenophon and his World, ed. by C. Tuplin (Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner, 2004), pp. 71–78.
20. See Noreen Humble, ‘The Limits of Biography: The Case of Xenophon’, in Pleiades Setting:
Essays for Pat Cronin on his 65th birthday, ed. by K. Sidwell (Cork: Ancient Classics Department,
2002), pp. 66–87 for the difficulties in reconstructing Xenophon’s life.
21. This was not particularly out of line with standards of his time (consider Thucydides in his
histories). See G. Most, ‘The Stranger’s Stratagem: Self-Disclosure and Self-Sufficiency in
Greek Culture’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 109 (1989), 114–33, who argues that first-person
narratives were frowned upon as boasting.
22. Cartledge, The Greeks, p. 59.
23. Views here range. For example, it has been read as an apology for his actions (e.g. F. Durrbach,
‘L’Apologie de Xénophon dans l’Anabase’, Revue des études grecques, 6 (1893), 343–86), as a sort of
curriculum vitae for Xenophon’s suitability to lead a panhellenic expedition against the Persians
(e.g. F. Robert ‘Les Intentions de Xénophon dans l’Anabase’, Information littéraire, 2 (1950), 55–59),
or as setting the record straight in response to another version of the journey (e.g. compare the
competing views of George Cawkwell and P. J. Stylianou in The Long March: Xenophon and the
Ten Thousand, ed. by Robin Lane Fox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 47–67
and 68–96 respectively).
24. Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1997), Bruce Laforse, ‘Xenophon’s Anabasis: The First War Memoir’, Syllecta Classica, 16 (2005),
1–30 and J. W. I. Lee, ‘Xenophon’s Anabasis and the Origins of Military Autobiography’, in Arms
and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing, ed. by A. Vernon (Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press, 2005), pp. 41–60. Robin Waterfield, trans., Xenophon: The Expedition of
Cyrus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. xx, also posits this as a generic tag.
25. Tim Rood, The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (London:
Duckworth, 2004), pp. 14–16 and 36–41.
26. e.g. Ray L. Smith and Bing West, The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division
(New York: Bantam, 2004), and Isaiah Wilson, ‘America’s Anabasis’, in War in Iraq: Planning and
Execution, ed. by T. G. Mahnken and T. A. Keaney (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 9–21, though
one would hardly recognize the Anabasis from Wilson’s description of it (the most egregious
misreading being the insistence that the anabasis lasted ten years, p. 9). The comparison of
course rests almost solely on the proximity between Cunaxa (where Cyrus and Artaxerxes met
in battle) and Baghdad.
27. Philip Dodd, The Art of Travel: Essays on Travel Writing (London: Frank Cass, 1982), p. 151,
following Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980).
28. Benedict Allen, The Faber Book of Exploration (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) includes the same
passage. He includes Herodotus too, but also excerpts from Julius Caesar and both Plinys, none
of whom is ever considered a travel writer.
29. Newby’s presence is heavily felt in the selection as well because the passage chosen is not
continuous (4.5.12–14, 25–30, 33–34). Compare Italo Calvino (‘Xenophon’s Anabasis’, in I.
Calvino, Why Read the Classics?, trans. by M. McLaughlin (London: Random House, 1999),
pp. 19–23) who comments both on his own recollections of being bored while learning Greek
but also about memorable passages from the Anabasis, highlighting the same passage as Newby
did and likewise edited out some portions of it (4.5.3, 12–13, 15 and then also 4.4.9–13). On the
attraction of the ‘hardships of journey’ see Rood, The Sea! The Sea!, p. 193.
30. Newby’s public school (St Paul’s School, London) still today has ancient Greek on the
curriculum, see <http://www.stpaulsschool.org.uk/>. See Patrick Holland and Graham
Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 27–36 on Newby.
31. As well examined in Rood, The Sea! The Sea!, pp. 42–65 (on the Anabasis in education) and
pp. 134–61 (for those who deliberately followed in the tracks of Xenophon). For recent scholar-
travellers see V. Manfredi, La Strada dei Diecimila: topografia e geografia dell’Oriente di Senofonte
28 Noreen Humble

(Milan: Jaca, 1986) and Robin Waterfield, Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the
Golden Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).
32. John Dillery in his edited edition of the Anabasis (Xenophon. Anabasis, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 11) argues for this (with features of history
and ‘travelogue’). Indeed Laforse’s (‘Xenophon’s Anabasis’) examination of past attempts at
generic pigeonholing, far from ruling them all out in favour of war memoir, shows the difficulty
in dismissing any approach to the text.
33. New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French: Genre, History, Theory, ed. by
Charles Forsdick, Feroza Basu and Siobhán Shilton (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 1: ‘the
uncertain status of which [i.e. travel writing texts] has been accentuated as much by their generic
and formal instability as by their refusal to conform to orthodox taxonomic categories’.
34. See particularly Dans les pas des Dix-Mille, ed. by P. Briant (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires
du Mirail, 1995); Christopher Tuplin, ‘On the Track of the Ten Thousand’, Revue des études
anciennes, 101 (1999), 331–66 (a lengthy review of Briant; and in whose initial Mots-clés ‘travel
writing’ makes no appearance); Jim Roy ‘Xenophon’s Anabasis as a Traveller’s Memoir’, in Travel,
Geography and Culture in Ancient Greece, Egypt and the Near East, ed. by Colin Adams and Jim
Roy (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007), pp. 66–77; Rosie Harman, ‘Looking at the Other: Vision,
Travel and Greek Identity in Xenophon’s Anabasis’, in Vision and Power, ed. by S. Blundell, D.
Cairns and N. Rabinowitz (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, forthcoming).
35. Tuplin, ‘On the Track’, p. 338. Various aspects of the complexity have been noted also by
Cartledge, The Greeks, pp. 60–65, Roy, ‘Xenophon’s Anabasis’, and Harman ‘Looking at the
Other’.
36. Dillery, Xenophon. Anabasis, p. 11. Cyrus is the only non-Greek to receive an obituary in the
work (1.9) and his Graecizing in contrast to other barbaric races (e.g. the Mossynoecians) could
be argued to fit the pattern Hartog (The Mirror of Herodotus) distinguished in Herodotus, when
he argues that the Persians appear as Greeks when faced with a more barbaric race such as the
Scythians.
37. Xenophon gives no systematic account of Cyrus’s barbarian troops. Given that they disappear
from the scene after the battle of Cunaxa this is perhaps not surprising. However, periodically
throughout Book 1 he gives glimpses into the ethnic array: e.g. Persian advisors (1.8.1);
Paphlagonian cavalry (1.8.5); Tamos of Egypt (1.4.2).
38. i.e. he generally refers to his ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’ troops 1.1.5–6, 1.2.2, 1.2.14. There are some
exceptions: e.g. he does specifically seek Peloponnesian mercenaries on the grounds that they
are the best (1.1.6).
39. See Tuplin, ‘On the Track’, p. 339. See Harman ‘Looking at the Other’, on the problematic
nature of Xenophon’s presentation of how Greeks view other Greeks in the Anabasis.
40. See the succinct analysis of this phenomenon (though on a passage from Xenophon’s Hellenica
4.1.29–39) by K. H. Allen, ‘Becoming the “Other” ’, pp. 207–08.
41. The deme was a smaller unit (township or village) within a polis.
42. See Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, ed. by Irad Malkin (Washington, DC: Center for
Hellenic Studies, 2001), introduction.
43. See John Ma ‘You can’t go home again: Displacement and Identity in Xenophon’s Anabasis’,
in Lane Fox, ed., The Long March, pp. 330–45, for an insightful analysis of the shifting identity
structures within the body of mercenaries as a whole. Common identity is founded paradoxically
on movement, he argues, not settlement.
44. Implicitly he signals his exile even earlier when he dreams that a thunderbolt sets on fire his
parental home (3.1.11–13); see Ma, ‘You can’t go home’, p. 336.
45. Created by the Spartans c. 401 bce; see Christopher Tuplin, ‘Xenophon, Artemis and Scillus’,
in Spartan Society, ed. by T. Figueira (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2004), pp. 251–81 (p.
266).
46. Jim Roy in a paper entitled ‘Xenophon’s Peloponnese in the Hellenica’ delivered at the
Xenophon Conference in Liverpool, July 2009, argued cogently that Xenophon perceived of the
Peloponnese as not just a geographical but a political unit. This suggests to me that Xenophon
had acquired a strong personal identification with the region.
47. In his description of the temple (An. 5.3.7–12) he is careful to point out the similarities with the
 Xenophon’s A nabasis 29

cult site of Artemis at Ephesus, both topographically and architecturally (An. 5.3.8, 12). Tuplin,
‘Xenophon, Artemis and Scillus’, provides a superb deconstruction of Xenophon’s description of
the temple and cult and argues that it may have been set up precisely to consolidate the identity
of the newly created Triphylian state (see especially pp. 266–68).
48. See Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions, p. 8. Ionia is the term roughly applied to the Greek
settlements in the central portion of the coast of Asia Minor but a debate about what constitutes
‘Ionian’ identity goes back to Herodotus; see Jeremy McInerney, ‘Ethnos and Ethnicity in Early
Greece’, in Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions, pp. 51–73 (pp. 57–59). One of the issues is whether
or not true Ionians were descended from Athenians. The Ionians also celebrated their pan-
Ionian festival in (or near) Ephesus during the period Xenophon was in Asia Minor (see Tuplin,
‘Xenophon, Artemis and Scillus’, p. 265 with further references).
49. See on this passage Ma, ‘You can’t go home’, pp. 340–41.
50. He is obviously himself a son but he does not mention any other family relationship across his
corpus. We learn the names of his sons and wife from the third-century ce Life of Xenophon
by Diogenes Laertius (2.52–55). His wife’s name is said to be Philesia but there is some debate
about where she came from. His sons, Gryllos and Diodorus, fought with the Athenian cavalry
at the Battle of Mantineia in 362 bce (see further Noreen Humble, ‘Re-dating a Lost Painting:
Euphranor’s Battle of Mantineia’, Historia, 56/4 (2008), 1–20).
51. There could, for example, hardly be more different interpretations of the work than George
Cawkwell, ‘When, How and Why did Xenophon Write the Anabasis?’, in Robin Lane Fox, ed.,
The Long March, pp. 47–67 and J. Howland, ‘Xenophon’s Philosophic Odyssey: On the Anabasis
and Plato’s Republic’, American Political Science Review, 94/4 (2000), 875–89.
52. The numerous subtle variations in modern assessments tend, though, to ref lect the agendas
of the scholars making them and to some respects their own identities (consider Cawkwell,
‘When, How and Why’, p. 47: ‘Indeed I have almost attained the arrogant feeling that I am a
reincarnation of Xenophon’); on this phenomenon see Humble ‘The Limits of Biography’.
53. Vince Azoulay, ‘Exchange as Entrapment: Mercenary Xenophon?’, in Robin Lane Fox, ed., The
Long March, pp. 289–304.
54. Azoulay, ‘Exchange’, pp. 289–90 provides a succinct overview of the institution of xenia. Gabriel
Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
and Lynette Mitchell, Greeks Bearing Gifts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) are
more in-depth.
55. When the relationship was between an individual and a polis, it was formal and public and
termed proxenia. Later sources say that Xenophon was a proxenos of the Spartans, but he never
expresses this himself.
56. And here we might compare the bond which ascription to humanist values gives Busbequius a
stronger connection to Ali Pasha than to his own countrymen. See Martels, this volume.
57. On philia bonds see Mitchell, Panhellenism, pp. 9–10.
58. He uses this term to describe the group under two different Spartan commanders, Dercylidas
and King Agesilaos (Hellenica 3.2.7, 3.4.20). He also refers to them (‘some of the Cyreans’) in his
encomium of King Agesilaos (2.11) when describing the Battle of Coronea in 394 bce which
pitted the Spartans against a coalition of other Greeks. We know Xenophon was present at this
battle on the Spartan side but not whether he actually fought against his countrymen; his use of
‘some’ may be a deliberate distancing device. The fourth-century bce Athenian orator Isocrates
also uses the term when mentioning Agesilaos’s campaigns in 395 (Panegyricus 144).
59. A contemporary historian describing the same events as Xenophon and Isocrates in the previous
note (i.e. a campaign under the Spartan king Agesilaos in 395 bce) calls the group Dercylidean
mercenaries, after the second Spartan commander under which they served (Hellenica
Oxyrhynchia 21.2). It is tempting to argue (though impossible to prove) that Xenophon’s use of
the term Cyreans is in response to this work and that he consciously wishes to distance himself
from his mercenary service under the Spartans.
60. Ellen Millender in a paper entitled ‘Spartan Imperialism and Xenophon’s Crafting of the
Anabasis’ (delivered at the Xenophon Conference in Liverpool, July 2009) argued that the work
should be dated to the 380s after the Peace of Antalcidas on the grounds that it is a criticism of
the Spartans’ betrayal of other Greeks in favour of Persian support.
30 Noreen Humble

61. It has been noted (Roy, ‘Xenophon’s Anabasis’, p. 68) that Xenophon seems for the most part
uninterested in broader contextualization of the journey. For example, he does not provide
historical background even though the region he is journeying through could have been
exploited in this way, as indeed Herodotus’s Histories shows. His story generally stays in the
moment of action.
62. Friedman, ‘Location and Dislocation’, p. 166.
63. P. J. Bradley, ‘Irony and the Narrator in Xenophon’s Anabasis’, in Essays in Honor of Gordon
Williams: Twenty-five Years at Yale, ed. by E. Tylawsky and C. Weiss (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001), pp. 56–84 (p. 61) has a useful discussion on this problem.
64. At 1.8.15 he recounts a brief vignette in which it seems that he had indeed come to be on close
terms with Cyrus just before the battle at Cunaxa. At 2.4.15 he presents himself taking an
evening stroll with Proxenus, when a messenger comes with news of Persian double-dealing.
At 2.5.37–41 he accompanies two other generals to find out the fate of his friend Proxenus (who
is being held prisoner by Tissaphernes along with another Greek general, Menon). Though his
appearances are brief, in the first and third he allocates himself direct speech, thus highlighting
his importance in each scene.
65. Bradley, ‘Irony’, cogently argues that Xenophon is consciously and continuously exploiting
reader expectation.
66. To be fair the anonymous narrator knows a bit about Clearchus’s past life too (1.1.9, 2.6.1–5),
more so even than he reveals about Proxenos (2.6.16–17) whom Xenophon, the historical
personage, surely knew much more about.
67. e.g. 1.2.5, 1.9.22, etc.; see further Bradley, ‘Irony’, pp. 70–71.
68. Neither does he mention himself at all in the Hellenica when he recounts brief ly some of the
movements of the mercenaries in their service for Sparta between 398 and 394 bce. See Malcolm
Maclaren Jr., ‘Xenophon and Themistogenes’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philo­
logical Association, 65 (1934), 240–47, for an overview of the issues and evidence. Bradley, ‘Irony’,
tends to work under the assumption that Themistogenes did write an Anabasis (e.g. p. 62).
69. And is this a variant on what Friedman, ‘Location and Dislocation’, p. 167 sees Herodotus doing:
making characters in his work serve a meta-narrative function in presenting ‘crucial aspects of
Herodotus’s own authorial persona’?
70. John Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), pp. 186 and 205, and Vivienne Gray, ‘Part Two: Historiography, Chapter
Nine: Xenophon’, in Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in
Ancient Greek Narrative, ed. by I. J .F. de Jong (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 129–46 (p. 130).
71. On which see Xenophon. Hellenika II.3.11–IV.2.8, ed. by Peter Krentz (Warminster: Aris and
Phillips, 1995), p. 157.
72. Hulme and Youngs, eds, Cambridge Companion, pp. 3–4
73. Thucydides manages to combine both forms of authority — autopsy and the objectivity of
presenting himself in the third person as an actor in events — but the combination is easier as
his role is not central to his text in the way Xenophon’s is.
74. See, e.g., Rood, ‘Herodotus’, p. 291.
75. Bradley, ‘Irony’, p. 59 n. 1 notes that there has long been a tendency to ‘assume a low level of
self-conscious manipulation on Xenophon’s part’; his article goes a long way towards addressing
this misconception.
76. Hence Bradley’s categorization of the work as ‘innovative novelesque autobiography’ (‘Irony’,
p. 60). Bradley’s work is, indeed, very much informed by work on the Greek novel.
77. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, p. xi.
78. It has been asked of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (which recounts the life of the historical figure
Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire but which has had the terms ‘novelesque’
and ‘fictional’ applied to it), ‘at what point does history become fiction?’ (Collected Ancient Greek
Novels, ed. by B. P. Reardon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 3).
79. In addition to the tales of Odysseus, Jason and Heracles, see Mitchell, Panhellenism, pp. 5–7
on the geographical mapping of cultic space in the early Homeric Hymn to Apollo. It has been
noted, however, that Herodotus’s definition of Greekness does not articulate land or ‘common
territory’; see Friedman, ‘Location and Dislocation’, p. 175, who argues that Herodotus longs to
concretize ‘Greece’.
 Xenophon’s A nabasis 31

80. Roy, ‘Xenophon’s Anabasis’, pp. 75–76. The first-century bce historian Diodorus of Sicily ends
his version of the Cyreans’ journey at Byzantium (D.S. 14.31.4–5; on which see Bradley, ‘Irony’,
pp. 63–64), and later in the work remarks that ‘having returned safely to Hellas, some went off
to their own fatherlands’ (14.37.1).
81. The area and the sea are referred to as Pontus.
82. On the sea as a definable ‘edge’ for the Greeks, signalling their return to a topography they
understand in contrast to the vast inland space of the Persian Empire through which they have
been wandering, see Alex C. Purves, Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 190 specifically and pp. 164–95 in general on the issue of
space in the Anabasis.
83. It is significant, as Bradley, ‘Irony’, p. 62 n. 6, notes that Xenophon chooses to regard the arrival
at the Black Sea as the end point of the summary of the events of the Anabasis which he ascribes
to Themistogenes in the Hellenica.
84. The geographical range of polis affiliations among the characters who express this notion is
striking: Leon of Thurii 5.1.3, Xenophon the Athenian 5.4.5 and 5.6.33, Silanus the Ambraciot
5.6.18, Timasion the Dardanian 5.6.22, Thorax the Boeotian 5.6.25 (i.e. Southern Italy, Central
Greece, North-Western Greece, the Southern coast of the Hellespont, the Peloponnese,
respectively).
85. Bradley, ‘Irony’, pp. 74–81 makes a case, in fact, for privileging ‘home’ as a goal over ‘Hellas’.
This self-centring of the narrative on the autobiographical traveller fits well within the broad
generic structure of travel writing
86. Tuplin, ‘Heroes’, p. 128.
87. Harman forthcoming.
88. On Plato see further Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean, pp. 15–16. Compare Peregrine
Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), p. 27, who see the mercenaries’ cry of ‘the sea! the sea!’ as ‘a symbol of the
attachment of many ancient peoples to a determinate Mediterranean world’. I would argue that
the whole of the Anabasis might do this, not simply the cry.
89. Indeed, Sordi, ‘Senofonte’, has provocatively argued that Xenophon served as a mercenary for
Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, in his wars against Carthage (c. 393–391 bce). There are, in fact,
Syracusans among Cyrus’s mercenaries: Sosis (An. 1.2.9) and Lycius (1.10.14).
90. As indeed are other locations which periodically pop up as potential places of settlement (see
further Ma, ‘You can’t go home’, p. 340 n. 24); only Byzantium is within the putative boundary
(7.1.21–31). It is uncertain how the Greeks who dwelt in the Black Sea viewed their own relation
with Hellas or where they drew geographical and cultural boundaries but as Vlassopoulos,
Unthinking the Greek Polis, p. 5 notes, the traditional way in which we approach Greek history
sidelines the history of the Greeks who colonized the Black Sea. For an accessible overview of
Greek colonization of this area see Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, ‘Greek Penetration of the Black Sea’,
in The Archaeology of Greek Colonisation: Essays dedicated to Sir John Boardman, ed. by Gocha R.
Tsetskhladze and Franco De Angelis (Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 1994),
pp. 111–35.
91. Christopher Tuplin, ‘Heroes in Xenophon’s Anabasis’, in Modelli Eroici dall’Antichità alla Cultura
europea, ed. by G. Zecchini and C. Bearzot (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2003), pp. 115–56,
provides a thorough examination of Homeric overtones, and his ‘Herodotus and Xenophon’s
Anabasis’, in The World of Herodotus, ed. by V. Karageorghis and I. Taifacos (Nicosia: Foundation
Anastasios G. Leventis, 2004), pp. 351–64, looks at Herodotus’s inf luence. See also Purves,
Space and Time, pp. 164–95 passim for echoes of both the Odyssey and Herodotus; more brief ly
Mitchell, Panhellenism, p. 23.
92. Roy, ‘Xenophon’s Anabasis’, is good on this aspect of the narrative.
93. Nor can irony be lacking from Xenophon’s reference to Xerxes in the Anabasis in a wonderful
passage which both maps a river in Phrygia with a Greek myth and simultaneously shows the
Persian king Xerxes imposing his mark on the land by building a palace there on his way home
from being defeated by the Greeks in 480 bce. Cyrus, the aspiring Persian king, therein holds a
review of the Greeks who were fighting now for the Persians (or at least a portion of them).
 CHAPTER 2
v

Pausanias’s Description of Greece:

Back to the Roots of Greek Culture
Maria Pretzler

Pausanias’s Description of Greece (Periēgēsis Hellados) is the most extensive example of

travel writing which has come down to us from antiquity.1 The text demonstrates
a highly sophisticated approach to the Greek landscape: Pausanias probes the
historical, cultural and symbolic resonance of the sites and monuments he
encounters. He states that he aims to deal with ‘all things Greek’: this claim will
need further discussion, but there is no doubt that the Periēgēsis offers a thorough
survey of many aspects of Greek culture and its varied expressions in the landscape
and in the imagination of local people and visitors alike. Pausanias is indebted to
ancient traditions of reporting about distant countries with unfamiliar cultures,
but he adapts (or subverts?) these traditions to apply them to a region where most
travellers would seek to discover the roots of their own identity and culture. I
shall argue that such a detailed treatment of the landscape, history and culture of
mainland Greece was particularly significant in Pausanias’s own time, the second
century ce, which saw elites of the cities around the Eastern Mediterranean use
Greek culture to re-define and re-evaluate their status within the Roman empire.
Pausanias came from Asia Minor, probably from Magnesia on Sipylos (see fig.
2.1),2 and he was therefore culturally (and almost certainly ethnically) Greek. The
Periēgēsis contains a few references to contemporary events and it discusses all the
Roman emperors of Pausanias’s lifetime. We can therefore date both the work and
its author’s lifetime relatively accurately: Pausanias was born around 115 ce and he
wrote his description of Greece during the 160s and 170s.3 There is no need to
assume that Pausanias spent these two decades doing nothing but researching and
writing his book, but his research was thorough and detailed and he visited most
of the places he describes. It is likely that he had done a good deal of travelling in
Greece long before he embarked on his project, because the complex geographical
structure of the Periēgēsis, conceived before he started writing, would have been
impossible to plan without an intimate knowledge of the whole region.4 The
detailed research carried out for this project required a significant commitment of
time and resources: only a very wealthy man could have undertaken such a project.5
The wealthy elite of the Greek-speaking east of the Roman empire developed a
very exclusive ideal of Greek culture and education. Their aspirations are ref lected
in many Greek texts produced in the Roman imperial period, especially in the
 Pausanias’s Description of Greece 33

Fig. 2.1. Greece and the Aegean

second century ce. They focused on a high level of expertise in Greek literature and
rhetoric, particularly the ability to demonstrate a detailed knowledge of classical
Greek texts and a proficiency in a highly artificial dialect of Greek, modelled on texts
written in classical Athens over five hundred years earlier. The most accomplished
intellectuals could become famous as public orators who attracted large numbers of
pupils from all over the empire, and large crowds would gather to hear a celebrated
‘sophist’ give a rhetorical performance. The cultural life of the Roman East of the
second and early third centuries ce, and particularly its expression in literature,
is therefore called the Second Sophistic.6 The ideals of Greek culture expressed
in the texts of the time had a reach far beyond the highly visible practitioners of
Greek rhetoric, and its inf luence can be seen in many aspects of life in the eastern
Roman provinces. Pausanias does not present himself as a showy performer, but he
subscribes to the contemporary ideal of Greek culture and education and he leaves
no doubt about his intellectual credentials, especially in matters of Greek literature,
religion, history and art. He also presents himself as a researcher who can use his
wide knowledge and experience to formulate his own arguments and to interpret
new discoveries.7
What, then, is the Periēgēsis? When a shorthand description of Pausanias’s work is
needed, it is often easiest to dub it ‘the ancient travel guide to Greece’. The Periēgēsis
does indeed share crucial characteristics with modern ‘cultural’ guidebooks,
although the comparison is not entirely accurate and does not do his efforts justice.
The word periēgēsis is related to the Greek verb periēgeisthai (‘to lead around, to
guide around’), and periēgētēs is a word often used for the tourist guides who could
be found on many Greek sites, especially in the Roman period.8 Pausanias’s text
follows routes through the landscape, focusing on locations and objects which he
considered worth seeing. Descriptions of cities or sanctuaries with a large number
34 Maria Pretzler

of interesting monuments can be lengthy and detailed: for example, in Olympia

alone Pausanias discusses over two hundred individual statues of Olympic victors,
in addition to dozens of other art works. The description of noteworthy sites and
monuments is accompanied by comments (logoi) which are integral to the project,
although modern commentators often refer to such passages as ‘digressions’.9
Pausanias is particularly keen to explain the historical background of the places and
objects he is describing, but he also discusses various other issues, from f lora and
fauna to religion or philosophy. The most tenuous association can trigger such an
excursus, and Pausanias’s logoi are sometimes not very relevant to the place where
they are included; seen as a whole, however, these comments add up to an overview
of the wide interests of a Greek intellectual, and they demonstrate many different
ways in which knowledge could be processed and used.
Early on in his work Pausanias suggests that he is planning to deal with ‘panta ta
Hellēnika’ (Paus. 1.26.4). The Greek phrase literally translates as ‘all Greek matters’
or ‘all things Greek’, but it could also be interpreted as ‘all of Greece’. Since the
geographical scope of the Periēgēsis by no means covers an area that could be
considered ‘all of Greece’, the exact meaning of this passage has been a matter of
much discussion.10 The Periēgēsis consists of ten books which cover the Peloponnese
and parts of central Greece (see Fig. 2.2). Athens fills most of book I, which also
includes Attica and the city of Megara just beyond its western borders. Book II
continues to Corinth, Argos and the Argolid, and marks the beginning of a grand
clockwise tour around the coast of the Peloponnese, with Sparta and Laconia
(book III), Messenia (IV), Olympia and Elis (V and VI) and finally Achaia (VII).
Book VIII turns to Arcadia, the mountainous interior of the Peloponnese, which
completes the description of the peninsula. Finally Pausanias returns to central
Greece, where he discusses Boeotia with its central city Thebes (IX) and Phocis (X)
which includes Delphi and a short overview of the Locrian cities11 on the coast of the
Corinthian Gulf.
This order also ref lects the sequence in which the books were written, and it
seems that the outline of the work and its coverage of these regions was planned
from the beginning. It is possible that the last book was finished in some haste or
that a small amount of text is missing at the end, but it is unlikely that there were
more books or that Pausanias planned to continue with the descriptions of further
areas.12 His selection of regions does not coincide with any conventional ancient
definition of Greece, and it is therefore unlikely that his promise to cover ‘panta ta
Hellēnika’ was meant in a geographical sense (‘all of Greece’). The Periēgēsis does,
however, include most of the areas which were central to the most widely known
classical Greek texts and mythical traditions: Pausanias seems to have chosen those
regions where almost every site or settlement, however small and run-down, was
likely to provide him with interesting material; after all, he preferred to report
information which could be linked to the literary tradition, especially if it added
new details that were not widely known.13 The literature and mythology of earlier
times therefore had a strong inf luence on the shape of Pausanias’s Greece.
In order to give structure to his description Pausanias had to find a systematic
way of handling a highly fragmented landscape. Wherever possible, he chose
 Pausanias’s Description of Greece 35

Fig. 2.2. Regional book divisions

of Pausanias’s Periēgēsis

to organize his text by the territories of the ancient city states which are so
characteristic for ancient Greece: this emphasis on the polis imbues mere geography
with cultural and historical significance. The text usually follows a main route to
the urban centre and proceeds to describe all the noteworthy sites in the town.
The surrounding countryside is then covered by following the main routes from
the centre to important rural sites and sometimes as far as the boundary with a
neighbouring state. Once the whole polis territory has been dealt with, Pausanias
continues to the next city (see Fig. 2.3).14 It is important to understand that these
routes are a literary construct: Pausanias never claims that his work is the account
of a specific journey, and modern readers should be careful to avoid reading the work
as a whole, or any particular part of the text, as a travelogue.15
Was the Periēgēsis written as a guidebook? Pausanias follows routes and gives
directions, but this information is insufficient to actually locate particular places.
He rarely provides a sense of the wider landscape and the spatial relations between
different places mentioned in the text. Without the help of maps and images a
reader will usually find it impossible to get a clear sense of the topography, and
generations of historical topographers have been kept busy trying to identify sites
and monuments mentioned in the Periēgēsis.16 However, even today it is enjoyable
to use Pausanias on a trip to Greece, and in antiquity, when the description still
matched the actual state of most sites, it could have been a very useful travel
companion, not as an actual guide, but as a work that would offer appropriate
reading and additional information to enhance the experience of a visit. At the same
time, the Periēgēsis works as a ‘virtual’ tour to Greece which offers a wide range of
information about Greek culture and tradition, and it is likely that it was at least in
part intended for readers at home.
36 Maria Pretzler

Every description of a landscape has to be a selection and an interpretation of all

that the author might have encountered. By making these choices travel authors
not only characterize the landscape, but they also provide an insight into their own
perspectives and worldviews. For example, Pausanias rarely provides descriptions
that allow a reader to imagine the scenery: even the most impressive landscapes
receive scarcely a comment. His focus is firmly on sites or objects which are
significant as historical and religious monuments or as works of art, and many fulfil
more than one of these criteria.17
Because Pausanias’s emphasis of cultural and historical details is so reminiscent
of the interests and omissions that characterize modern ‘cultural’ guidebooks,
readers often do not notice immediately just how many important aspects are in
fact missing from his version of Greece. For example, Pausanias is rarely interested
in reporting aspects of contemporary life, apart from cult practice and religious
festivals.18 He often refers to local informants, and we can infer from the text
that his research involved many conversations and probably led him to make
acquaintances all over Greece.19 Specific individuals are, however, rarely mentioned
and the site descriptions hardly acknowledge the presence of local inhabitants or
other visitors. Pausanias rarely talks about residential quarters or civic infrastructure
such as baths and commercial or administrative buildings. There is also very little
information about the contemporary use of the landscape: Pausanias’s sketchy
landscape descriptions do not usually include references to crops or fields,20 and
‘practical’ information for travellers is limited to a few comments on the quality of
particular roads, and some remarks about good springs along the way.21 This lack of
interest in contemporary circumstances gives the Periēgēsis a timeless quality which
made it such an attractive companion for travellers who visited Greece centuries
after Pausanias.
The description is nevertheless firmly rooted in its own time, the second century
ce. The larger cities of Roman Greece were fairly prosperous, although the region as
a whole could not compete with the wealthier Roman provinces of Asia Minor and
the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Smaller communities in particular found it
difficult to ensure economic stability and some were no longer able to maintain all
of their ancient monuments; in extreme cases ancient sites were all but abandoned.22
Pausanias mentions such developments of his own time, for example the recent
restoration of ancient monuments or changes to cult practices, and he also records
many ancient monuments that had disappeared or fallen into ruin. Most places
could, however, boast some connection to the great past of Greece, and this is what
attracted Pausanias’s interest. The accounts of local traditions connected to sites
and monuments ref lect contemporary ideas and attitudes, especially in the many
instances where Pausanias depends on local informants.23 Pausanias’s description is
therefore not an attempt to elide the present and to transport his reader into a fantasy
version of Greece in an earlier period: he is recording the physical and memorial
landscape of his own time. As we shall see, this preoccupation with the hist­orical
and cultural heritage of Greece was in fact particularly relevant in this period.
Pausanias’s approach owes much to historiography, not only where he presents
accounts of the past, but also in his efforts to integrate landscape and narrative.24
 Pausanias’s Description of Greece 37

Fig. 2.3. Overview of

Pausanias’s ‘itinerary’

Herodotus’s Histories are cited particularly often, and Pausanias deliberately echoes
many of the characteristic features of Herodotus’s work, although he draws on a wide
range of historical literature.25 The Periēgēsis contains numerous historical accounts
which come in many shapes and sizes, from elaborate historical introductions to
regions and individual cities to the ubiquitous short comments which accompany
descriptions of sites and monuments. These passages accommodate mythical and
historical events in an equal manner: Pausanias approaches Greek history as a long
continuum from the distant past when the gods were born down to his own time,
and it is clear that this is what makes Greece special. In the Periēgēsis the past is
an integral part of the Greek landscape: Pausanias may not pay much attention
to its physical characteristics or contemporary realities, but he offers a complex,
multilayered map of historically significant places that commemorate activities of
gods, heroes and historical characters.
The sacred landscape is intimately connected with Pausanias’s historical
perspective, because every community had myths and traditions that firmly
rooted sanctuaries and rituals in the local past. The Greeks shared basic myths and
ideas about their gods and appropriate cultic practices, but there were significant
differences between the religious traditions of different Greek communities. Every
city had its own set of divinities, usually a combination of specific aspects of the
major Greek gods and a number of smaller local divinities such as nymphs or river
gods and especially heroes; the appropriate rituals for these divinities and a specific
calendar of festivals would also be unique to each city. The whole system was held
together by myths which explained the special significance of the community’s
religious landscape. Local myths, divinities and religious activities were intimately
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Het papieren boek accentueert sommige woorden met
uitgebreidere letterafstand ("expanded letter-spacing"). In de
'platte-tekst'-versie wordt dit met underscores aangegeven:

_gespatieerde tekst_ → g e s p a t i e e r d e t e k s t

Bladzijdenummers zijn in de 'platte-tekst'-versie weggelaten. In

de HTML-versie zijn ze wel zichtbaar, maar virtueel, wat het
voordeel heeft dat u kunt zoeken op tekst-fragmenten zonder
dat de bladzijde-nummers het zoeken hinderen. Dit werkt alleen
als de bladzijdenummers in de tekst staan (maar niet in de
kantlijn).

Bladzijdenummers staan bovenaan een bladzijde. U kunt zoeken

op bladzijdenummers: door bijvoorbeeld p.20 in te tikken.

Als u de weergave van de bladzijde-nummers wilt aanpassen,

kijk dan met een tekstverwerker in het <style> blok naar de
CSS-klassen [.blznr] (voor bladzijde-nummers) en [.hyphen]
voor afbreekstreepjes

Voor de hand liggende interpunctie fouten zijn gecorrigeerd

maar worden hier verder niet genoemd.

Dit boek bevat een aantal zetfouten.

De volgende zetfouten zijn gecorrigeerd:

[niet-zelf-richtende reddingboot] →
[niet-zelfrichtende reddingboot]

[een algemeen gegemopper,] →

[een algemeen gemopper,]

[bediening der toestelllen] →

[bediening der toestellen]
[oostersche mogendheid] →
[Oostersche mogendheid]
Zie het vergelijkbare [Aziatische] in de tekst.

[plooiig over] →
[plooiïg over]
Zie ook vergelijkbare woorden: [goeiïg] en [lawaaiïg] in
tekst.

[mesroom] →
[messroom]

Enkele fouten die waarschijnlijk van de schrijver afkomstig zijn

en niet van de zetter, zijn niet gecorrigeerd. Voor de
volledigheid worden ze hier wel genoemd:

Bij een aantal hoofdstuktitels is er verschil in schrijfwijze tussen

inhoudsopgave en het daadwerkelijke hoofdstuk. Dit wordt
veroorzaakt doordat de hoofdstuktitel in een illustratie is
verwerkt:
[In den Onderzeeër] /
[In een Onderzeeër]
[Hollandsche Scheepsspreekwoorden] /
[Scheepsspreekwoorden]
[Met de Koningin aan boord van een onzer
Oorlogsschepen] /
[Met de Koningin aan boord van een onzer
Oorlogschepen]
[Een overlevende van Shimonoseki] /
[Een overlevende van/de Shimonoseki]
[Van oude Uithangborden] /
[Op oude Uithangborden]
[De Millioenen van de Lutine] /
[De Millioenen-schat op/den Zeebodem]
[oorlogsschip] / [oorlogschip]
Eerstgenoemde spelling komt 5x voor, laatstgenoemde
12x. Het woord is een samenvoeging van de woorden
"oorlog" en "schip" waar tegenwoordig een "s" wordt
toegevoegd. Omdat vergelijkbare woorden in dit boek
ook op twee wijzen geschreven worden, is hierop geen
correctie toegepast.
[een weddingschap]
Alhoewel dit op een foutief gebruik van het Engelse
woord "wedding" lijkt, is dit de Vlaamse schrijfwijze voor
[een weddenschap]
[Zuider-Zee] / [Zuider-Zee-vaarder] / [Zuider-zee] / [Zuiderzee-
haventje] / [Zuiderzee-visschersman]
Door elkaar gebruikte hoofd- en kleine letter "z" in "zee",
evenals soms een koppelteken tussen "Zuider" en "zee"
en soms niet.
[Spaansche matten]
Men zou kunnen denken dat hier "Spaansche munten"
moet staan. Het is echter correct, en was de Nederlandse
bijnaam voor zilvermunten van 8 real.
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