Read Why Read the Classics? Online
Authors: Italo Calvino
Most archaic? According to Alfred Heubeck the opposite might have been the case. (See Omero,
Odissea
, Libri I-IV, introduction by Alfred Heubeck, text and commentary by Stephanie West (Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla/Mondadori, 1981).)
Ulysses had always been an epic hero, even before
The Odyssey
(and also before
The Iliad)
, and epic heroes, such as Achilles and Hector in
The Iliad
, do not have folktale adventures of that type with monsters and magic spells. But the author of
The Odyssey
has to have Ulysses absent from home for ten years: as far as his family and former comrades in arms are concerned he has vanished and can no longer be found. To do this he has to make him disappear from the known world, to cross over into another geographical space, into a world beyond the human one, into the Beyond (not for nothing do his travels culminate in a visit to the Underworld). For this voyage beyond the bounds of the epic the author of
The Odyssey
turns to traditions (which certainly are more archaic) such as the deeds of Jason and the Argonauts.
So the novelty of
The Odyssey
resides in having an epic hero like Ulysses pitted against ‘witches and giants, monsters and eaters of men’, that is in situations that belong to a more archaic kind of saga, whose roots are to be found ‘in the world of ancient fable, and even in the world of primitive magic and Shamans’.
It is in this that the author of
The Odyssey
shows us, according to Heubeck, his true modernity, which makes him seem close to us, even our contemporary: if traditionally the epic hero had been a paradigm of aristocratic, military virtues, Ulysses is all these things but in addition he is the man who withstands the harshest of experiences, labours, pain, solitude. ‘Certainly he too carries his audience into a mythical world of dreams, but this dream world becomes at the same time the mirror image of the real world in which we all live and which is pervaded by need and anguish, terror and pain, and in which man is immersed without escape.’
In this same volume Stephanie West, though she starts from entirely different premisses from Heubeck, ventures a hypothesis that would appear to confirm his argument: the hypothesis that there was an alternative
Odyssey
, another journey of return, preceding Homer’s. Homer (or whoever the author of
The Odyssey
was), she argues, finding this tale of voyages too thin and pointless, replaced it with the fabulous adventures, but preserved traces of the earlier version in the account of the disguised Cretan. And in fact in the opening lines there is one verse which ought to epitomise the whole of the poem: ‘He saw the cities and came to know the thoughts of many men.’ What cities? What thoughts? This line seems to apply more to the voyages of the false Cretan …
However, as soon as Penelope has identified her husband in the bedroom which he has now repossessed, Ulysses starts talking again of the Cyclops, the Sirens … Perhaps
The Odyssey
is the myth of all voyages? Perhaps for Ulysses-Homer the distinction between truth and falsehood did not exist; he simply recounted the same experience now in the language of reality, now in the language of myth, just as for us even today each journey we undertake, big or small, is still an
Odyssey
.
[1983]
Reading Xenophon’s
Anabasis
today is the nearest thing to watching an old war documentary which is repeated every so often on television or on video. The same fascination that we experience when watching the black and white of a faded film, with its rather crude contrasts of light and shade and speeded-up movements, emerges almost spontaneously from passages such as this:
They completed another fifteen parasangs in three days, every day through deep snow. The third day was particularly terrible, because of the North wind blowing against them as they marched: it raged all over the area, destroying everything and freezing their bodies … During the march, in order to defend their eyes from the glare of the snow, the soldiers put something black in front of them: against the danger of frostbite the most useful remedy was to keep moving the feet, never staying still and especially removing one’s boots at night … A group of soldiers, who had been left behind because of these difficulties, saw not far off, in a valley in the middle of the snow-covered plain, a dark pool: melted snow, they thought. In fact the snow had melted there, but because of a spring of natural water, which rose nearby, sending vapours up to the sky
.
But it is difficult to quote from Xenophon: what really counts is the never-ending succession of visual details and action. It is difficult to locate a passage which epitomises entirely the pleasing variety of the text. Maybe this one, from two pages before:
Some Greeks, who had moved away from the camp, reported having seen in the distance what looked like a massive army, and many fires lit in the night. When they heard this, the commanders thought it unsafe to remain bivouacked in separate quarters, and once more made the soldiers regroup. The soldiers then all camped together again, especially as the weather seemed to be improving. But unfortunately, during the night so much snow fell that it covered the men’s armour, the animals, and the men themselves huddled on the ground: the animals’ limbs were so stiff with the cold that they could not stand up; the men delayed before standing up because the unmelted snow lying on their bodies was a source of heat. Then Xenophon bravely got up, stripped and started to chop wood with an axe; seeing his example, one of the men got up, took the axe from his hand and continued with the chopping; others got up and lit a fire; and all of them greased their bodies, not with oil, but with unguents found in the local village, an oil made from sesame-seeds, bitter almonds and turpentine, and lard. There was also a perfumed oil made of the same substances
.
The rapid shift from one visual representation to another, and from those to an anecdote, and from there again on to a description of exotic customs: this is the texture of the backdrop to a continuous explosion of exciting adventures, of unforeseen obstacles blocking the way of the itinerant army. Every obstacle is overcome, usually, by some piece of cunning on Xenophon’s part: every fortified city that has to be captured, every enemy that takes the field to oppose the Greeks in open battle, every fjord to be crossed, every bit of bad weather — all of these require a piece of brilliance, a flash of genius, some cleverly thought-out stratagem on the part of this narrator-protagonist-mercenary leader. On occasions Xenophon appears to be one of those heroes from children’s comics, who in every episode manage to survive against impossible odds; in fact, just as in those children’s comics, there are often two protagonists in each episode: the two rival officers, Xenophon and Cheirisophus, the Athenian and the Spartan, and Xenophon’s solution is always the more astute, generous and decisive one.
On its own the subject matter of
The Anabasis
would have been ideally suited to a picaresque or mock-heroic tale: ten thousand Greek mercenaries are hired under false pretences by a Persian prince, Cyrus the Younger, for an expedition into the hinterland of Asia Minor, whose real aim was to oust Cyrus’ brother, Artaxerxes II; but they are defeated at the battle of Cunaxa, and now leaderless and far from their native land, they have to find a way
back home amidst very hostile peoples. All they want is to go back home, but everything they do constitutes a public menace: there are ten thousand of them, armed, but without food, so wherever they go they ravage and destroy the land like a swarm of locusts, and carry in their wake a huge following of women.
But Xenophon was not the type of writer either to be tempted by the heroic style of the epic or to have a taste for the grim and grotesque aspects of a situation such as that. His is a precise record written by an army officer, a kind of log-book containing all the distances covered, geographical reference points and details of the vegetable and animal resources, as well as a review of the various diplomatic, strategic and logistical problems and their respective solutions.
The account is interspersed with ‘official statements’ from high command, and speeches by Xenophon either to the troops or to foreign ambassadors. My classroom memory of these rhetorical excerpts was one of great boredom but I think I was wrong. The secret in reading
The Anabasis
is not to skip anything, to follow everything point by point. In each of those speeches there is a political problem, regarding either foreign policy (the attempts to establish diplomatic relations with the princes and leaders of the territories through which the Greeks have to pass) or internal politics (the discussions between the Greek leaders, with the predictable rivalry between Athenians and Spartans etc.). And since the work was written as a polemic against other generals, about the responsibilities of each person in managing that retreat, then this background of overt or merely covert polemic can only be elicited from those rhetorical pages.
As an action writer Xenophon is a model. If we compare him with the contemporary writer who is his nearest equivalent—Col. T. E. Lawrence — we see how the skill of the English writer consists in surrounding events and images with an aura of aesthetic and even ethical wonder that lies like a palimpsest beneath the factual surface of the prose; whereas in the Greek there is nothing beneath the exactness and dryness of the narration: the austere military virtues mean nothing other than austere military virtues.
Of course there is a kind of pathos in
The Anabasis:
it is the anxiety of the soldiers to return home, the bewilderment of being in a foreign land, the effort not to get separated, because as long as they are still together they carry their own country within them. This struggle of an army to return home after being led to defeat in a war that was not of their making and then left to their own devices, a struggle which is now only to carve out a
way home away from their former allies and former enemies, all of this makes
The Anabasis
similar to one strand in recent Italian literature: the memoirs written by Italian Alpini troops on their retreat from Russia. This analogy is no recent discovery: as far back as 1953 Elio Vittorini, launching what was to be a classic of this type of literature,
Il sergente nella neve (The Sergeant in the Snow)
by Mario Rigoni Stern, defined it as ‘a little
Anabasis
in dialect’. And in fact, the chapters about the retreat through the snow from Xenophon’s
Anabasis
(the source of the passages quoted above) are full of episodes which could have been taken entirely from Rigoni Stern’s book.
One characteristic of Rigoni Stern and of the best Italian writing on the retreat from the Russian front is that the narrator-protagonist is a fine soldier, just as Xenophon was, and he discusses military action with competence and commitment. For them, as for Xenophon, in the general collapse of the more pompous ambitions, military virtues go back to being virtues of practicality and solidarity against which can be measured the ability of each man to be useful not only to himself but also to the others. (It is worth recalling here Nuto Revelli’s
La guerra dei poveri (The War Declared by the Poor)
for the passion and frenzy of the disillusioned officer; as well as another fine book, unjustly forgotten, J
lunghi fucili (The Long Rifles)
by Cristoforo M. Negri.)
But the analogies stop there. The memoirs of the Alpini stem from the clash between an Italy that was now humble and had come to its senses, and the madness and massacres of all-out war. In the memoirs of a general from the fifth century BC, the contrast is between the role of locust-like parasites to which the Greek army of mercenaries had been reduced and the exercise of the classical virtues—philosophical, civic, military virtues-which Xenophon and his men try to adapt to these new circumstances. And in the event this contrast has none of the heart-rending tragedy of Rigoni Stern’s book: Xenophon seems to be sure of having succeeded in reconciling the two extremes. Man can be reduced to a locust but can apply to this condition of locust a code of discipline and decorum — in a word, ‘style’ — and consider himself satisfied; man is capable of not even discussing for a minute the fact that he is a locust but only the best way of being one. In Xenophon we find already delineated, with all its limitations, the modern ethic of perfect technical efficiency, of ‘being up to the job’, of ‘doing your job well’ quite independently of what value is put on one’s actions in terms of universal morals. I continue to call this ethic modern
because it was modern when I was young, and it was the lesson we derived from so many American films, as well as from Hemingway’s novels, and I was caught between adherence to this totally ‘technical’, ‘pragmatic’ ethic, and awareness of the void that lay beneath it. But even today, when it seems so different from the spirit of our times, I find that it did have its positive aspects.
Xenophon has the great merit, in moral terms, of never mystifying or idealising his or his men’s position. If he often displays an aloofness or aversion towards ‘barbarian’ customs, it must also be said that ‘colonialist’ hypocrisy is completely foreign to him. He is aware of being at the head of a horde of parasites in a foreign land, and that the ‘barbarian’ peoples whose lands they have invaded are in the right not his men. In his exhortations to his soldiers he never fails to remind them of their enemies’ rights: ‘You have to bear in mind something else. Our enemies will have time to rob us, and will have good reason for ambushing us since we are occupying their property …’ In this attempt to give a certain ‘style’ or rule to this parasitical movement of greedy and violent men amidst the mountains and plains of Anatolia resides all his dignity: not tragic dignity, but rather a limited dignity, fundamentally a bourgeois dignity. We know that one can easily succeed in endowing the basest actions with style and dignity, even when they are not dictated as these were by a state of necessity. The Greek army, creeping through the mountain heights and fjords amidst constant ambushes and attacks, no longer able to distinguish just to what extent it is a victim or an oppressor, and surrounded even in the most chilling massacres of its men by the supreme hostility of indifference or fortune, inspires in the reader an almost symbolic anguish which perhaps only we today can understand.