The Ancient World
5 December 2009
I mentioned before that I have been slowly working my way through Xenophon’s Anabasis, having taught myself the rudiments of Attic Greek. The story so far: Greek mercenaries are traveling with Cyrus to fight against the army of King Artaxerxes, Cyrus’s brother, for the throne of Persia. Orontas, a Persian nobleman and part of Cyrus’s retinue, has been caught trying to betray him to the king just as the army is nearing the capital. He has been tried and sentenced to death by a small group of Cyrus’s advisors, including one of the Greek generals, Clearchus. Clearchus finishes telling the rest of the Greeks about the proceedings:
“Then those who had been ordered to do so led him away. And when the same people saw him who used to bow to him, still now they bowed to him, even though they knew he was being led towards death.” But once he had been led into the tent of Artapates, the most trusted of Cyrus’s officials, nobody ever saw Orontas again, either dead or alive, and nobody who knew said how he died; everybody speculated differently. And no grave ever appeared.
An endnote by the editors explains:
Herodotus (7.114) states that it was a Persian custom to execute by burying alive. It is not improbably that this method was adopted here.
I wouldn’t say this surprises me exactly; everybody knows the ancient world was a grisly place. But it does terrify me. I’ve read the passage several times and will probably read it again, and there is a vivid picture in my head of what it might be like to be buried alive secretly in the camp of Cyrus on the eve of war with the king. These things seem more real when you have to work for them: I can’t just read this account in ten seconds on some website, I have to translate it from Greek. The things that happen in the Anabasis are far more real to me than the things that happen in the newspaper. Maybe stories are always better in a language freshly learned; maybe we should always be learning new languages so that we can read stories in them and have those stories affect us the way stories used to, when we were first learning our native language.
This post was the first time I translated Greek in public.
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