当然,在《远征记》中有一种悲戚的感染力:士卒们归乡的渴望,身处异乡的狼狈,以及不掉队的努力,因为只要他们还在一起,他们就能把自己的国家放在心中。一支军队被领进一场并非他们的过错而败北的战争,任凭自生自灭后挣扎着想要返乡,仅仅是挣扎着开出一条路返回故乡,远离他们的盟军和敌人。《远征记》中的所有这些与近代意大利文学中的一个主题十分相似:即意大利的阿尔卑斯山地部队从俄国撤离时写的回忆录。这个类比并不是最近才得出的,早在1953年维托里尼[vi]就推出了这类作品的经典,马里奥·利格尼·斯特恩[vii]的《雪中的中士》(Il sergente nella neve),将之誉为“用方言写成的小《远征记》”。而事实上,色诺芬的《远征记》中充满了雪地撤退的章节(上述引述段落的来源),完全可能都是从利格尼·斯特恩的的书中摘抄下来的。
叙事者——主角是一个优秀的战士,是利格尼·斯特恩以及那些写从俄国前线撤退的最好的意大利作品的特点之一。就像色诺芬那样,他有这个能力和责任来探讨军事行动。对他们及色诺芬而言,在被过分夸大的抱负雄心崩溃之后,他们回归到了求实与团结一致的军人品质上,而不是以每个人不仅要能自助且能助人的标准来衡量。(在此值得一提的是努托·雷维利[viii]的《穷人的宣战》(La Guerra dei poveri),其描述了幻灭军官的激情与疯狂,还有另一本被不公正地遗忘的好书《长步枪》(I lunghi fucili),作者是克里斯多佛罗·M·内格利[ix])
[i] Xenophon,(前434~前335)。希腊历史学家、诗人、苏格拉底的学生。他曾参加希腊雇佣军远征波斯的战争,《远征记》记录了希腊雇佣军从波斯腹地穿过美索不达米亚、亚美尼亚抵达黑海,返回希腊的冒险经历。
[ii] Parasang,古波斯的长度单位,一帕约为5.6公里。
[iii] Cyrus the Younger(前427~401)波斯阿契美尼德王朝的王子,吕底亚总督,策划了希腊雇佣军远征波斯争夺王位,在战斗中被杀,使得远征军深陷异乡,最后艰难地返回希腊。
[iv] Artaxerxes II Mnemon(前404-358)小居鲁士的兄长,统治长达46 年,期间政局稳定,人民安定,缔造了波斯帝国的繁荣。
[v] T. E. Lawrence(1888~1935),英国作家、冒险家、军人,一战时帮助阿拉伯义军反抗奥斯曼帝国,被称为“阿拉伯的劳伦斯”,著有《智慧的7柱石》等。
[vi] Elio Vittorini(1908~1966)意大利小说家,参加过抵抗运动,《梅纳波》杂志主编,著有《墨西拿的妇女》、《人与非人》等。
[vii] Mario Rigoni Stern(1921~)意大利作家,二战时已经是个老兵了,是纳粹集中营的幸存者之一,《雪中的中士》出版于1953年,描写的是阿尔卑斯山地小组从俄国撤退时一个中士的经历。1999年获得意大利PEN笔会奖。
[viii] Nuto Revelli(1919~2004),意大利作家。军校毕业后加入阿尔卑斯山地小组,指挥过多次战斗,也经历过从俄国的撤退,战后开始写作,他的许多作品都是以抵抗运动,阿尔卑斯山地小组,农民为主题的。
http://committeeofpublicsafety.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/xenophon-roundtable-the-shadow-of-herodotus/ By Joseph Fouche Cunaxa is an interesting counter-point to the three traditional pillars of Herodotus’s Histories, Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. While those three confrontations took place in or near Attica, the cradle of democracy, Cunaxa happens in Mesopotamia, the cradle of despotism. Herodotus skillfully built a narrative of the clash of East and West, Freedom and Slavery, Democracy and Despotism out of the Persian attempts to conquer an obscure people on the fringes of the Known World. His account looms over those of his successors, even the works of the prickly Thucydides, who considered himself superior in every respect to the world traveling gossip from Halicarnassus. Xenophon was no exception. The Anabasis almost reads like a strange mirror version of the Histories. Instead of the Ascent of Darius, Xerxes, or Mardonius into the heart of Hellas, it’s the descent of the Greeks into the heart of Achaemenid power. The squabbling Greeks, under the less than inspired figures of Clearchus, Proxenus, and Menon, appear rather shabby compared to the heroic generation of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Pausanias. Cyrus in his foolish death and disfigured body and Artaxerxes II in his pettiness and undignified scramble to keep his throne fall far short of the power and majesty of Darius and Xerxes, so exalted that Herodotus portrayed them as living embodiments of hubris, pride that not only rivaled but threatened that of the gods themselves. Herodotus portrays the mighty Xerxes, in the full flower of his pride, flogging the Hellespont as punishment for destroying his first pontoon bridge from Asia into Europe. Artaxerxes II, on the other hand, barely escapes with his life and throne, blusters at the Ten Thousand, flees cravenly when the Ten Thousand post him up, and proceeds to engage in all sorts of gutter intrigue. With great insight, Xenophon convinces the leaderless Greeks that the Great King would never negotiate with them in good faith. Artaxerxes II knew he looked pathetic. If I were Artaxerxes II, I wouldn’t want my vulnerabilities broadcast to all the world either, especially when I’d been shown up by a bunch of country bumpkins from Arcadia, the armpit of Greece. I would kill every last man, woman, child, beast of burden, or slave of the Ten Thousand. Being routed is one depth of humiliation. Being routed by rednecks, however, is a depth of humiliation that Persians hadn’t faced since the Spartans reacted to a demand for earth and water by throwing the Great King’s emissaries down a well into the bowels of Mother Earth. Xenophon continues Herodotus’s amateur anthropology by observing the Oriental Other. However Xenophon lacks the cosmic depths of Herodotus’s cosmopolitanism. Xenophon goes up country a Greek and comes down it a Greek. The locals are primarily defined by their non-Greekness, suffering from the irreversible disease of original high barbarity. Bar bar they all say. Bar we are shifty. Bar we are treacherous. Bar we betray even the gods with our lies. Bar we are unable to rule ourselves. Bar we are slaves. Bar we are sheep. Bar we are strange. Some of the Oriental world is familiar, a terrain populated by agrarian villages bursting with provisions and ripe for plunder. Some of it lies behind an iron cage that Xenophon, trapped in his Greekness, is barred from opening. Everything Xenophon does is in deadly earnest. While this is largely because Xenophon’s fate and the fate of the Ten Thousand were delicately balanced on the edge of a knife blade, Xenophon doesn’t strike me as a bon vivant in any of his other works. In contrast, Herodotus is a damned hippie, cheerfully imbibing and inhaling whatever the locals would offer. Herodotus is Mr. Fun, painting the world in bright fun Deluxe Crayola colors, a literary Expressionist for all time. Xenophon is more like Thucydides, a gloomy and bitter exile justifying the vagaries of his career by pouring out apologia galore. Like Seurat, he paints the world as a summation of pinpricks, with himself cast as the most prominent prick. I’m more sympathetic with Herodotus, who toiled away making his living through readings before a democratic mob, than with Xenophon, who spent much of his career as a literary Vyshinsky for the totalitarian Spartans. But with his descent into Mesopotamia, the birthplace of autocracy, Xenophon demonstrates that there are differing degrees of tyranny and even the citizens of Sparta had not fallen to the depths of the Great King’s slaves, driven into battle and corvee with whips. Of course tyranny, like influenza, is catching and the Ten Thousand may have brought the virus back with them from Mesopotamia, setting the scene for the passing of vigorous Greek liberty at Chaeronea a mere 63 years later. It is not without a touch of truth that the great historian Arrian’s history of the first flowering of Oriental despotism in the free soil of Greece is called the Anabasis of Alexander.