 Purchase this book from amazon.co.uk Tim Rood is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and author of The Sea! The Sea!: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination. | American Anabasis
Xenophon and the Idea of America from the Mexican War to IraqT Rood The Marines' march up to Baghdad; Sherman's trail of destruction in Georgia; an army of Missouri volunteers trekking across the Great Plains to Mexico - this wide-ranging and imaginative book tells for the first time the story of how American armies from the sands of Iraq to the halls of the Montezumas have followed figuratively in the footsteps of the original Anabasis, the famous Greek march into the interior of Asia made by Xenophon and the Ten Thousand in 400 BC. Starting with the Iraq War, Tim Rood turns back to the conquest of the American West and to the Civil War, showing how one of the most famous episodes in classical antiquity was first appropriated in the name of military expansion, and then used to express conficting responses to the most controversial campaign of the Civil War. Allusions to Xenophon in speeches, newspapers reports, and military memoirs are throughout read against Xenophon's own story. Taking in American culture from the fiction of Thomas Wolfe to the drawings of Cy Twombly, American Anabasis will be of interest to anyone who wants to discover why Xenophon's classical story has proved so rich a symbol for the American journey.
PRAISE FOR
The Sea! The Sea!: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination
'In The Sea! The Sea! the British classical scholar Tim Rood has assembled a huge collection of ways in which Xenophon's words have, as he says, "twisted and played" in the modern imagination ... triumphant'
Peter Stothard, Wall Street Journal 'an unusual and fascinating book ... delightfully compelling'
Eric Ormsby, New York Sun 'so enjoyable to read ... takes an honourable place among studies of that perenially fascinating theme, the reinterpretation by the modern world of ancient Greece'
Tom Holland, Times Literary Supplement 'There will be no reader, I confidently predict, who won't be taken aback at the sheer variety of Xenophon's heritage ... and who won't be delighted by the highways and byways of such a journey'
Simon Goldhill, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 'a real tour de force of readable scholarship ... he tells a story that is excitingly enjoyable and displays ... the fruits of impressively wide and profound scholarship'
Anglo-Hellenic Review |
