by Xenophon
2. carry on: 1,000 was the official full complement of the Athenian hippeis (Cavalry); that it was not easy to maintain is implied by 9.3 and 9.5. It was apparently the duty of tribally appointed ‘Cataloguers’ to list men qualified but not yet enrolled: Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Ath. Pol.) 49.2, with the expert Commentary by P. J. Rhodes (Oxford University Press, 1981, corr. reprint, 1993). Spence, pp. 287–315 (see Further Reading) lists known Athenian cavalrymen between c. 500 and 300.
3. rough ground: The Greeks did not shoe their horses, and ground that was hippasimos, suitable for cavalry horses, was rare in Greece (cf. 8.13), not least in Attica (see Herodotus 5.63.4).
4. javelin from horseback: The difficulty of javelin-throwing from horseback without the benefit of stirrups needs no underlining; cf. On Horsemanship 8.10–11, 12.12–13.
5. tribal regiments: The ten tribal regiments (2.2) were each commanded by a Phylarch. Note that, like the two Hipparchs (Cavalry Commanders), they were elected, not appointed through the chance of the lot. See further Ath. Pol. 61.4–5.
6. the cavalry: The Council of 500, 50 men selected annually by lot from each of the ten Athenian civic tribes, was Athens’ principal administrative body. Among its many functions two were relevant to the administration of the cavalry: (i) the conduct of dokimasiai or examinations to check the credentials of those appointed to an office or military function; and (ii) the distribution of public stipends (misthos) of various kinds, including certainly a fodder grant for cavalrymen’s horses (Ath. Pol. 49.1) and possibly pay when on active service (see note 11 below). Hoards of lead tablets have been recovered from the Athenian Agora recording the colour, brand and value of cavalrymen’s horses, the latter possibly because the state would repay the value of a horse killed in action.
7. just notes: In a sense the whole treatise is a hypomnema or aide-mémoire, but here and at 3.1 the author uses the term to disclaim comprehensiveness. At 9.1 he generously allows that just a ‘few readings’ of the treatise will suffice.
8. their qualification: For this double requirement of health and wealth (cf. 9.5), see also Ath. Pol. 49.2. Wealth was required because the cavalryman had to provide his own horse, but see note 6 above for provision from central funds thereafter. Legal procedure might be necessary in case a man’s eligibility (see notes 2 and 6 above) were disputed.
9. horse’s vicious behaviour… ineffective too: Cf. On Horsemanship 3.7–11.
10. weight: An Attic mina weighed 436.6 grams. See also On Horsemanship 4.4–5 for slightly more detailed directions.
11. of war: If the 1,000 cavalrymen were all on active service and paid 4 obols a day, that would yield the figure of 40 talents per annum (1 talent = 6,000 drachmas; 1 drachma = 6 obols), but that equation is by no means certain. One alternative would be to assume a daily stipend of one drachma per man, with the consequence that in the mid–360s (if that is the date of this treatise) the cavalry was seriously under-strength at only 650 men, owing perhaps to recruitment difficulties. On the cost of cavalry service at Athens, see Spence, pp. 272–86.
12. practice yourself: These scouts (prodromoi) were a special body of light-armed cavalry, the successors apparently to the fifth-century horse-archers (hippotoxotai): Ath. Pol. 49.1, with Rhodes, Commentary, pp. 565–6, cf. pp. 303–4.
13. throughout Athens: Xenophon, like Agesilaus (see e.g. A History of My Times 3.4.16), was a great believer in the merits of competition; see also 1.21 and 3.5. The following remark about the quality of judges is probably a veiled jibe at Athens’ democratic method of selecting judges for the theatrical competitions at the Great Dionysia, by lot on a totally random basis.
CHAPTER 2
1. something done: Cf. Thucydides’ account (5.66.4) of the Spartan chain-of-command at the Battle of Mantinea in 418, stressing the merit of an army consisting almost entirely of officers.
CHAPTER 3
1. as possible: The Academy and Lyceum were public gymnasia or exercise-grounds, sacred respectively to the hero Academus and to Apollo Lyceius (‘Wolfish’). They are more famous for being the sites of respectively Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical schools or institutes of higher learning. Their positions in relation to the Agora (next note) are neatly shown in a reconstructed drawing by Candace H. Smith in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 4. The Hippodrome was probably in the Peiraeus area. The reference to ‘Phalerum’, which does not recur, may well be spurious.
2. city square: The Athenian Agora has been the subject of intensive exploration and excavation by the American School of Classical Studies since 1931; the specifically topographical volumes of the School’s Agora Series (Princeton University Press) are 3 (R. E. Wycherley, 1957) and 14 (H. A. Thompson and Wycherley, 1972). The Herms were located on the north side of the Agora; many or most were deliberately smashed one ill-omened night in 415 as the Athenian armada was about to sail for Sicily (Thucydides 6.27). The number of shrines and statues was by now very large, including hero shrines such as the Leocoreum, honorific statues of the two Tyrannicides (see Hiero chapter 5 note 3) and the Stoa (portico) of Demeter and Core referred to here as the Eleusinium.
3. their wishes: Nostalgia is not of course peculiar to Xenophon, but the endings of both Spartan Society and Cyropaedia are extended meditations on the decline of Sparta and Persia from their supposed golden eras, and Xenophon is likely to have shared the hankering of his slightly older contemporary Isocrates for a less or rather a non-democratic order.
CHAPTER 4
1. critical moment: The author of an extant contemporary treatise on siegecraft, Aeneas, was especially interested in espionage and various modes of cryptic communication (D. Whitehead, Aineieas the Tactician: How to Survive under Siege [Oxford University Press, 1990], especially chapter 31). The author may be the politically conservative Aeneas of Stymphalus in Arcadia mentioned by Xenophon at A History of My Times 7.3.1, and it would not be odd if he and Xenophon were personally known to each other or if either had written his treatise in knowledge of the other’s.
2. trick I have just mentioned: Xenophon is remarkably interested in ambushes, a convenient list of references to which in Greek literature has been collated in W. K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War, vol. 2 (University of California Press, 1974), chapter 9.
CHAPTER 5
1. fake spears: Grooms (hippokomoi), like the hoplites’ batmen, were typically slaves. An Attic drinking cup from the early fifth century, attributed to the painter Onesimus (itself a slave name), depicts on the interior an African groom sighting along his curry comb for hairs after currying the horse (J. Ober and C. W. Hedrick, The Birth of Democracy [American School of Classical Studies at Athens and National Archives, Washington, D.C., Exhibition Catalogue, 1993], p. 141, fig. 23.2).
2. out of sight: ‘The enemy will not know (a) the number of files when posted one behind another, nor (b) the depth of the line when the files have wheeled’ (Marchant, Loeb edition, p. 269 n. 1).
3. ability to deceive… work on it yourself: Ruse or cunning intelligence (metis) had always been an admired, but also a morally questionable, quality, as exemplified paradigmatically by Odysseus ’of the many wiles’ (polumetis). Traditional hoplite warfare by and large did not lend itself to deception or even surprise. What we seem to see in this treatise, however, as in Xenophon’s accounts of Agesilaus’ career, are an increasing use and increasingly positive valuation of deception (apate) of all kinds (cf. chapter 4 note 2).
4. on foot: Infantry mixed with cavalry had a technical name, hamippoi; they were not original to the fourth century, and Xenophon refrains from mentioning that they were a Theban invention and speciality (Thucydides 5.57; A History of My Times 7.5.23–4). For Athenian hamippoi see Ath. Pol. 49.1, with Rhodes, Commentary, p. 566; Spence, pp. 58–9, pl. 10.
5. the god: Here and elsewhere (6.1, 7.3, 7.14, 9.8) Xenophon uses the masculine singular, ho theos, without necessarily having any one male god in mi
nd. The characteristically religious note had been struck in the very first sentence of the treatise, recurs throughout and is explicitly sounded again right at the end.
CHAPTER 6
1. his will: The craftsman (cheirotechnes) was not a figure of high status in aristocratic Greek eyes, but that did not stop either Xenophon or, more famously, Plato from using craft analogies to illustrate or point their philosophical or didactic theses. The particular craft Xenophon has in mind here is probably that of the bronze statuary who moulded (our ‘plastic’ comes from the Greek verb plassein) clay and plaster and wax – cf. Memoirs of Socrates 3.10, in Penguin Conversations of Socrates.
2. his men: A History of My Times 4.5.4 (Agesilaus sharing fire in 390) is a classic illustration.
CHAPTER 7
1. foot-soldiers: This is a reference to the Boeotians, and more especially the hated (by Xenophon: see next note) Thebans; see ‘Oxyrhynchus Historian’, chapter 11 (the status quo in 395).
2. are just as proud… as Boeotians: For Xenophon’s own hostility to Thebes, see Agesilaus chapter 2 note 5. Athenian pride of lineage was celebrated notably in the Epitaphios or Funeral Oration pronounced over the year’s war-dead (e.g. Thucydides 2.35–46).
3. city walls: Xenophon follows Thucydides in underestimating the offensive elements (including annual raids across the border against Megara) in Athens’ Peloponnesian War strategy by land. But the cavalry was certainly relatively little used, and least of all for offence.
4. of marauders: Plundering (leisteia) was something for which cavalry were particularly well equipped; the economic as well as military importance of plundering was not lost on contemporaries: see Y. Garlan, Guerre et économie en Grèce ancienne (Maspéro, 1989); and Agesilaus chapter 1 note 31.
CHAPTER 8
1. women against men: The Greek for the sort of courage, bravery or pugnacity required in combat was andreia, literally ‘manliness’. A favourite Greek military insult from Homer onwards was to deride the enemy as ‘womanish’.
2.flying… long to be able to do: This is a rather revealing personal interjection. Would-be high flyers among ancient Greek mortals had of course the awful warning of Icarus to contemplate; but what Xenophon is in effect saying is that riding, or more specifically cavalry training, gave him the sort of divine pleasure that other Greeks derived from sexual intercourse, for which a regular Greek phrase was ta Aphrodisia, ‘the things of Aphrodite’.
3. with prosperity: At the so-called ‘crown’ games (see Hiero chapter 1 note 1) prizes were purely symbolic tokens (an olive-wreath crown at the Olympics, etc.), but at all the many times more numerous local games value-prizes (e.g. olive oil at Athens, bronze cauldrons at Argos) were awarded. Xenophon, for the sake of his rhetorical point, collapses the distinction between token-prize and value-prize boxing-matches.
4. with intelligence: Xenophon was ever the elitist, a spokesman for, as well as to, the supposedly intelligent (phronimoi) few.
5. to resist: True shock cavalry tactics in Greek warfare, however, had to await the discovery – or use – of stirrups.
6. unexpected fright: In this Xenophon was at one with Thucydides, who also placed great emphasis on tales of the unexpected (to aprosdoketon). For the morale factor in Xenophon, see note to Agesilaus chapter 2 note 3.
CHAPTER 9
1. seen through: The same point is vigorously urged in the peroration of Ways and Means 6.2–3.
2. of enthusiasm: This remark sits awkwardly with his disparagement elsewhere of Spartan cavalry: see Agesilaus chapter 1 note 18.
3. large estates: The legal status and welfare of Athenian orphans were the peculiar responsibility of the annual eponymous archon (Ath. Pol., Rhodes, Commentary, pp. 629–36). War-orphans constituted a special, and particularly prestigious, subcategory.
4. resident aliens: Resident aliens (metoikoi, or metics) were a quite numerous category of the Athenian population, concentrated inevitably in the Peiraeus area (see further Ways and Means chapter 2 note 2). Their status was emphatically second class, marked as such by the requirement to pay a monthly poll-tax. But they had some privileges as well as disabilities compared with non-resident foreigners and of course slaves. If they were of sufficient means, they were already required to serve as hoplites, and some of the poorest among them no doubt served voluntarily as trireme oarsmen. Xenophon in arguing for their recruitment to the cavalry was ranking military effectiveness above the strict maintenance of social boundaries. See generally D. Whitehead, The Ideology of the Athenian Metic (Cambridge Philological Society, 1977).
5. the time: Presumably Xenophon has in mind exiles from the enemy city, as at A History of My Times 5.3.17 (Agesilaus and the oligarchic exiles from Phleious in the late 380s); cf. A History of My Times 7.2.4, where Xenophon mentions in dispatches the loyalty to Sparta of the Phleiasian cavalry.
6. in danger. Compare On Horsemanship 11.13.
7. dreams: The treatise began implicitly with divination by extispicy, that is examination of the entrails of sacrificial animals: see chapter 1 note 1. Xenophon here adds the other three main forms of divination practised by the Greeks; cf. Memoirs of Socrates 1.1.3. The most famous oracular shrine was of course Delphi; the most famous site for ‘incubation’ (sleeping overnight in a shrine in order to dream divinely sent dreams) the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus (see On Hunting chapter 1 note 4); at Dodona in north-west Greece one mode of divination was by interpreting the cooing of the doves, but avispicy normally took the form of observing the flight of birds.
ON HORSEMANSHIP
The translator gratefully acknowledges the help of Sally Gilbert, Briar Maxwell and especially Wendy Price towards understanding some of the equine and equestrian points in this treatise.
CHAPTER 1
1. with him: A ‘Simon’ is invoked in Aristophanes’ Knights (line 242); the chorus that gives that comedy its name represented the Athenian cavalry, and according to one ancient commentator, this Simon was then one of its two Hipparchs, or cavalry commanders (see e.g. Cavalry Commander chapter 1 note 5). If so, he may be the author of the treatise mentioned here and at 11.6, part of which survives: see D. Whitehead, Aineieas the Tactician: How to Survive under Siege (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 35 n. 101. For the Eleusinium, see Cavalry Commander chapter 3 note 2.
2. a war-horse: As the author will shortly make explicit (3.7), he is talking throughout this treatise about horses for war, rather than for work or leisure (for the contrast, see e.g. Agesilaus 9.6). Horses apparently cost more to buy than houses.
3. the frog: The author’s word here (and at 4.5, 6.2) is actually chelidon, ‘swallow’. Presumably this is because of the V-shape of the horse’s frog and of the swallow’s tail. Later Greek writers, however, do use batrachos, the Greek for ‘frog’, for this spongy tissue under the horse’s hoof.
4. the pin: What the author calls the ‘pin’ or brooch (perone) is probably the deep flexor tendon at the back of the lower leg, which is the shape of an ancient Greek fibula (similar to a modern safety pin). As the author implies, if the circulation to this part of the leg is blocked off, the horse may suffer from navicular disease, which in turn can lead to lameness.
5. better appearance: The ideal shape and proportions for a nude male statue (the so-called kouros type) were thought to have been attained by the fifth-century Argive sculptor Polycleitus in his figure named Kanon (‘Standard’); he also wrote a treatise of that title. See also Memoirs of Socrates 3.10.
6. horse’s shoulders: Another point for the modern reader to bear in mind is that the Greek rider did without stirrups and saddle (see next note; at most he might use a saddle-cloth, 7.5).
7. double spine: The so-called double spine made the saddle-less horse more comfortable to sit on and thus earned the praise of many ancient writers (e.g. Virgil, Georgics 3.87). Rather than protruding, the spinal column in a thus favoured horse rests as it were in a slight valley.
8. the belly: Today, we would say that such a horse has a goo
d girth.
9. broad line: Looking at a standing horse tail-on, you should be able to draw an imaginary line straight down from the centre of its rump to its hoof, on both sides. These two lines should be parallel and, as the author says, form a ‘broad line’ between them. This indicates that the horse is not bandy-legged, cow-hocked or sickle-hocked.
CHAPTER 2
1. public standing: This truism gives special point to the story that Alexander the Great himself broke the horse he named Bucephalas (‘Ox-Head’), and after whom he named a city on the banks of the Hydaspes ( Jhelum) (Plutarch, Alexander 6, 32, 44, 61).
2. breaking in colts: Whether or not Xenophon was the author of the present treatise, this passage refers to topics treated at length by Xenophon in Memoirs of Socrates, The Estate-manager and elsewhere.
3. notes… be paid: For ‘notes’, hypomnemata, see Cavalry Commander chapter 1 note 7. The practice of employing written contracts was on the increase in the fourth century.
4. groom… from distress: On grooms, see Cavalry Commander chapter 5 note 1.
CHAPTER 3
1. buying such a horse: Xenophon sold a favourite horse for 50 darics at Lampsacus, ‘a fancy price for a fancy horse’ (Cawkwell’s note to The Persian Expedition p. 349 n. 11). For more normal horse-prices at Athens, see Spence, pp. 274–80.
2. the ‘chain’: A figure-of-eight exercise; see also 7.13.
3. of slopes: The same recommendations are made at Cavalry Commander 8.1 – 3; cf. Estate-manager 11.17.
CHAPTER 4