The Politics of Viewing in Xenophon's Historical Narratives

Download or read book The Politics of Viewing in Xenophon's Historical Narratives written by Rosie Harman and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book considers problems of cultural identity and power in the context of the competing imperialisms of the early 4th century BC through a reading of Xenophon's works of narrative history, the Hellenica , Anabasis and Cyropaedia . These texts deal with highly contentious subject matter: the representation of conflicts between Greek states, conflicts between Greeks and non-Greeks, especially Persia, and relations between the elite individual and society. In all three texts, politically significant moments are imagined in highly visual terms. We are shown spectacles of Spartan military victory, vistas of Asian landscape or displays of Persian imperial pomp, and historical protagonists are presented as spectators viewing and responding to events. Through this visual form of narration, which is also used, with slightly different emphasis, by Xenophon's historiographical predecessors Herodotus and Thucydides, the reader is encouraged imaginatively to place themself in the position of the historical protagonists. Through being allowed to view events from different perspectives, and therefore to occupy multiple, often conflicting political positions in close sequence or even simultaneously, the reader not only experiences the problems faced by historical actors, but becomes engaged in the political conflicts acted out in the narratives. The depiction of spectacles and spectators draws the reader into an active participation in the ideological contradictions of their time, in a period when Panhellenic aspiration co-existed with hegemonic competition between Greek states, and when Greeks could be both beneficiaries and victims of imperialism. Through offering an often contradictory and conflictual reading experience, Xenophon's Hellenica , Anabasis and Cyropaedia both reveal and enact conflicts within elite Greek political self-consciousness in the late Classical period"--