UC San Diego

All Together Now: The Successes and Failures of Community Building in Xenophon’s Anabasis,” analyzes several of the most common strategies for community building employed by the Greeks of the Classical Period. It considers the ways in which religion, Panhellenism, ethnic identity, and factionalism affect the creation and preservation of a community. To study these phenomena in community building, I use Xenophon’s Anabasis, a firsthand account of ten thousand Greek mercenaries who fought in a Persian civil war in 401 BCE, and who, after the death of their Persian patron, were forced to band together and fight their way 1000 miles back to mainland Greece. As a truly cosmopolitan assembly of Greeks, made up of men from cities throughout the Greek world, the successes and failures of the Ten Thousand in establishing what amounts to a civic community provide a unique insight into the most common strategies and devices employed in fostering communal bonds across a diverse group, and the practical limits to which these could be employed. My research shows that despite those in the army sharing many broad cultural similarities, such as the belief in a shared pantheon of gods, or an awareness of common ancestors, any unity achieved among the soldiers through appeals to their cultural similarities or shared heritage were often short-lived and needed to be reiterated time and again. While this observation shows us the limits of mobilizing these phenomena across the larger Greek world of the early fourth century BCE, it also sheds light on the ways in which communities in general, not just in antiquity, develop and fall apart. In this way, we find that religion and shared ancestry are particularly useful in creating identities that allow for the organization of a community, but self-interest and sub-ethnic distinctions are powerfully corrosive, and if left unchecked, they can destroy any unanimity gained through this common identity.