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From the Strategy Conference…..

Actually the speeches that Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye considers the greatest – not speeches made by Dave himself. Though, being an erudite fellow, he probably can give a good speech.

The Greatest Speeches

…..Another reasonable criticism is that some of the speeches, in my view probably anything from before about 1500 CE, are fictional.

But it’s a good, interesting, thought-provoking list that includes George Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, his Gettysburg address, several memorable speeches from Theodore Roosevelt, FDR’s first inaugural speech, several of Churchill’s wartime speeches, Douglas MacArthur’s farewell address, several of John Kennedy’s speeches, and several of Ronald Reagan’s speeches.

Ignoring speeches less than twenty years old which can reasonably be thought not to have withstood the test of time and just off the top of my head, here are several speeches in chronological order that I think are worthy of consideration in a “best” list:

• Elizabeth I’s Golden Speech
• Napoleon’s farewell to the Old Guard
• John Quincy Adams’s speech on the Fourth of July, 1837
• Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech
• Garibaldi’s speech of 1860 to the troops
• Bismarck’s “Blood and Iron” speech
• Lenin’s speech on the Soviet power
• Nehru’s “Tryst With Destiny” speech
• Mao’s speech of June 30, 1949, the 28th anniverary of the Chinese communist party
• Khrushchev’s “We will bury you” speech

I think Dave’s criticism of the ancient speeches in the Art of Manliness list is reasonable, though saying they are entirely “fictional” might be going too far ( though in some cases that might be true). Real events often become “mythologized” and accrue a thick crust of romanticism but attain a historical staying power because, unlike with pure fiction, there was a real event underneath acting to legitimize the story. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address will probably still be remembered in 2500 AD by someone, even if we Americans have vanished but how they reconstruct it may involve some invented context.

ADDENDUM:

On a humorous note, Schmedlap points to Peter’s Evil Overlord List

… 55)  The deformed mutants and odd-ball psychotics will have their place in my Legions of Terror. However before I send them out on important covert missions that require tact and subtlety, I will first see if there is anyone else equally qualified who would attract less attention.

This amusing videoclip makes the same point that my polymathic amigo Dave Schuler likes to make about the true state of historiography about classical  antiquity:

I will now let Dave speak for himself:

….Take the example of a single book, Plato’s Republic. The book was written in something like the 4^th century BCE. Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt in the 1945 the very earliest manuscript of The Republic that was known to exist was from around 895 CE. The version of The Republic in the Nag Hammadi library dates from something like 325 CE. Assuming that the text that came down to the Founding Fathers was derived from the 895 manuscript (a very bad assumption-it wasn’t), the book had been preserved for a half millennium by Christian scribes for Christian purposes.This would be a good point for a digression-within-a-digression about the Arab copyists who preserved many works of classical antiquity but that would be too big a digression. Suffice it to say that these copyists took copies that had been preserved by Christians and preserved them themselves for their own, presumably Muslim, reasons.So The Republic has a history something like this. We don’t have a single copy of the work from Plato’s time. For six or seven hundred years it was copied by Greek and Roman scribes for reasons we can only guess at. It was then copied for between a half and a full millennium by Christian, Jewish, and Arab scribes for Christian, Jewish, and Muslim reasons.That is the history of every single work from classical antiquity that survived until the time of the founding of our republic. We have, essentially, no idea of the entire body of work produced by the ancients. What was known of classical antiquity at the time of the founding our republic consisted of the buildings that still survived that they had built (often highly modified for Christian use), works of art and other artifacts, classical writings that had been preserved by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scribes for their own purposes and that, presumably, furthered their agenda, and accounts of classical antiquity from Christian and Jewish writers.That’s it.

History is an empirical profession based on standards of evidence – in part. It is also an art of crafting a narrative that can effectively communicate the meaning of the evidence of an event that is known to exist.  Leopold von Ranke, one of the founders of the modern historical method, admonished his students that history should explain “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” ( “Tell it how it really was” or “how it actually has been”) and eschew grand theories in seeking causation. These are difficult objectives to balance.

Historians are prisoners of their primary sources. Without them they are theorists or mere speculators. Too few, as with ancient history, and the historian is engaged in the same sort of guesswork as archaeologists and paleontologists or they are reduced to ideological theorizing, something historians are supposed to hold as suspect and as fit only for political scientists.

Too many sources, as with any modern presidential administration, and the sheer number makes it difficult to find critical evidence or draw upon a defensibly representative sample. Ronald Reagan supposedly signed one million documents in his eight years in the White House. True or not, the figure would represent a fraction of what his administration generated. Many documents of great importance are nonetheless not important enough at the time to cross the desk of the President of the United States.

The need to craft a narrative, imposes other restraints. There is no “history” unless the results of a historian’s work are disseminated and understood, challenged and defended.  Narrative works require the formating of historical events as a story and while this is reasonable in most instances, some periods of crisis are products of chance or a series of small acts that while unrelated, happen to intersect. Imposing a strong narrative frame on these situations is misleading but without the “story” there is no hook attractive enough to secure the attention of the general audience.

This is not to say, as Henry Ford did, that “history is bunk” but rather we need to be aware of the practical limitations under which historians labor. While history is not sociology or philosophy, it is not to be confused with physics.

Herodotus, the “Father of History” has received some new props in terms of his reliability from archaeologists digging in Egypt.

Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

….”We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus,” Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.

According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt.After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an “oasis,” which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again.

“A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus.

A century after Herodotus wrote his account, Alexander the Great made his own pilgrimage to the oracle of Amun, and in 332 B.C. he won the oracle’s confirmation that he was the divine son of Zeus, the Greek god equated with Amun.The tale of Cambyses’ lost army, however, faded into antiquity. As no trace of the hapless warriors was ever found, scholars began to dismiss the story as a fanciful tale.

Herodotus was long disparaged by historians as an entertaining and unreliable mythologizer, who instead upheld his younger and envious rival Thucydides as the model of ancient historical purity and accuracy. The empirical basis for this position is eroding fast and while Thucydides has his own greatness that can never be denied, the shadow he long cast over Herodotus has waned.

Below is my first contribution to The Xenophon Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

Xenophon Roundtable: The Art of Leadership

Prior to the roundtable, Dave Schuler a friend an astute blogger, asked if it mattered to me if Xenophon’s Anabasis of Cyrus turned out to be a work of fiction? I thought for a moment and replied that if The Anabasis is a work of fiction, by Xenophon or attributed to him by some later writer, it is a very durable work of fiction because the lessons of the story have a timeless quality. One of the lessons of The Anabasis of Cyrus is on the art of leadership.

Throughout the text Xenophon gives contrasting examples of leadership in the narrative, and as with Cyrus and Clearchus, his explicit commentary. Xenophon’s conception of leadership goes beyond that of command and embraces political acumen, foresight and the moral example provided by Greek and Persian rulers ( used here in the same sense as Ambler’s translation, of anyone holding authority over others). In this conception of leadership, I think the teachings of Socrates lies heavily on Xenophon and the passages about Xenophon pressing forward to go East with Proxenus were included mainly to assert the independence of his judgment to his fellow Athenians.

How did Xenophon present the notable “rulers” in The Anabasis? A few examples:

Clearchus the Spartan: Clearchus is presented by Xenophon as a competent and fearless commander but one lacking in wisdom, deeply flawed by a character that was given over to wrath. Xenophon, who was an admirer of Spartan military prowess, nevertheless portrays Clearchus as a martinet and something of a fool:

“Clearchus, was agreed by all those who had experience of him, to have seemed to be a man who was both war-like and war-loving to an extreme….When it is possible to be at peace without shame or harm, he chooses to make war; when it is possible for him to turn to an easygoing life, he wishes to do hard labor, so long as it be in making war….
….He was also said to be fit to rule, as far as this is possible with a character such as he had. For he was competent as any other in thinking out how his army might have provisions and in providing them; and he was competent also to impress it upon those who were with him that he, Clearchus, had to be obeyed. This he used to do by being severe. For he was stern to behold and harsh in his voice; and he always punished with severity, sometimes in anger, so that there were times when even he regretted it.
….Amid dangers, therefore, his soldiers were exceedingly willing to listen to him, and they would choose no other. For they said that his sternness….and severity seemed to be a strength against the enemy, so that it seemed to betoken safety and be severity no longer. But when they were out of danger and it was possible to go away and be ruled by others, many would leave him; for he had no charm but was always severe and fierce. The soldiers consequently were disposed toward him as boys toward a teacher.”

Xenophon’s assessment comes after Clearchus is beheaded by the Great King, having been betrayed by the treacherous Tissaphernes, to whom Clearchus stubbornly went under truce and unarmed, against all advice. Hotheaded and suspicious, he provokes a brawl with the soldiers of Menon, fear of whose intrigues causes Clearchus to trust his enemy, Tissaphernes, more than his fellow Greeks. Clearchus, despite his physical bravery and military skill lacks both the judgment and justice required of a true leader.

Cyrus: Xenophon lavishes extensive praise on Cyrus, more so than on any other figure in the book. To some extent this is an apologia for a deceased man in whose cause the Ten Thousand marched, justifying their expedition to posterity. What Xenophon stressed foremost, was not the generalship of Cyrus -perhaps understandably – but his propensity as a ruler for generosity, mercy and justice. Qualities necessary for a legitimate basileus and that contrast handsomely with those of his brother the Great King, whom Cyrus sought to depose:

“Thus did Cyrus end his life, a man who, of all the Persians born since Cyrus the Elder, was both most kingly and most worthy to rule, as agreed by all those reputed to have had direct experience of Cyrus.
….if he made a treaty with someone, if he made an agreement with someone, or if he promised something to someone – not to be false in any respect. And therefore the cities that turned to him, trusted him, and men trusted him. When Cyrus made a treaty, even if someone was an enemy, he trusted that he would not suffer anything contrary to the treaty. Accordingly, when he made war against Tissaphernes, all the cities voluntarily chose Cyrus instead of Tissaphernes, except the Milesians…
….Nor yet could anyone say that he allowed malefactors and the unjust to laugh, but punished them most unspariungly of all….Consequently, it became possible in Cyrus’ realm for both Greek and Barbarian, if he did no injustice, to travel without fear wherever he might wish, while having with him whatever suited him”

Cyrus looks particularly good next to his enemy Tissaphernes, an intriguing betrayer without honor, and the Great King, who appears both vindictive and rather cowardly in facing the Ten Thousand with vastly superior forces. What goes unremarked by Xenophon, was how colossal a failure of military-political judgment it was that led Cyrus to challenge his brother with greatly inferior forces and then, with battle engaged, to be unable to prevent his own Persians from breaking while the Ten Thousand advanced. Cyrus, who brought his Greek mercenaries to war initially under false pretenses, could not deliver as a warlord and paid the ultimate price. A ruler must be able at war before he can demonstrate his mastery in peace and Cyrus was not able, Xenophon’s praise notwithstanding.

The other rulers, Menon etc. look worse in their short descriptions than did Clearchus.

Xenophon, though he does not stoop often to openly praise himself, demonstrates the fusion of martial abilities, judgment, justice, foresight and moral example as The Anabasis unfolds. One could say that Xenophon’s leadership exemplifies a Socratic balance – and in case we missed that point, “Theopompus” (i.e. Xenophon) is compared to a philosopher in an exchange by a Greek herald of the enemy.

Of course, Xenophon is our reporter. He has the luxury of writing the history and neither Clearchus nor Tissaphernes, who ultimately came to a very bad end, are there to dispute his account. That said, fact or fiction or self-promoting “spin”, Xenophon is using the story of the Ten Thousand to present a political subtext on leadership that is at odds with that of the ruling democratic faction of his day in Athens.

Perhaps that was always his motive.