Exchange as entrapment : mercenary Xenophon ?
Résumé
Xenophon's Anabasis is a work of apologetics, written in response to attacks against the author. The work answers two types of accusation concerning exchange and the right way to conduct exchange. The first accusation appears as the collective pressure from the rank and file of the Ten Thousand: Xenophon attempts to counter the forceful accusations of corruption levelled at him by the troops. Part of the Anabasis-- especially Book 7-- is devoted to refuting such accusations. But Xenophon also uses the Anabasis to respond to another type of accusation, produced much later by his aristocratic peers rather than the rank and file. The Athenian general seeks to put as much distance as possible between himself and the disgraceful shadow of the mercenary. He must erase anything that might portray him to his readership as a paid soldier, on the move for base financial reasons. For a Greek aristocrat keen to demonstrate his detachment from the purely monetary, such a mercenary's status was necessarily compromising, especially since two barbarians assembled the mercenary host in question: the Persian Cyrus, then a Thracian, the ambiguous character of Seuthes. The present paper is offered as a reading of this double exercice de style.
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