How Far, How Close Imagining the Battle of Cunaxa in Greek Historiography

This chapter examines the representations of the Battle of Cunaxa that are provided by Xenophon, Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch. It focuses on the processes of selection, abstraction, and schematization that any effort to translate an intense and confusing event like a full-scale battle into a compelling narrative inevitably – and also wilfully – involves. More specifically, it explores how compositional and stylistic choices in the narrative representation of events lead readers to imagine, feel, judge, and understand what happened at Cunaxa in certain specific ways. The author concentrates mainly on salient elements of Xenophon’s and Diodorus’ radically different accounts, adducing Plutarch more selectively. Features that the accounts have in common allow us to say something about how battle was generally imagined in Greek historical writing (as opposed to other genres and periods), while differences between them give an impression of the range of possibilities within the genre. It is the author’s contention that most of the differences have to do with the various ways in which Greek historians deal with questions of ‘historical distance’.