Anabasis and Analethia - A Mercenary Story

There was recently a comment by Stephen Bradley mentioning that anabasis was the name of a mercenary army created in 405 BC by Cyrus the Younger as recounted in the book Anabasis  "... the most famous work of the Ancient Greek professional soldier and writer Xenophon. It narrates the expedition of a large army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to help him seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II, in 401 BC."

He asked, rather weirdly I thought, "Did they succeed?"

It prompted these replies of mine:

It is an interesting exercise to look at the lexicon in a Greek edition of Euclid's Elements. There you find a root, like rational, for example, with a privative term, becomes the word irrational. Then there is a further undoing of the privative by a higher construction, which recovers the rationality from the irrational. So you get for example logon, for knowledge, alogon for its absence and finaly analogon for the recovery of knowledge from its absence. So to me the word anabasis has a connotation of a dynamic form of constructing a basis which was previously absent. I have made a complete pig's ear of saying what I mean, but it's late, ...

He then replied asking if I meant that anabasis was the recovery of the empire that had previously been lost, ...

@Stephen Bradley I don't know the story, I'm a mathematician. However I imagine they had some sort of reason to choose the name anabasis for a force of mercenaries. If you Google "Fitzpatrick Euclid Texas" you will find a PDF of Euclid's Elements in English and Greek, and if you look up these terms logon, alogon and analogon in the lexicon you'll see what I mean about the structure. You will also find all of them used in Book V which is kind of spindle from which the whole thing unfolds.

Although Euclid's Elements was written around 300 BC in Alexandria, the essence of the first sixteen theorems of Book V was known and very well understood by Aristotle, so was presumably known to Alexander The Great too. And just now I was thinking about the term alethia, which is the privative of lethia which is forgetting and presumably has a common root with the term lethal. So there is potentially another term analethia, which I've never seen used, and which would be a kind of meta-forgetting which describes quite well my state of mind when I replied last night. :-)

 I suppose you could call the music of Dead Can Dance Xenophonia.

What Brendan Perry was saying about pop-music, ... (see Jennifer Rush - I Come Undone (1987) and For Jaguar House Natalie in Cochabamba) I don't know. I think nowadays all we need to do is knock some of these tired old producers out of their auditory ruts, ... or buy them a new set of ears. See I Just Saw Something Great on Mexican TV, ...

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