He thus brought into play the art which he alone in the army appears to have possessed—the art of dealing with and influencing assembled multitudes. His speeches, considered in relation to their object and occasion, are models of oratory. Apparently straightforward and simple, and totally free from all flourishes of rhetoric, they yet are most artistically constructed, so as to say the most effective things in the most effective way. The report of them is so graphically given, that we seem to have the whole scene before our eyes, and to be made interested spectators of transactions that took place twenty-two hundred years before any of us was born. And it must be added that, in these transactions, we find Xenophon always using his powers of influence for good and worthy purposes—for the advantage of the army as a whole, rather than for any isolated objects of self-aggrandisement; and for the prevention equally of base conduct, and of rash and calamitous enterprise.
The Cyreian Greeks, embarking in the ships which had been provided for them, sailed along the Black Sea to Sinope—a name rendered familiar to the present generation by the disastrous episode of the Russian war[1] which occurred there in 1853. At this flourishing Greek seaport, the seat of an ancient Milesian colony, they were hospitably received, and here the soldiers began to feel the absolute necessity of striking some blow which might fill their purses and save them from returning empty-handed to Greece. For the success of such a project they determined that they
- ↑ See Mr Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea, vol. i. p. 373.
