Reading the first few pages of “Maidenhair” by Mikhail
Shishkin, I was stunned by these random lines within the very modern story:
“And so Darius and
Parysatis had two sons, the elder Artaxerxes and the younger Cyrus. When Darius was taken ill and felt the
approach of death, he demanded both sons come to him. At the time the elder son was nearby, but Darius sent for
Cyrus to another province, over which he had been placed as satrap.”
It was a Proustian moment and I was propelled back a decade
to the summer I spent taking a one-on-one Ancient Greek class with one of my
favorite professors, Brad Cook.
The text that summer was Xenophon’s “Anabasis,” often referred to as the
march of the ten thousand. The
lines by Shishkin are the opening ones of Xenophon. Here they are in the Greek (click a word for some linguistic fun):
Δαρείου
καὶ Παρυσάτιδος
γίγνονται
παῖδες δύο,
πρεσβύτερος
μὲν Ἀρταξέρξης, νεώτερος
δὲ Κῦρος: ἐπεὶ δὲ ἠσθένει Δαρεῖος καὶ ὑπώπτευε τελευτὴν τοῦ βίου,
ἐβούλετο τὼ παῖδε ἀμφοτέρω παρεῖναι. ὁ μὲν οὖν πρεσβύτερος
παρὼν ἐτύγχανε: Κῦρον δὲ μεταπέμπεται
ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρχῆς ἧς αὐτὸν σατράπην
ἐποίησε
This is one hell of a book (Shishkin), so nothing I find would
surprise me. I just wonder at its
purpose. Anyway, here is my
pretty literal translation from the Greek:
“Darius and
Parysatis begat two sons, the elder Artaxerxes and the younger, Cyrus. And when Darius lay sick and suspected
the end of his life, he wished both sons to be nearby. The elder one happened to be nearby,
but he sent way for Cyrus from the province over which he (Darius) had made him
(Cyrus) Satrap.
The one thing I remember clearly from Xenophon is that it
felt after a while like I was marching along with the troops, covering so many
stathmoi everyday, trapped inland with no guide and no hope of seeing the coast
and a glimpse of familiar islands, and I was as thrilled as any Greek when the
shout went up toward the end, “thalatta!, thallatta!,” “The Sea!, The Sea!” We shall see what this ancient tale of
strangers marching through and trying to escape a foreign land has to do with a
novel of Russians trying to get into a foreign land and escape their own.
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