The ancient Greek that Mulligan declaims in Telemachus,
“Thalatta! Thalatta!" comes from Xenophon's Anabasis,
which he again quotes from in Oxen of the Sun.
The Greek army whose story this work tells escaped
near-certain death in Asia Minor and reached the shore of the
Black Sea, expressing its relief and exultation in the cry,
"The sea! The sea!"
The Anabasis was written in the first decades of
the 4th century BCE. Its title refers to a military
expedition, literally “a march up from the coast” or “a march
up country.” Xenophon took part in such an expedition in 401,
as one of 10,000 Greek mercenaries who, along with a much
greater number of Persians, agreed to follow Cyrus the Younger
from the Aegean Sea up into Ionia, western Turkey today, to
attack a Persian tributary who ruled Ionia. The real target of
Cyrus’ massive army, however, was his older brother Artaxerxes
II, the emperor of Persia. Near Tarsus, in what is now south
central Turkey, the Greek soldiers discovered this appalling
deception and refused to go further east, but were convinced
to do so by a Spartan general named Clearchus. After surviving
battle with Artaxerxes’ army in what is now the heart of Iraq,
Clearchus was invited to a peace conference by Artaxerxes, who
betrayed and murdered him. Far from the sea and surrounded by
hostile forces, the Ten Thousand elected new leaders (Xenophon
one of them) and fought their way out of Persia, north to the
Black Sea. From there they made their way home via the
Bosporus.
When the young men at the end of Oxen begin to think
of their walk from the maternity hospital to Burke's pub as a
military march, someone says, "Thence they advanced five
parasangs." This must be Mulligan again recalling the
language of the Anabasis. The parasang was a Persian
unit of walking distance equivalent to several miles.
Herodotus writes of armies traveling five parasangs a day (the
term was transliterated into Greek, and later into Latin), and
numerous passages in Xenophon's work speak of marching such
distances––e.g., "From there he marched one stage, five
parasangs, to the Pyramus river... Thence he marched one
stage, five parasangs, to the Gates between Cilicia and
Syria.... Thence Cyrus marched one stage, five parasangs, to
Myriandus, a city on the sea coast" (1.4, trans. Carleton L.
Brownson). There is some humor in applying the phrase to a
walk which covers less than two city blocks.
