The Sea! The Sea!: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (review)

"At last, as I rose in my swift course to the crest of a lofty ridge, Thalatta! Thalatta! the sea—the sea was before me" (p. 24). The great nineteenth-century travel writer Alexander Kinglake thus describes his arrival at Suez after traveling across the desert from Cairo. He quotes in Greek Xenophon's Anabasis, expecting his audience will understand the allusion. The allusion falls short of exact aptness, as Kinglake well knows. Xenophon's exclamation comes from the lips of a group of exhausted Greek mercenaries, who have for months fought their way out of the inland fastnesses of the Persian Empire to the Black Sea. Kinglake, on the other hand, is merely traveling as a peaceable tourist, in relative comfort and safety. Still, Kinglake, as Rood shows, has a right to assume that his readers will have read the Anabasis in Greek as part of a proper, upper-class schoolboy's education.

Now Rood has collected hundreds of passages in fiction or history where someone famous or obscure repeats (either in the original or in translation) the words thalatta, thalatta in a context that might recall Xenophon. They pronounce these words, could have done so, or maybe should have done so, or even (as in the case of T. E. Lawrence) specifically denied doing so. Rood also collects miscellaneous non-Xenophontic references to sea or ocean, even Freud's portrayal of human happiness as an "oceanic" feeling or Joyce's sea, alternately "snotgreen" or "scrotumtightening."

Rood's work could be seen as social history, an analysis of British pedantry, eccentricity, or love of silly puns: "Thalassa or thalatta, the former or the latter?" (p. 12). Rood gives lengthy explanations for why a given passage fits in his book despite complex counter-indications. For example, he cites the British retreat to Dunkirk, while admitting that the army was larger and had a shorter distance to travel than Xenophon's. Rood never considers the possibility that many of the passages he cites are simply tiresome clichés.

Rood connects the free, democratic British sea over which Brittania once ruled with Xenophon, but the suggestion rings false. Xenophon's ten thousand were mercenaries working for a Persian prince, and Xenophon, not known as the sharpest knife in the drawer in any case, idealized Persian tyranny. As a Spartan sympathizer he was later exiled from Athens.

A long chapter details the pathetic career of an obscure British painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, creator of a hideous painting (on Rood's dust jacket and illustrated within) depicting Xenophon and the Ten Thousand on First Seeing the Sea from Mount Theches (1829–31). Poor Haydon, utterly devoid of artistic talent in the opinion of contemporaries Rood quotes, ("a tempestuous and luckless blend of idealism, megalomania, and paranoia [p. 110]), committed suicide, unable to support by his art his wife and eight children.

Even non-British readers may discern charm here, others may be stimulated to explore Rood's large bibliography (Kinglake's Eothen being a good starting point), but no assiduous reader will ever again behold the sea after a long trip without some inward frisson.