Xenophon Carries a Soldier's Shield

The story

In 401 BC about ten thousand Greek soldiers were stranded deep in the Persian Empire. A Persian prince, Cyrus, had hired them to help him take the throne from his brother, the king, and Cyrus was killed in the battle between their armies. The Persians then invited the Greek generals to a meeting, seized them, and later put them to death, so the army chose new generals. One of them was Xenophon, a young Athenian who had come along without a post in the army. He later wrote an account of the march home, the Anabasis.

As the Greeks marched north along the Tigris, a Persian army followed them. One day the Persians occupied a ridge above the road the Greeks needed to take. Xenophon saw a higher peak above the Greek army, with a way from it down to the ridge, and he led a detachment toward it. The Persians on the ridge saw them and raced for the same peak.

Xenophon rode beside his men and urged them on, telling them they were racing to get home to their wives and children. A soldier named Soteridas answered him:

“We are not on equal terms, Xenophon; you are mounted on a horse; I can hardly get along with my shield to carry.”

Xenophon got off his horse, pushed Soteridas out of the line, took his shield, and kept climbing with it. He was also wearing a cavalryman’s breastplate, and he writes that he was “sore pressed.”

The other soldiers then hit Soteridas, threw things at him, and, in Xenophon’s words, “showered him with abuse,” until he took back his shield and marched on. Xenophon got back on his horse and rode until the ground was too steep, then went the rest of the way on foot. The Greeks reached the peak first, and the Persians on the ridge fled.

How we see it through leadership economics

A team has no actual monetary prices to offer information the way a competitive market does, so people learn what a leader expects of them partly from what the leader is willing to give up. Soteridas’s complaint was that Xenophon was asking his men to bear a cost he did not bear himself. Carrying the shield showed that he would not ask his men to do anything he was not willing to do himself. It also showed the other soldiers what standard would be upheld. Xenophon could have taken the shield onto his horse and carried it for Soteridas, but that would have relieved one soldier of a burden every other soldier still carried, which would have lowered the standard. Instead he got down and carried it on foot, the same way his men carried theirs, where all of them could see him.

Xenophon said nothing more to Soteridas; the other soldiers made him take his shield back. Xenophon does not say why they did it. Our interpretation is that once their commander had carried a shield himself, the soldiers saw carrying your own as the standard for everyone. We find the story useful because it shows that a leader’s visible sacrifice can set a standard that the team then enforces among its members.

A quote we’re thinking about

“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”

Galatians 6:2, King James Version