Thálatta! Thálatta! ( — "The Sea! The Sea!") or Thálassa! Thálassa! was the cry of joy uttered by the roaming Ten Thousand when they saw the Black Sea from Mount Theches after participating in Cyrus the Younger's failed march against the Persian Empire in the year 401 BC. The mountain was only a five-day march away from the friendly coastal city Trapezus. The story is told by Xenophon in his Anabasis. The date of the incident itself is believed to be in the early months of 400 BC.Brennan & Tuplin (2023), p. 138.
Xenophon's account Xenophon describes the scene as follows:
Location Several attempts have been made in recent years to discover the exact location of the mountain, Theches, from where Xenophon and the army of ten thousand men saw the sea. One feasible location, which Brennan and Tuplin call "the current leading contender", is a hill situated roughly halfway between Pirahmet and Maçka near an ancient road. Here in 1996 Tim Mitford, who had been guided to the mountain by a local man Celal Yılmaz, observed a large circular cairn of stones, 12 metres in diameter, which may well be the platform which Xenophon describes as being assembled by the soldiers in order to set up a trophy.Mitford, T. (2000). "Thalatta, Thalatta: Xenophon's View of the Black Sea". Anatolian Studies, Vol. 50 (2000), pp. 127–131; includes a map, which shows that the mountain is approximately 21 km south of Maçka.
Mitford's identification was supported by V. Manfredi, who, revisiting the site with Mitford a few years later, suggested that Xenophon's cairn was not the 12-metre one, but a second, 24-metre-wide round doughnut-shaped structure nearby.Manfredi, V. (2004). 7.2. "THE IDENTIFICATION OF MOUNT THECHES IN THE ITINERARY OF THE TEN THOUSAND: A NEW HYPOTHESIS". In Xenophon and His World: Papers from a Conference Held in Liverpool in July 1999 (No. 172, p. 319). Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH.
However, Brennan and Tuplin argue that this is only one of several possible solutions, depending on the route which Xenophon and the army followed, and believe that the matter may never be fully resolved.Brennan, S. G., & Tuplin, C. J. (2023). "Theches: an elusive mountain". Anatolian Studies, 1–21; includes a map and photographs.
The name "Theches" is not found in any other ancient source. The hill which Mitford believes is Xenophon's is today called Deveboynu Tepe ('Camel-Neck Hill').
Linguistics Thálatta (θάλαττα, pronounced ) was the Attic (i.e. Athenian) form of the word, as it appears in Xenophon's text. In most other dialects of Ancient Greek, as well as in Modern Greek, it is thálassa (θάλασσα).
Legacy
The moving moment described by Xenophon has stirred the imagination of readers in later centuries, as chronicled in a study by Tim Rood.Rood, T. (2004). "The Sea! The Sea!": The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination. London: Duckworth.
Heinrich Heine uses the cry in his cycle of poems published in in 1827. The first poem of the second cycle, ('Sea Greeting'), begins:
The cry is used by the protagonists of Jules Verne's The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864-1866) when they reach the Open Polar Sea after an arduous journey Verne, Jules: The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras and by the protagonists of Kéraban the Inflexible (1883) when they reach the Eastern shore of the Bosporus after having traveled around the perimeter of the Black Sea.Verne, Jules: Kéraban-le-Têtu The cry is also mentioned by the narrator of Frederick Amadeus Malleson's (1877) translation of Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth,Journey to the Center of the Earth, translated by Frederick Amadeus Malleson when the explorers in the story discover an underground ocean. It is absent from the original French work.
The shout briefly appears in Lionel Dunsterville's memoir The Adventures of Dunsterforce (1920), when, after passing Rasht, Dunsterville's small force reaches the Caspian Sea:
The phrase appears in Book 1 of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses when Buck Mulligan, looking out over Dublin Bay, says to Stephen Dedalus:
In Book 18, Molly Bloom echoes the phrase in the closing moments of her monologue:
In book III.3 of Finnegans Wake this is echoed as ""Joyce, J. Finnegans Wake. p. 551 combining the original chant with Greek kolossa, colossal.McHugh, R. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. p. 551
Christopher Gair sees the influence of this moment in the description in Jack Kerouac's well-known 1957 novel On the Road, when the narrator Sal Paradise sees the Pacific Ocean for the first time:Gair, C. (2018). "Thalatta, Thalatta!: Xenophon, Joyce and Kerouac." In: Murnaghan, S. and (RM) Rosen, R. M. (eds). Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition (Classical Memories/Modern Identities). Columbus, OH, pp. 38-54.
Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel that inspired Walter Hill's 1979 film of the same name, The Warriors, was based on Anabasis, and the movie references this quotation near the end, as the titular gang stands on a Coney Island beach and their leader (Michael Beck) comments, "When we see the ocean, we figure we're home."
Iris Murdoch wrote a novel called The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978.
See also List of Greek phrases
References