HKB
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Often appears with: poisonous intoxicating honey · conquest, plunder, and captives · colchians defeat · battle formation · battle and tactics
Usually: narrative (1) · the test or trial (1)
“Men, these men whom you see in front of you are the sole obstacles still interposed between us and the haven of our hopes so long deferred. We will swallow them up whole, without cooking, if we can.” Xenophon, Anabasis · precept
Xenophon persuades the Greeks to fight the Colchians on the mountain in columns-by-companies rather than a straight line, leads the attack, and after the enemy flees they occupy villages where intoxication from poisonous honey incapacitates the troops.
(2) Or, "we will gobble them up raw." He is thinking of the Homeric line ("Iliad", iv. 35) "Perchance wert thou to enter within the gates and long walls and devour Priam raw, and Priam's sons and all the Trojans, then mightest thou assuage thine anger."--Leaf. The several divisions fell into position, the companies were formed into columns, and the result was a total of something like eighty companies of…