greek · historical

Xenophon — Anabasis (The March of the Ten Thousand)

c. 370 BCE (composed decades after events of 401 BCE) · Classical Greece (early 4th century BCE) · Scillus, Elis (composed in Xenophon's retirement)

Book I — The Muster

1Darius and Parysatis had two sons: the elder, Artaxerxes, and the younger, Cyrus.
2When Darius fell sick and suspected that his end was near,
3he wished to have both his sons at his side.
4The elder was already at the court; the younger, Cyrus, he summoned from his province.
5Artaxerxes succeeded to the throne after Darius's death.
6Cyrus, accused of plotting against his brother, was arrested,
7but through his mother's intercession was released and sent back to his province,
8where he began to gather forces to make war against his brother.
9He raised, in secret, an army of Greek mercenaries — some ten thousand men —
10whom he told he was leading against a hostile tribe.
11Only when they had come far into Persia did he reveal his real purpose:
12to seize the throne of Persia.

Book I — The Battle of Cunaxa

13At Cunaxa, near Babylon, Cyrus met his brother in battle.
14The Greek force on the right wing routed all before them.
15But Cyrus, seeing his brother in the enemy line, rode against him with a small band.
16He wounded Artaxerxes with a javelin.
17But he himself was wounded in the eye by a spear-thrust, and fell from his horse, and was killed.
18The Greeks had won every fight in which they had engaged — but they had lost the war.
19For the man whom they served was dead.

Book II — The Deception of the Persians

20Now the Ten Thousand were stranded in the middle of Asia,
21a thousand miles from the sea, without a leader, without supplies,
22without knowledge of the country, surrounded by an empire that had just witnessed the death of its would-be usurper.
23Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap, offered them safe conduct back to Greece.
24They accepted, and set forth under his guidance.
25But after some days he invited the five Greek generals to his tent, under a pretence of parley.
26They came unarmed. He seized them, sent them in chains to the king,
27and slew the twenty captains who had accompanied them.
28When the news reached the camp, there was consternation.
29"We are lost. Not one of us will see Greece again."

Book III — Xenophon Comes Forward

30There was a certain Athenian in the army, Xenophon, who was neither a general nor a captain,
31but a private soldier who had come along because his friend Proxenus invited him.
32That night he could not sleep. He rose and dressed and called together the surviving officers of the ten thousand.
33"My comrades," he said, "we cannot afford despair. Our arms have not been taken from us.
34Our courage has not left us. We are ten thousand strong.
35The Persians have shown us that no oaths bind them — well, then let us set the example.
36"Choose new generals. Choose new captains. Elect them now — and let us march.
37For if we sit still, we die."
38They elected new officers. Xenophon was chosen for the rear guard.

Book IV — Through the Mountains

39The Ten Thousand marched northward, through Kurdistan and Armenia,
40fighting each mountain tribe as they came upon it, in the depth of winter.
41They crossed rivers waist-deep in ice.
42Men lost their toes and fingers to frostbite. Snow blindness took many.
43On one march, some of the men lay down in the snow and would not rise.
44Xenophon dismounted and beat them with a stick until they got up and moved.
45"Better a beating than to lie down and freeze," he said.

Book IV — "The Sea! The Sea!"

46After many months, they came to a mountain called Thekes.
47Xenophon was in the rear when he heard a great shouting from the vanguard ahead.
48"Enemies!" he thought, and rode forward with his cavalry.
49As he came near, the shouting grew louder — and he could hear the words:
50"Thalatta! Thalatta!" — "The Sea! The Sea!"
51The men who had first reached the summit had seen it —
52the Black Sea, wine-dark and shining below them —
53and were weeping, and embracing their officers, and one another,
54and heaping up stones for a cairn to mark the spot.
55For the sea meant Greeks: Greek colonies along the shore.
56The sea meant home.
57They had marched some fifteen hundred miles through enemy country,
58and they were saved.

Book VII — The End of the March

59Some months later, having reached Byzantium and then served briefly in the pay of a Thracian prince,
60the surviving remnant of the Ten Thousand disbanded.
61Xenophon returned to Greece, and settled at Scillus in Elis on land given him by the Spartans,
62where he wrote this history many years later.
63"So the whole of the retreat had come to an end, and Xenophon was free
64to give himself up to the pleasures of hunting and country life
65and to writing."

notes

Xenophon (c. 430–354 BCE), an Athenian aristocrat and student of Socrates, wrote the Anabasis ("March Up-Country") — his firsthand account of a Greek mercenary army's march inland into the Persian Empire, and their extraordinary fighting retreat back to the Black Sea after the death of their employer, Cyrus the Younger, at the Battle of Cunaxa (401 BCE). The work is one of the great adventure narratives of world literature and the earliest surviving memoir by a soldier of his own campaign. It has been read by military commanders for two and a half thousand years — Alexander the Great is said to have carried a copy on his Persian campaign — and remains today on the reading lists of many Western military academies. The moment when the Ten Thousand, after months of marching through mountains in winter, reach the sea and weep — "Thalatta! Thalatta!" — is one of the most famous scenes in Greek literature. It gave James Joyce the title of a chapter in Ulysses and Iris Murdoch the title of a novel. Translation: Henry Graham Dakyns, "The March of the Ten Thousand: Being a Translation of Xenophon's Anabasis," London: Macmillan, 1897. Public domain.

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