Being Greek

Henry Day

• The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand by Robin Lane Fox
  Yale, 351 pp, £25.00, September 2004, ISBN 0 300 10403 0
• The Expedition of Cyrus by Xenophon, translated by Robin Waterfield
  Oxford, 231 pp, £8.99, September 2005, ISBN 0 19 282430 9
• Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia and the End of the Golden Age by Robin Waterfield
  Faber, 248 pp, £17.99, November 2006, ISBN 0 571 22383 4
• The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination by Tim Rood
  Duckworth, 272 pp, £12.99, August 2006, ISBN 0 7156 3571 9

The Anabasis, as The Expedition of Cyrus is often called, stands out among classical Greek texts for the glimpses it offers of Hellenes encountering a baffling and often dangerous alien world. A mishmash of military memoir, travelogue and biography, it’s also the most detailed description we have of Greek soldiers on campaign. The story opens with the rebellion in 401 BC of the Persian prince Cyrus against his brother Artaxerxes II, and recounts the progress of his army (which included around 13,000 hired Greek soldiers, among them Xenophon) from his headquarters in Sardis through modern Turkey and the Syrian desert to the plains of Mesopotamia. The first book culminates in Cyrus’ death at the hands of his brother in the battle of Cunaxa. The remaining six follow the ordeals of the stranded Greek survivors (‘the Ten Thousand’) as, against all odds, they fight their way back home, a trek of a thousand miles, which first takes them north to the Black Sea then west to Byzantium. (The term anabasis technically denotes only the march ‘up country’ to Cunaxa; the march ‘down’ to the sea is properly the katabasis, that along the coast the parabasis.) On the way, the Greeks encountered Syrians who regarded ‘fish as gods and did not let anyone harm them, or doves either’; Armenians who lived underground and binged on barley wine; and Mossynoecians who ‘wanted to have sex in the open with the kept women whom the Greeks had brought, because that was their custom there’. Xenophon has an eye for a snapshot.