d. 401 B.C Cyrus - The expedition of Cyrus

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XENOPHON was born in the early 420s BC to a wealthy Athenian family. He associated in his youth with the philosopher Socrates. In 401 BC, three years after Athens defeat in the Peloponnesian War, he accepted an invitation to serve with a mercenary army (the famous Ten Thousand) raised by Cyrus, brother of the king of Persia. Cyrus led his army in an unsuccessful attack on his brother. After Cyrus death Xenophon was one of the leaders of the Ten Thousand in their retreat to the sea. He was later exiled from Athens and settled by the Spartans in the Peloponnese. It was there that he started writing the extraordinarily wide variety of works for which he is now famous: a didactic historical fiction (the Cyropaedia), a contemporary history of Greece (the Hellenica), as well as Socratic dialogues and treatises on economics, hunting, horsemanship, and the Spartan constitution. His most famous work is The Expedition of Cyrus, his account of the march of the Ten Thousand. He died in the late 350s BC.

ROBIN WATERFIELD is a self-employed writer, whose books range from philosophy and history to childrens fiction. He has previously translated, for Oxford Worlds Classics, Platos Republic, Symposium, Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Meno and Other Dialogues, Aristotles Physics, Herodotus Histories, Plutarchs Greek Lives and Roman Lives, Euripides Orestes and Other Plays and Heracles and Other Plays, and The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists.

TIM ROOD is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Hughs College, Oxford. He is the author of Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation and The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination, as well as of a number of articles on Greek historiography.

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XENOPHON

Translated by
ROBIN WATERFIELD

With an Introduction and Notes by
TIM ROOD

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Translation Robin Waterfield 2005
Editorial material Tim Rood 2005

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2005

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Darius and Parysatis had two sons, of whom Artaxerxes was the elder and Cyrus the younger, and when Darius was ill and suspected that he was dying, he wanted them both by his side...

XENOPHON s Expedition of Cyrus starts with the beguiling simplicity of a fairy tale. The story Xenophon unfolds is itself beautifully simpleand the most exciting adventure to survive from the ancient world. Xenophon tells the story of a young Persian prince, Cyrus, who rose in revolt in 401 BC against his brother Artaxerxes, the king of Persia, and gathered a large armyamong them about thirteen thousand Greek soldiers, including Xenophon himself. Cyrus marched from Sardis (in what is now western Turkey) to Mesopotamia. To the north of Babylon, he finally encountered the royal army and died in an impetuous attack on his brother. The Greek mercenaries in his army were left stranded in the desert a thousand miles from home. When the Persians demanded that they hand over their weapons, the Greeks refused and set off northwards on their long march home. For some days they were shadowed by a section of the Persian army. Their generals were then invited to a conference with the Persians, and seized and killed. It was at this moment of crisis that Xenophon himself rose to prominence. He inspired the despondent Greek soldiers and led them through the mountains of Kurdistan and the snowy Armenian plateau to the sight of The sea! The sea!, and then along the coast of the Black Sea to the fringes of the Greek world.

The march of Cyrus Greek troopsknown to posterity as the Ten Thousandhas long been admired. The Greek biographer Plutarch tells the story that Mark Antony, during his own disastrous retreat from Parthia in 36 BC, would often cry out loud Oh, the Ten Thousand!, in awe at Xenophons men, whose march back from Babylon to the sea had been even longer and who had won their way to safety fighting far greater numbers of enemies (Antony 45.12). John Macdonald Kinneir, an early nineteenth-century explorer who travelled through much of the same terrain, thought that the achievement of the Ten Thousand was unparalleled in the

The Expedition of Cyrus (Greek Anabasis Kyrou