The Expedition of Cyrus (Oxford World's Classics)

276 Pages·2005·1.31 MB·English

by  Xenophon

 ’ 
THE EXPEDITION OF CYRUS
X was born in the early s  to a wealthy Athenian
family. He associated in his youth with the philosopher Socrates. In
, three years after Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War,
he accepted an invitation to serve with a mercenary army (the fam-
ous 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 Thou-
sand 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 s.
R W is a self-employed writer, whose books range
from philosophy and history to children’s fiction. He has previously
translated, for Oxford World’s Classics, Plato’s Republic,Symposium,
Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Meno and Other Dialogues, Aristotle’s
Physics, Herodotus’ Histories, Plutarch’s Greek Lives and Roman
Lives, Euripides’ Orestes and Other Plays and Heracles and Other
Plays, and The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists.
T R is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Hugh’s College,
Oxford. He is the author of Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation
andThe 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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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
XENOPHON
The Expedition of Cyrus
Translated by
ROBIN WATERFIELD
With an Introduction and Notes by
TIM ROOD
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford  
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CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Translator’s Note xxxv
Select Bibliography xxxvi
Outline of Events xxxix
Map: The March of the Ten Thousand xliv
THE EXPEDITION OF CYRUS
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Appendix: Weights and Measures 
Explanatory Notes 
Textual Notes 
Index of Proper Names 
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INTRODUCTION
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...
X’s Expedition of Cyrus starts with the beguiling simpli-
city of a fairy tale. The story Xenophon unfolds is itself beauti-
fully simple––and 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   against his brother Artaxerxes,
the king of Persia, and gathered a large army––among 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 troops––known to posterity as the
Ten Thousand––has long been admired. The Greek biographer
Plutarch tells the story that Mark Antony, during his own disastrous
retreat from Parthia in  , ‘would often cry out loud “Oh, the
Ten Thousand!”, in awe at Xenophon’s 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
.). 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
viii Introduction
annals of war’ and ‘a memorable example of what skill and resolution
are able to effect’,1 while a modern archaeologist who also crossed
the same formidable mountain passes––‘in the comfort of a modern
Land Rover on a modern road from Bitlis to Erzerum in summer’––
has written of ‘the almost incredible discipline, high morale and
almost superhuman powers of endurance of this force’.2
The Expedition of Cyrus (Greek Anabasis Kyrou––literally Cyrus’
March Up Country) has been admired as much as the march it
describes. Xenophon wrote an extraordinarily wide variety of works
besidesThe Expedition of Cyrus: the Cyropaedia, a pseudo-historical
account of the upbringing and leadership of the founder of the
Persian empire, Cyrus the Great, after whom the prince Xenophon
served was named; the Hellenica, a work on contemporary Greek
history; the Apology, a version of the defence speech of his one-time
mentor Socrates, as well as other philosophical conversations involv-
ing Socrates (Memorabilia, Symposium) and the poet Simonides
(Hiero); the treatises On Hunting and On Horsemanship, and others
on household management (the Oeconomicus, another Socratic
work), military leadership (the Cavalry Commander) and politics (the
Constitution of the Spartans); an encomium of the Spartan king
Agesilaus; and an economic pamphlet (Ways and Means). At some
periods of history his more didactic and philosophical works have
been more popular, but for the last two centuries The Expedition of
Cyrus has generally been regarded as his masterpiece. It can be
enjoyed in its own right as a gripping narrative that offers a glimpse
of Greek soldiers encountering a foreign world––hunting gazelle in
the desert, stumbling on the almost deserted cities of Nimrud and
Nineveh, confronting wild mountain tribes who block their way
by rolling rocks down steep slopes, sheltering against the harsh
Armenian winter in underground homes while restoring their spirits
with the local ‘barley wine’. Xenophon’s narrative also offers a
unique insight into the character of a Greek army on the march. We
see at first hand the soldiers at leisure, holding athletic competitions
amongst themselves. We meet a world marked by the particular
1 J. M. Kinneir, Journey through Asia Minor, Armenia, and Koordistan, in the Years
 and , with remarks on the Marches of Alexander and the Retreat of the Ten
Thousand (London, ),.
2 R. D. Barnett, ‘Xenophon and the Wall of Media’, Journal of Hellenic Studies,
 (),–, at .
Introduction ix
forms of Greek religion: vows and sacrifices are frequently made to
the gods, seers are constantly consulted, a sneeze is thought to be a
favourable omen. This world permeated by the divine is also a world
permeated by the particular forms of Greek political life. The propi-
tious sneeze occurs at a meeting where the troops elect their own
generals and debate what steps they should take next. The troops
manage to create among themselves a sense of common purpose and
a readiness to accept discipline, but that hard-won sense of unity
comes increasingly to be threatened by internal tensions as they draw
nearer to Greece itself. The life of the Greek cities from which these
soldiers came was marked by a similar blend of co-operation and
rivalry.
Xenophon’s account tells us much about the character of Greek
soldiers and of Greek political life, but it also offers insight into a
broader human experience. The sense that Xenophon’s narrative is
somehow archetypal was well expressed by the French critic and
philosopher Hippolyte Taine. Taine found that, just as he first learnt
what a battle was like when he read Stendhal’s account of the battle
of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma, so too he felt when he
read the retreat of the Ten Thousand that he was ‘learning for the
first time what the march of an army is’.3
The Expedition of Cyrus has had an extraordinary afterlife.
Xenophon himself was much admired in antiquity. The second-
century  historian Arrian drew from Xenophon the title of his
Expedition of Alexander (Anabasis Alexandrou); he also imitated
Xenophon by writing philosophical memoirs and a work on hunting.
Rhetoricians praised the grace and purity of Xenophon’s style (it
earned him the names ‘the Attic Muse’ and ‘the Attic bee’––bees
were proverbial for elegance) while many other writers of prose
history and fiction copied it.
The fame of Xenophon’s account in the modern world comes in
large part from its use as a school text. Xenophon’s fairly simple
style had always made him a suitable author for beginners in Greek
to read, but it was the greater formalization of examinations in the
nineteenth century that led to The Expedition of Cyrus becoming
entrenched as the school text. In a lecture delivered in the s,
John Henry Newman imagined a university interview in which a
3 H. Taine, ‘Xénophon: L’Anabase’, in his Essais de critique et d’histoire (th edn.;
Paris, ; orig. pub. ),–, at .