A great scene from Xenophon

 One of my favorite passages in literature is from Xenophon’s Anabasis.

After Athens fell to Sparta, a lot of people thought the world was falling apart. 

In Persia, the great power of the day, Cyrus launched a revolt against his brother Artaxerxes II, the Great King. Cyrus had money and recruited 10,000 Greek mercenaries.

Xenophon asked his old teacher Socrates if he should go. Socrates said no. Xenophon went anyway.

In 401 BCE, Cyrus’s army left Sardis, now in Turkey but then in western Persia, and marched toward Babylon. It was a long march, about like walking across Texas.

Just before Cyrus’s army got to Babylon, it was met by Artaxerxes’s larger army at Kounaxa.

It was a disaster.

The Greeks were not stampeded, but they were the only part of Cyrus’s army that was not. Cyrus was killed. The Greek generals were lured into a trap and imprisoned.

The Greek soldiers had marched a thousand miles through rough country only to see their allies wiped out and their leaders eliminated. They were surrounded and outnumbered. They’d been months away from wives and children, parents and friends. They doubted they’d see any of them again.

Exhausted by battle, grief and bad news, the men didn’t bother to pitch tents or light fires. They dropped to the earth and slept.

It’s one of the great descriptions of men who are starblasted and moonstruck. Milton’s description of Lucifer falling from heaven is the only thing I know of that compares with it.

What do you do when you’re overwhelmed by misfortune?

Well, if you were a Greek of that era, you had an election.

The men voted for new generals. They then formed ranks. They fought their way to the nearest sea, the Black Sea.

In that day, if a Greek soldier could get to the sea, a Greek sailor sooner or later would pass by and pick him up. The Anabasis is the story of how the Greek soldiers made it home.