Anabasis

Ten thousand Greek soldiers, a thousand miles inside enemy territory, with their employer dead and their generals murdered. This is how they got home.

In 401 BC a Persian prince named Cyrus hired the finest heavy infantry in the world and marched them east without telling them where they were going. Only deep into Asia did the Greeks learn the truth: they had been bought to take the throne of Persia from the man who held it, Cyrus's own brother.

They met the king's army at Cunaxa, near Babylon. The Greeks charged, broke the wing in front of them, and did not lose a single man.

Then word came down the line that Cyrus was dead.

In one afternoon a victorious army became the most stranded body of men in the ancient world — fifteen hundred miles from the sea, with no employer, no supplies, no maps, and no way out that did not run through hostile country. The king demanded their surrender. They refused.

What follows is the greatest fighting retreat ever recorded, told by a man who was there.

The Persian satrap Tissaphernes offered a truce, invited the Greek commanders to his tent to settle terms, and had every one of them seized and beheaded. The army woke leaderless, and that night a young Athenian with no rank and no command — a gentleman volunteer who had come along at a friend's invitation, and who had once studied under Socrates — stood up in the dark and told them they were not finished.

They elected him general before morning.

Xenophon led them north into country no Greek had seen: through the Carduchian mountains, where hill tribes fought them for seven straight days; across rivers in flood; over Armenian passes in snow deep enough to swallow a man, where soldiers went blind from the glare and lost toes to frostbite and had to be kicked awake so they would not die sitting down. They fought, starved, mutinied, held trials, argued, and kept walking.

And then, one morning, the men at the front of the column reached the top of a mountain called Theches and began to shout — and the shouting got louder as it came down the line, until the officers at the rear ran forward thinking they were under attack, and saw what the vanguard had seen.

The sea. The sea.

What this edition is

An original retelling in clear modern English prose — not a word-for-word translation, and not offered as one. Xenophon wrote fast, plain, soldierly narrative, and this edition is built to read the way he wrote: at the pace of the march itself.

Every episode is here, from the quarrel of the two brothers to the handing over of the army at the end. Every battle, mutiny, trial, storm, mountain crossing and assembly is in it. What has been compressed is Xenophon's bookkeeping — the running tallies of stages and leagues, and the messages he reports several times over as they pass between parties. Events, speeches and outcomes are untouched.

This edition includes:

• The complete march — all seven books, in Xenophon's order, in flowing narrative prose
• A foreword on what the Anabasis is, who wrote it, and why it has been read for two thousand four hundred years
• A note on the text, stating plainly what this edition is and how it was made
• A guide to the principal figures — Greek, Persian and Thracian — with pronunciations

Why read it

Because it is the oldest first-hand account of war we possess, written by the officer who led it, and it is startlingly unheroic. Men complain about pay. Generals are accused of embezzlement and have to defend themselves. The army votes. Soldiers steal, panic, and refuse orders. Xenophon is vain, and lets you see it.