Anabasis
Xenophon · translated by H. G. Dakyns
Xenophon's first-hand account of a Greek mercenary army that loses its generals deep in Persia and fights its way to the sea, then spends its last book on unpaid wages and service under a Thracian prince.
Editorial review. Written from the complete text of Project Gutenberg eBook #1170.
on this day they will behold ten thousand Clearchuses instead of one
What it is
Anabasis is Xenophon's account of the Greek mercenaries who marched inland with Cyrus in 401 B.C. to take the Persian throne from his brother. Cyrus names the real target, the king, only at Thapsacus (I.iv), and the soldiers accuse their generals of hiding it. Cyrus dies in the battle of I.viii, and in II.v Tissaphernes seizes the five generals under a truce. The army, more than a thousand miles from Hellas, picks new officers, crosses Carduchian mountains and Armenian snow, and reaches the Black Sea in IV.vii. Xenophon holds no command when the generals fall: III.i says he came as neither general, officer nor private, only on a friend's invitation. Book VII follows the unpaid remnant into the service of the Thracian prince Seuthes.
What holds up
After the seizure, III.i opens on men who mostly neither eat nor kindle fires. By III.ii Xenophon gets the army to vote to burn its wagons and tents so that the baggage train does not become its general. He names the Persian wager, that anarchy would follow the loss of the rulers, and answers it with a rule: any bystander must help an officer chastise an offender.
The fixes are specific. In III.iii a pursuit of Persian archers gains nothing, and Xenophon admits the fault to Cheirisophus. The enemy shoots and slings beyond the Cretan archers, so two hundred slingers are enrolled that night, on the claim that Rhodian leaden bullets reach twice as far as Persian stones, and fifty horse the next day. In III.iv the marching square comes apart at bridges and narrows, and six companies of a hundred, falling back to the rear when the flanks close and filling the gaps when they open, cure it.
The account also records its own losses. In VI.iii the Arcadians, split off at Heraclea, lose Smicres's company to a man and all but eight of Hegesander's. In IV.v hunger-faintness is diagnosed and cured with food from the baggage train.
What does not
Dakyns's English is nineteenth century: anon, fain and whilst run through every speech, and the footnotes cite Greek in braces and Victorian scholarship. He marks some passages as likely insertions, including the closing note after VII.viii, a list of satraps and a total of 215 stages, which he credits to an annotator.
The royal army at I.vii is reported at one million two hundred thousand, set against 10,400 heavy infantry, and nobody counts it. The narrator writes of himself in the third person, and V.viii, VII.vi and VII.vii are largely Xenophon defending his conduct over pay. Book VII, thick with wages owed and the bolted gates of Byzantium, moves more slowly than the rest.
Cruelty is reported as method. In IV.i a prisoner who will not name another road is killed before the eyes of his fellow, who then talks, and the text moves on. In II.vi Clearchus's whip is explained by the theory that a soldier "must fear his commander more than the enemy".
Who should read it
Readers who want a participant's record of command after a leadership collapse: how an improvised staff keeps thousands of men moving, fed and obedient with no state behind them. It suits those who read campaign narratives for decisions rather than set battles, since the engagements are short and the logistics are long. Readers after smooth modern prose will find Dakyns heavy.
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