ANABASIS

Ten thousand Greek soldiers, stranded in the heart of the Persian Empire after the death of the prince they came to crown. No maps. No allies. No route home. And one of the greatest true adventure stories ever written.In 401 BC, a Greek mercenary army of approximately ten thousand men marched deep into the Persian Empire in support of Cyrus the Younger's bid to seize the throne from his brother Artaxerxes II. At the Battle of Cunaxa, near Babylon, Cyrus was killed — and in a single afternoon the entire purpose of the expedition ceased to exist. The Persian army had not defeated the Greeks; the Greeks had, in fact, routed the Persian forces on their own wing of the battle. But their employer was dead, their generals were subsequently massacred under flag of truce, and the ten thousand found themselves leaderless, surrounded, and approximately fifteen hundred miles from the nearest Greek city, in the middle of a vast empire whose ruler had every reason to destroy them.What followed was one of the great feats of collective human endurance in the ancient world. Under the impromptu command of officers elected by vote — among them the young Athenian gentleman-soldier Xenophon, who would later write the account that makes the whole extraordinary episode live — the ten thousand fought, negotiated, and marched their way northward through Mesopotamia, up through the mountains of Kurdistan and Armenia in the depth of winter, skirmishing with hostile tribes, enduring starvation and frostbite and the continuous pressure of a hostile empire, until the advance guard crested a mountain ridge and saw, spread out below them, the Black Sea. The single Greek word that broke from them — Thalassa! Thalassa! The sea! The sea! — has echoed through Western literature ever since as one of the great cries of human relief and endurance.Xenophon's Anabasis is one of the foundational works of Western military literature — a firsthand account of a campaign that has been studied by every serious military mind from Alexander the Great to Napoleon, and one of the most gripping true adventure narratives in the entire classical tradition. H. G. Dakyns's celebrated English translation renders Xenophon's clear, direct, soldierly Greek prose with elegant fidelity and remains one of the finest English versions of the text. Anabasis is essential reading for anyone interested in classical history, military biography, the ancient world, or the great tradition of first-person adventure writing. This edition presents the complete, unabridged text of one of the most exciting true stories ever told. Read more