The March of the Ten Thousand (Anabasis)
Some 10,000 Greek mercenaries marched into the middle of the Persian empire in 401 BC and walked out again. They had been hired by Cyrus the Younger, a Persian prince who told them they were going to fight a minor hill people and who was in fact marching on Babylon to take the throne from his brother Artaxerxes II. The battle at Cunaxa near Babylon was won by the Greek wing and lost by everyone else, because Cyrus charged at his brother personally and was killed. The Greeks were then some 1,600 kilometres from the sea in hostile territory with no employer and no cause. The Persian satrap Tissaphernes invited their generals to a parley under truce and had them seized and killed, on the reasonable assumption that a leaderless army would disintegrate. They elected new officers instead, including an Athenian gentleman-soldier and pupil of Socrates named Xenophon, who had come along as an observer. The march north through Kurdistan and Armenia in winter, harassed continuously, took five months, and the moment everyone remembers is the shout from the vanguard on a hilltop — the sea, the sea — when the Black Sea came into view. Xenophon wrote it up in the Anabasis, one of the first military memoirs and still used to teach ancient Greek. Its political effect was larger. It demonstrated that the Persian empire could be entered and left, which Greek writers noted and which Alexander's generation acted on. The Ten Thousand also governed themselves on the march by assembly, electing and dismissing officers and voting on routes, which is a Greek city moving through Kurdistan. Xenophon reports the debates in full, and they are the closest thing we have to a verbatim record of how such a thing worked.
- Year: 401 BCE
- Category: Military
