Anabasis: The March of Ten Thousand

Ten thousand soldiers. A thousand miles from home. Every road out runs through enemy country.In 401 BC, ten thousand Greek mercenaries marched into the heart of the Persian Empire in the pay of a prince who lied to them about where they were going. By autumn, their employer was dead on a battlefield near Babylon. Their generals were lured to a parley and beheaded. And the survivors stood leaderless in the middle of the greatest empire on earth, surrounded, unpaid, and written off as dead men.What happened next became the most famous march in history.The Anabasis is the story of how they got home, told by the man who led them out: Xenophon, a thirty-year-old student of Socrates who joined the expedition as a civilian and ended it a general. It is the first great soldier's memoir ever written - a true story of battle, betrayal, mutiny, blizzard, and survival, climaxing in the single most famous cry in Greek literature, from the vanguard on a nameless mountain summit: "The sea! The sea!"Seventy years later, Alexander the Great carried this book east as a field manual - and finished what the Ten Thousand started.A NEW TRANSLATION FOR MODERN READERSMost editions of the Anabasis are scholarly volumes or century-old translations. This Lyceum Press edition is a fresh, original translation into fast, clear modern English - because Xenophon was not a dusty classic when he wrote this. He was a soldier telling the greatest story of his life.Read it as the adventure it is: the death-scene of a prince who would be king; the midnight council where one man talks an army out of despair; the seven-day running battle through the mountains; the snow that buried an army alive; the Thracian warlord who paid his soldiers' wages in cattle and excuses.THIS EDITION INCLUDES: - A foreword on Xenophon, Socrates, the fall of Athens, and the world that sent ten thousand spears east- A map of the entire route - from Sardis to Babylon and home along the Black Sea- A brief introduction to each of the seven books- A roster of the principal figures, from Cyrus the Younger to the treacherous Tissaphernes- A glossary of terms: hoplites and peltasts, darics and satraps, omens and oaths- Clean, readable typography designed for the long marchBeloved by soldiers, stoics, historians, and anyone who has ever had to find a way home the hard way, the Anabasis has been read for twenty-four centuries and assigned at military academies to this day. This edition was built to be the copy that finally gets read cover to cover.THE LYCEUM PRESSThe Lyceum Press publishes original, accessible translations of the classics - including the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Art of War, Meditations, and the works of Epictetus - crafted to feel both timeless and new.

Pages: 218, Paperback, Independently published