Anabasis / Persian Expedition

What It Is

Seven books of Greek prose, written around 370 BC, about a campaign that began in 401 BC. Xenophon was a young Athenian gentleman and a student of Socrates who joined a mercenary army on the advice of a friend and against the advice of his teacher. He was there for all of it. He wrote the account himself, in the third person, referring to Xenophon throughout as though describing another man, and Plutarch says he first published it under someone else's name.

It is the oldest first-hand war memoir in the Western tradition and still one of the two or three best. What it records is not strategy but the texture of soldiering: cold, hunger, snow, mutiny, arguments about which way to go, the difficulty of getting men to do anything at all. There are votes. There are speeches to unwilling troops. There are long stretches in which the enemy is the weather.

It is also fast. Two hundred and fifty pages, and no interest whatever in testing your patience.

Why It Matters

For two thousand years this was the first real Greek that schoolboys read, which means it has passed through more literate minds than almost any other pagan book.

Its historical consequence was enormous. What this expedition taught the Greeks about the Persian Empire lodged in their imagination and stayed there. Alexander was born into a world that had read this book.

Its literary consequence is larger still. Caesar's Commentaries take their third-person self-narration from Xenophon. Every account since of an army somewhere it has no business being, from Arrian to the modern war memoir, works in a form he invented. Sol Yurick moved it to the New York subway in 1965 and it held, which tells you how durable the shape is.

It also contains the oldest sustained account of leadership as a practical problem: not the general as hero, but the general as a man who must persuade tired, frightened, quarrelsome people to keep walking. Xenophon is honest about how hard that is. This is the only ancient book on the list that reads as though written by someone who has actually been cold.

Before You Read

Ten to twelve hours. The easiest ancient prose you will read, and the most propulsive. A few days is enough.

Keep a map open. The geography is the book, and following the route valley by valley is a large part of what the Anabasis offers.

Watch the speeches, especially his own. He reports his own oratory at length and always to his credit, and he is also the man writing it down. A little scepticism improves the experience.

Which Translation to Read

• Robin Waterfield (Oxford World's Classics, 2005), published as The Expedition of Cyrus — recommended. The best modern English: quick, muscular, unfussy, and true to a writer whose great virtue is plainness. Tim Rood's introduction and notes are excellent on the mercenary world and on Xenophon's reliability about himself. Portable and cheap. The cost: the maps are adequate rather than good, and this is a book where maps matter. View on Amazon →
• The Landmark Xenophon's Anabasis (translated by David Thomas, edited by Shane Brennan and David Thomas, Pantheon, 2021). The reference edition: maps on nearly every spread, a superb index, appendices by specialists, and notes from editors who have walked the ground. Nothing else makes the march this legible. The cost: a heavy hardback, and the marginal summaries tell you what is coming on every page, which flattens a narrative that depends on not knowing.
• Rex Warner (Penguin Classics, 1949), published as The Persian Expedition. The version generations grew up on, still in print, still readable, with a fine introduction by George Cawkwell. The cost: seventy-five years old and it sounds it. Warner's Greeks talk like officers in a British war film.

Take Waterfield as your text and keep the Landmark beside you for the maps.

The Folio Society issued the book in 2009 in Warner's translation, illustrated by Bob Venables. A handsome object; not the best text.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it as a book about management, because that is largely what it is. Xenophon is preoccupied by the practical question of how you get people to follow you when you cannot compel them. His answers are unsentimental and mostly still correct.

Trace the route on a modern map. Recognising the ground the Ten Thousand crossed as places that still exist, with names in this week's news, does something to the reading that no footnote can.

Read the introduction afterwards; most of them summarise the march in full.

The commonest mistake is to treat this as a minor work by a minor historian standing in the shade of Thucydides. Different job, done superbly. Nobody else in antiquity tells you what it was like.