Cyrus’s army set off in the spring of 401 BC from Sardis, in Lydia, and reached the village of Cunaxa, at the gates of Babylon, towards the end of the summer. This is where the battle with the army of the Great King – whose forces greatly outnumbered theirs – took place, on a desert plain on the banks of the Euphrates. The Greeks charged the left wing of the enemy and overwhelmed them, then took off after them in close pursuit. But at the end of the day they were greeted by a bitter surprise: Cyrus had been defeated, his body impaled and decapitated.
Thus began the Greeks’ long retreat through the desert, the mountains of Kurdistan and finally the desolate, icy expanse of the Armenian high plain in the middle of winter, all lands defended by savage tribes fiercely attached to their territory. What is most surprising is that an army of heavily armed infantrymen, accustomed to fighting on open ground and in a close formation, managed to survive the attacks of native warriors who would have benefited from all the advantages of guerrilla warfare, moving with extreme agility and speed over a harsh, mountainous land whose every aspect they were completely familiar with.
In the end, after unspeakable suffering and massive losses, due mainly to frost and starvation, the survivors of the Ten Thousand arrived within view of the sea. Their triumphal cry ‘Thalassa! Thalassa!’ (The sea! The sea!’) has become part of our collective imagination as the symbol of an unthinkable triumph over unbeatable odds.
This long march of over six thousand kilometres amidst every kind of danger and natural obstacle filled Xenophon’s contemporaries and later generations alike with wonder and admiration, but has been considered largely insignificant from a historical point of view, if not in view of the fact that it demonstrated the substantial weakness of the greatest power of that time, the Persian empire, and probably inspired the conquests of Alexander the Great. It has in fact been demonstrated that the Macedonian sovereign was greatly influenced by the Anabasis and followed Xenophon’s itinerary scrupulously during the early Anatolian and Syrian stages of his own expedition into Persia in 331 BC.
I have long been fascinated by Xenophon’s account and set out, beginning in the 1980s, to reconstruct the itinerary of the Ten Thousand on the actual terrain, undertaking three separate scientific expeditions on which I was able to map out the route with considerable accuracy and at times with complete certainty. In 1999 I joined British scholar Timothy Mitford for a close inspection of the territory. Mitford had already localized the circular bases of two huge stone cairns on the Pontian mountains south of Trabzon, and identified them as the trophy erected by the Ten Thousand when they came into view of the sea. Our joint reconnaissance fully confirmed Mitford’s thesis and his meticulous topographical survey.
But the novel does not stop here. It narrates the long march in an emotional key and hints at the existence of a huge international plot at the end of the fifth century BC, based on several discoveries which emerged during my field work and were later published in a scientific volume. My studies suggest that the Spartan government played a direct – yet covert – role in the expedition, officially organized by Cyrus alone.
First of all, it is likely that the original commander of the Ten Thousand, Clearchus, who was allegedly wanted for murder in Sparta, was actually a Spartan secret agent.
Chirisophus, the only regular Spartan officer to take part in the expedition – who became the commander of the Ten Thousand after Clearchus fell in an ambush along with all his general staff – was most probably poisoned by his own compatriots as a reward for bringing the army all the way back to Byzantium.
Xenophon himself almost certainly cut three months out of his account, precisely at the point in which the army gets lost in northern Armenia, perhaps even ending up in Azerbaijan.
Disturbing hints, these, that the expedition had not gone wholly according to plan. I hypothesize that Sparta – which had earlier won the Peloponnesian war against Athens with the help of Persian gold – learned about Cyrus’s intentions and decided to play two hands at once by allowing the rebellious young prince to enlist the Ten Thousand while keeping the entire operation absolutely secret. If he succeeded in winning the throne, Cyrus would be in debt to Sparta, whereas if he failed, the Spartan government could claim that they had had no part in the scheme and continue to enjoy good relations with Artaxerxes, guaranteeing their hegemony over all of Greece. In other words, the Ten Thousand were truly meant to win or disappear. But the outcome of the venture foiled Spartan expectations. Unimaginably the Ten Thousand succeeded in surviving their long march through a region from which no army had ever returned: two years after Cyrus’s luckless attempt, they were back at the gates of the Greek world.
Although what Xenophon seems to have deliberately left out of his account – the details of these events and their repercussions – can only be surmised, the mystery can be explored through fiction, crafting an imaginary, but quite likely, scenario.
Valerio Massimo Manfredi
The Lost Army Page 42
