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Updated: June 26, 2025
The Persian made more than one effort to recover his province. After conspicuous failure with his own generals Artaxerxes adopted tardily the course which Clearchus, captain of the Ten Thousand, is said to have advised after the battle of Cunaxa, and tried his fortune once more with Greek condottieri, only to find Greek generals and Greek mercenaries arrayed against them.
These Greek women of western Asia were much in request among the Asiatic kings. Cyrus the younger had two Greek women with him when he fell at Cunaxa, and one of them was a Milesian. The description shows what it was. The diadem was a mark of royal rank among the Asiatic nations. Aurelian is said to have been the first Roman Emperor who adopted the diadem, which appears on some of his coins.
At the end of the retreat their numbers were reduced to about six thousand, and from the starting-point at Cunaxa to the middle of the southern coast of the Black Sea they had travelled as much as two thousand miles. Their great performance is regarded as having prepared the way for Alexander's triumphant advances in the East.
The battle of Cunaxa was fatal to Cyrus; he was slain and his camp was pillaged. The expedition had failed. But such men are not driven to despair. They refused to surrender, and make up their minds to retreat—to find their way back again to Greece, since all aggressive measures was madness.
Escaping from prison, he formed a design to wrest the throne from Artaxerxes. For this purpose he engaged the forces of Proxenus, and to this army Xenophon attached himself. Instead of attacking the Pisidians, the followers of Cyrus proceeded east through Asia and Babylonia till they met the forces of Artaxerxes at Cunaxa.
The Ten Thousand Greeks would in all likelihood never have got under Clearchus to Cunaxa or anywhere within hundreds of miles of it, but for the fact that Cyrus was with them and the adherents of his rising star were supplying their wants and had cleared a road for them through Asia Minor and Syria. In their Retreat they were desperate men, of whom the Great King was glad to be quit.
To his credit account, which is considerable, stands his wonder-working faith in the recuperative forces of his country when its fortunes were at their lowest ebb. With buoyancy and confidence he set himself the task of rescuing his fellow-countrymen when it looked as hopeless as that of Xenophon at Cunaxa.
He takes with him an auxiliary force of ten thousand Greeks. He in killed in battle at Cunaxa; and the ten thousand, led by Xenophon, effect their retreat in spite of the Persian armies and the natural obstacles of their march. In this, and the five following years, the Lacedaemonians under Agesilaus and other commanders, carry on war against the Persian satraps in Asia Minor.
At Cunaxa, not far from Babylon, Cyrus fell in the combat with his brother. The Persians enticed the Greek generals to come into their camp, and slew them. The story of this march, through snow, over rugged mountains, and across rapid currents, is told in the Anabasis. A very striking passage is the description of the joy of the Greeks when from a hilltop they first descried the Black Sea.
Eager for knowledge as they were, they passed over the ground without suspecting that the dust thrown up by their feet had once been a city famous and feared over all Asia, and that the capital of an empire hardly less great than that of the Artaxerxes whom they had faced at Cunaxa, had once covered the ground where they stood. Fr.
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