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Updated: June 26, 2025
For eighteen days the army marched without other provisions than what they brought with them, parched with thirst and exhausted by heat. At Pylæ they reached the cultivated territory of Babylonia, and the alluvial plains commenced. Three days’ further march brought them to Cunaxa, about seventy miles from Babylon, where the army of Artaxerxes was marshaled to meet them.
It was a blazing material world of which he was the center, the sun, and yet always I had the sense of very great life. With no knowledge of or interest in the superior mental sciences or arts or philosophies, still he seemed to suggest and even live them. He was in his way an exemplification of that ancient Greek regimen and stark thought which brought back the ten thousand from Cunaxa.
I had finished a translation of Xenophon shortly before and found it a very different book than when I was plodding drearily through it in the original at school. Here it was all vivid and real before my eyes, with the scene of the great battle of Cunaxa only a few miles from Museyib. Babylon was in sight of the valiant Greeks, but all through the loss of a leader it was never to be theirs.
The place, then, in which the two armies were drawn out is called Cunaxa, being about five hundred furlongs distant from Babylon. And here Clearchus beseeching Cyrus before the fight to retire behind the combatants, and not expose himself to hazard, they say he replied, "What is this, Clearchus? Would you have me, who aspire to empire, show myself unworthy of it?"
It was they who gave asylum to the admiral and fleet of Cyrus after Cunaxa, and sent corn to Agesilaus when he invaded Asia Minor; they supplied money and ships to the Spartan fleet in 394, and helped Evagoras of Cyprus in a long resistance to his suzerain.
Born in Athens about 430 B.C.; died after 357; celebrated as historian and essayist, being a disciple of Socrates; joined the expedition of Cyrus the Younger in 401, and after the battle of Cunaxa became the chief leader of ten thousand Greeks in their march to the Black Sea, the story being chronicled in his famous "Anabasis"; fought on the Spartan side in the battle of Coronea; banished from Athens, he settled at Scillus in Eleia; spent his last years in Corinth; among his writings besides the "Anabasis" are the "Hellenica," "Cycropædia," "Memorabilia of Socrates," and essays on hunting and horsemanship.
His three years' administration of Asia Minor was chiefly marked by a barbarous severity towards criminals, and by a lavish expenditure of the resources of his government, which left him in actual want at the moment when he was about to commence his expedition. His generalship failed signally at the battle of Cunaxa, for the loss of which he is far more to be blamed than Clearchus.
They revealed, to the quick eye of these warlike mercenaries, the political weakness of the empire and the possibility of reaching its centre. After the death of Cyrus on the battle-field of Cunaxa, it was demonstrated, by the immortal retreat of the ten thousand under Xenophon, that a Greek army could force its way to and from the heart of Persia.
Sometimes the phrase is varied, and the petition is for the special protection of a certain class of Deities the Dii familiares or "deities who guard the house." The worship of Mithra, or the Sun, does not appear in the inscriptions until the reign of Artaxerxes Mnemon, the victor of Cunaxa.
When they came to the first Greek colony—namely, Trapezus, or Trebizond—they had been a full year marching through an enemy’s country; and yet out of the 11,000 who had fought at Cunaxa there were still 10,000 men safe and well, and they had saved all the women, slaves, and baggage they had taken with them.
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