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This trench was eighteen feet deep, thirty feet wide, and upwards of forty miles in length; it stopped short of the Euphrates by only twenty feet. Over that narrow strip of ground, which the Persian king might easily have held with a small number of resolute men, the Cyreian forces passed, with no one to hinder them.
For it was but too probable that the Cyreian soldiers, under the keen sense of recent injury, would satiate their revenge, and reimburse themselves for the want of hospitality towards them, without distinguishing the Lacedæmonian garrison from the Byzantine citizens; and that too from mere impulse, not merely without orders, but in spite of prohibitions, from their generals.
Speaking through an interpreter, he stated to them that the vicinity of his province to Greece impressed him with a strong interest in favor of the Cyreian Greeks, and made him anxious to rescue them out of their present desperate situation; that he had solicited the King's permission to save them, as a personal recompense to himself for having been the first to forewarn him of the schemes of Cyrus, and for having been the only Persian who had not fled before the Greeks at Kunaxa; that the King had promised to consider this point, and had sent him in the mean time to ask the Greeks what their purpose was in coming up to attack him; and that he trusted the Greeks would give him a conciliatory answer to carry back, in order that he might have less difficulty in realizing what he desired for their benefit.
Being on the outside along with the soldiers, Xenophon felt at once, as soon as he saw the gates forced open and the army again within the town, the terrific emergency which was impending: first, the sack of Byzantium next, horror and antipathy, throughout all Greece, towards the Cyreian officers and soldiers indiscriminately lastly, unsparing retribution inflicted upon all by the power of Sparta.
But the Lacedæmonian governor was so incensed as well by his own fright as by the calumnies of Dexippus, that he threatened to sail away at once, and proclaim the Cyreian army enemies to Sparta, so that every Hellenic city should be interdicted from giving them reception. It was in vain that the generals, well knowing the formidable consequences of such an interdict, entreated him to relent.
There was no restraining cause to reckon upon, except the general Hellenic sympathies and education of the Cyreian army; and what was of not less importance, the fact that they were not mercenary soldiers by permanent profession, such as became so formidably multiplied in Greece during the next generation but established citizens who had come out on a special service under Cyrus, with the full intention, after a year of lucrative enterprise, to return to their homes and families.
=Satrap=: the governor of a Persian province. =Cyreian Greeks=: those Greeks who had engaged in the expedition of Cyrus in his attempt to seize the throne of Persia. See Introduction. =Covenant=: a solemn agreement or treaty which both parties bound themselves to keep by oath, calling on their respective gods to punish them if they violated the compact. =Convention=: treaty or agreement.
The statements of Ktesias, though known to us only indirectly, and not to be received without caution, afford ground for believing that Queen Parysatis decidedly wished success to her son Cyrus in his contest for the throne that the first report conveyed to her of the battle of Kunaxa, announcing the victory of Cyrus, filled her with joy, which was exchanged for bitter sorrow when she was informed of his death, that she caused to be slain with horrible tortures all those, who, though acting in the Persian army and for the defence of Artaxerxês, had any participation in the death of Cyrus and that she showed favorable dispositions towards the Cyreian Greeks.
See note on p. 38. =Tribute=: this was an annual tax so heavy and so cruelly extorted that it kept the great body of the people in a state little better than that of slavery. =Cyreian Persians=: those Persians who had espoused the cause of Cyrus in his attempt to seize the throne. =Amnesty=: pardon. =Strike our tents=: take down our tents.
This enormity, though it occurred under the eyes of the generals, immediately before their departure from Kerasus, remained without inquiry or punishment, from the numbers concerned in it. This march cost the Cyreian army not less than ten days, by an inland track departing from the seashore, and through the mountains inhabited by the native tribes Mosynoeki and Chalybes.
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