Anabasis (Xenophon)

Xenophon's Anabasis, translated by Carleton Lewis Brownson.[1]

Anabasis (/əˈnæbəsɪs/; Greek: Ἀνάβασις [anábasis]; an "expedition up from") is the most famous work of the Ancient Greek professional soldier and writer Xenophon.[2] It gives an account of the expedition of the Ten Thousand, an army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to help him seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II, in 401 BC.

The seven books making up the Anabasis were composed c. 370 BC. Although as an Ancient Greek vocabulary word, ᾰ̓νᾰ́βᾰσῐς means "embarkation", "ascent", or "mounting up", the title Anabasis has been rendered by some translators as The March Up Country or as The March of the Ten Thousand. The story of the army's journey across Asia Minor and Mesopotamia is Xenophon's best known work and "one of the great adventures in human history".[3]

  1. ^ Brownson, Carlson L. (Carleton Lewis) (1886). Xenophon;. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press.
  2. ^ Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert. A Greek-English Lexicon on Perseus.
  3. ^ Durant, Will (1939). The Story of Civilization Volume 2: The Life of Greece. Simon & Schuster. pp. 460–61.