Attending Oxford: The Expedition of Cyrus!

The Oxford University Press, centuries old and the biggest academic press in the world, founded its World’s Classics series in 1906 (having bought the imprimatur lock, stock, and barrel from the brilliant publisher Grant Richards in 1901). For over a hundred years, the line has produced reasonably-priced and expertly-edited canonical texts, proving that great and challenging books never go out of fashion and paving the path for later imitators like the Modern Library and Penguin Classics. New or old, it’s always a pleasure to celebrate Oxford World’s Classics here at Stevereads.

The Anabasis Kyrou of the ancient Athenian writer Xenophon was given a spiffy new translation in 2005 by the indefatigable Robin Waterfield under the title The Expedition of Cyrus, easily supplanting the sturdy old translation Rex Warner did for Penguin Classics. The book tells the famous story of the Greek forces hired by the Persian prince Cyrus in 401 BC in order to bolster his attempt to overthrow his brother Artaxerxes, the ruler of the Persian Empire. After Cyrus was killed on the campaign and the Greek generals were betrayed and murdered by the Persians, the Greeks found themselves stranded far from home, as Xenophon himself memorably puts it at the beginning of Book Three of the Anabasis:

After the capture of the generals and deaths of the company commanders and the soldiers who had gone with them, the Greeks reflected on their desperate predicament. They were close to the king’s headquarters; they were surrounded on all sides by countless hostile tribes and cities; there was no longer anyone who would sell them provisions; they were at least 10,000 stades from Greece; there was no guide to show them the way; there were uncrossable rivers blocking their route home; even the barbarians who had made the journey up country with Cyrus had betrayed them; and they had been left all alone, without a single horseman in their army, which, they were sure, meant that even if they won a battle they would not kill any of the enemy, while if they lost, not one of them would survive. Weighed down by these depressing thoughts, few of them managed to eat anything that evening and few lit fires; a lot of them spent the night not in their quarters, close to where the weapons were stacked, but wherever they happened to find themselves. But sleep was banished by distress and by longing for home, parents, wives, and children, whom they no longer expected ever to see again. And so they all passed a restless night.

Hounded by the Persian armies and plagued by the elements, Xenophon and his comrades must march across Armenia and through the mountains of Kurdistan, and the moment when they first glimpse the Black Sea, they give rise to one of the most famous travel bulletins in history: “Thalatta! Thalatta!” – The Sea, the Sea!

In his Introduction to this Oxford version, Oxford classicist Tim Rood lays out the history of the text with admirable concision and retails some of the speculations as to what Xenophon might have been getting at by writing a book about how an army of Greek mercenaries could march up-country through the heart of the Persian Empire and reach home successfully:

Xenophon’s representation of the Ten Thousand has often been seen as having a practical aim. As we have seen, their performance at Cunaxa and during the retreat was thought in the Greek world to have shown a weakness of Persia and to have paved the way for the conquests of Alexander. Xenophon himself as aware that the performance of the Ten Thousand could be used to highlight the possibility of an attack on Persia … Did he write The Expedition of Cyrus to promote a different sort of expedition – a united Greek expedition against the old enemy?

And the crowning detail of this lovely Oxford edition is the cover: it’s a detail from a fantastic picture called Ancient Warriors by the great French historical painter Georges Marie Rochegrosse, complete with warriors in shining helmets running right at us. Re-reading Xenophon’s book has just such an effect, every time.