Anabasis
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~94,900 words · 451 passages
Cite this work
- APAXenophon. (n.d.). Anabasis. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/xenophon/anabasis
- MLAXenophon. "Anabasis." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/xenophon/anabasis.
- ChicagoXenophon. Anabasis. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/xenophon/anabasis.
What it is about
The retreat of ten thousand Greek mercenaries through the heart of the Persian empire after the prince who hired them died in battle. Xenophon was there and ended up leading them.
Context and history
401 BC. The earliest surviving first-person account of a military campaign, and the cry «Thalatta! thalatta!» — the sea, the sea — on sighting the Black Sea is among the most quoted scenes in antiquity. For centuries it was the text on which Greek was learnt, and it taught the Greeks that Persia could be crossed: Alexander read it. Note: the catalogue carries the Anabasis in more than one version — complete, the first four books, and another English translation — plus the modern Greek volume. Say which edition you are citing, and better still the book and chapter.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
This was typed from Dakyns' series, "The Works of Xenophon," a four-volume set. The complete list of Xenophon's works (though there is doubt about some of these) is: Work Number of books The Anabasis 7 The Hellenica 7 The Cyropaedia 8 The Memorabilia 4 The Symposium 1 The Economist 1 On Horsemanship 1 The Sportsman 1 The Cavalry General 1 The Apology 1 On Revenues 1 The Hiero 1 The Agesilaus 1 The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians 2 Text in brackets "{}" is← Back to Xenophon