Ten Thousand

[citation needed] The Greek senior officers accepted the invitation of Tissaphernes to a feast where they were taken prisoner, led before the king, and executed.

[citation needed] Xenophon and his men initially had to deal with volleys from a minor force of harassing Persian missile cavalry.

[4] Tissaphernes pursued Xenophon with a vast force, and when the Greeks reached the wide and deep Great Zab river, they seemed to be surrounded.

A Rhodian proposed a plan in exchange for a talent; all goats, cattle, sheep, and donkeys were to be slaughtered and their bodies stuffed with hay, laid across the river, and sewn up and covered with soil so as not to be slippery.

Dodge notes: On this retreat also was first shown the necessary, if cruel, means of arresting a pursuing enemy by the systematic devastation of the country traversed and the destruction of its villages to deprive him of food and shelter.

[6]The Ten Thousand eventually made their way into the land of the Carduchians, a wild tribe inhabiting the mountains of modern southeastern Turkey, ...a fierce, war-like race, who had never been conquered.

[7] The Ten Thousand made their way in and were fired at with stones and arrows for several days before they reached a defile where the main Carduchian host stood.

Xenophon ordered small parties of his men to appear on the hill road; and when the defenders flung boulders, a soldier would leap into the trees, and he "did this so often that at last there was quite a heap of stones lying in front of him, but he himself was untouched."

Then, "the other men followed his example, and made it a sort of game, enjoying the sensation, pleasant alike to old and young, of courting danger for a moment, and then quickly escaping it.

When the stones were almost exhausted, the soldiers raced one another over the exposed part of the road", storming the fortress, where most of the now neutralized garrison barely put up a fight.

[10] Xenophon records the joyful moment when the Ten Thousand (by then actually far fewer), from the heights of Mount Theches, saw the sea and friendly Greek colonies on the coast, which signified their escape had been made good, whereupon they shouted Θάλαττα!

Before they departed, the Greeks made an alliance with the locals and fought one last battle against the Colchians, vassals of the Persians, in mountainous country.

[19] Soon after this, the Greeks left the town under the command of the adventurer Coeratades; and Anaxibius issued a proclamation, subsequently acted on by the harmost Aristarchus, that all of Cyrus's soldiers found in Byzantium should be sold as slaves.

[20] In view of his originality and tactical genius, Xenophon's conduct of the retreat caused Dodge to name the Athenian the greatest general to precede Alexander the Great.