Thalatta! Thalatta!

was the cry of joy when the roaming Ten Thousand Greeks saw Euxeinos Pontos (the Black Sea) from Mount Theches (Θήχης) near Trebizond, after participating in Cyrus the Younger's failed march against the Persian Empire in the year 401 BC.

Xenophon describes the scene as follows: From there they went through four days’ march and twenty parasangs to a large, prosperous and populous city which was called Gymnias.

For from behind also the people from the land which was burning were following them, and the rearguard had killed some of them and taken some of them prisoner after making an ambush, and they had captured about 20 wickerwork shields covered with raw hide from oxen with the hair still on them.But when the shouting was getting louder and nearer, and those who were continually arriving kept running fast towards those who were continually shouting, it seemed to Xenophon to be something more serious, and mounting on a horse and taking with him Lycius and the cavalrymen he began going to help.

After that the Greeks send the guide away after giving him gifts from the common property – a horse and a silver libation-bowl and a Persian outfit and ten darics; he kept asking particularly for their finger-rings and he took a lot of them from the soldiers.

[3]Several attempts have been made in recent years to discover the exact location of the mountain, Theches, from where Xenophon and the army of ten thousand men saw the sea.

One feasible location, which Brennan and Tuplin call "the current leading contender", is a hill situated roughly halfway between Pirahmet and Maçka near an ancient road.

Here in 1996 Tim Mitford, who had been guided to the mountain by a local man Celal Yılmaz, observed a large circular cairn of stones, 12 metres in diameter, which may well be the platform which Xenophon describes as being assembled by the soldiers in order to set up a trophy.

[5] However, Brennan and Tuplin argue that this is only one of several possible solutions, depending on the route which Xenophon and the army followed, and believe that the matter may never be fully resolved.

Thálatta (θάλαττα, pronounced [tʰálatta]) was the Attic (i.e. Athenian) form of the word, as it appears in Xenophon's text.

The moving moment described by Xenophon has stirred the imagination of readers in later centuries, as chronicled in a study by Tim Rood.

[7] Heinrich Heine uses the cry in his cycle of poems Die Nordsee published in Buch der Lieder [de] in 1827.

')The cry is also mentioned by the narrator of Frederick Amadeus Malleson's (1877) translation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth,[9] when the explorers in the story discover an underground ocean.

[11] The phrase appears in Book 1 of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses when Buck Mulligan, looking out over Dublin Bay, says to Stephen Dedalus: "God!

There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born.

[16]Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel that inspired Walter Hill's 1979 film of the same name, The Warriors, was based on Anabasis, and the movie references this quotation near the end, as the titular gang stands on a Coney Island beach and their leader (Michael Beck) comments, "When we see the ocean, we figure we're home."