What it is
The Anabasis — "the march up-country" — is Xenophon's seven-book first-person narrative of the expedition of the Ten Thousand: a large force of Greek mercenaries hired in 401 BCE by Cyrus the Younger, a Persian prince, to overthrow his elder brother, the reigning Great King Artaxerxes II. The march took the army deep into the Persian heartland to Cunaxa near Babylon, where Cyrus was killed; the bulk of the work follows the stranded Greeks' fighting retreat north through hostile territory to the Black Sea. Xenophon, a participant, became one of the army's leaders.
Historical context
The expedition belongs to the period after the Peloponnesian War, when masses of Greek soldiers were available for hire and the Persian empire was the richest employer in the world. Cyrus the Younger (not to be confused with Cyrus the Great, two and a half centuries earlier) was satrap of Anatolia and used Greek heavy infantry as the spearhead of his bid for the throne. His defeat and death left ten thousand Greeks leaderless in the middle of the empire — and their survival became one of the most famous stories of antiquity.
What it reveals about the empire
The platform reads the Anabasis less as a war memoir than as an inadvertent survey of the Achaemenid empire from the inside. The march traces the royal roads, the provisioning of armies, the satrapal organisation of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, and the relationship between the imperial centre and its frontiers and mountain peoples — exactly the systems the platform reads under frontiers and borderlands and imperial logistics. It shows both the empire's reach (a pretender could raise armies and march on the capital) and its limits (whole regions of mountain peoples were never really governed at all).
Reception and influence
The book's most consequential reader was Alexander. The spectacle of ten thousand Greeks marching to the heart of the Persian empire and back was read, in the fourth century, as a demonstration that the Achaemenid colossus was penetrable — that disciplined Greek and Macedonian infantry could go where they liked inside it. The Anabasis thus belongs to the prehistory of Alexander's conquest, read in Alexander and the Persian inheritance. As literature it founded the genre of the military memoir.
Source discipline
Xenophon was a participant and one of the commanders, and the Anabasis is in part a self-justification — he writes of himself in the third person and presents his own conduct favourably. It is a Greek soldier's view of the Persian interior, not a Persian source. Cite by book and chapter (e.g. An. 1.8 for Cunaxa). See our Sources page.