Battle Odyssey

THE MARCH UP COUNTRY: XENOPHON'S ANABASIS (205 pp.)--Translated by W.H.D. Rouse--University of Michigan ($3.95).

More than 2,000 years ago. in a campaign against King Artaxerxes II, a force of Greek troops was trapped deep in the Persian Empire. Surrounded by hostile armies, the Greeks had no hope of reinforcement and no allies, were separated from home by broad rivers, towering mountain ranges, snow-covered plateaus.

The story of how 10.000 Greeks fled the trap is told in a third-person narrative by the man who led them out of the trap: Xenophon, a 30-year-old Athenian, who was a friend of Socrates and the world's first war correspondent; he accompanied the expedition as a curious observer, not a soldier. This modern translation by the late Professor William H. D. Rouse (the Iliad and the Odyssey) marks another important addition to the ancient classics that are being turned into briskly readable, contemporary English by such able writers as Robert Graves (The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Lucan's Pharsalia), Rolfe Humphries (Ovid's Metamorphoses), Moses Hadas (An Ethiopian Romance by Heliodorus), Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald (Sophocles' Theban plays), Stanley Alexander Handford (Caesar's Gallic Wars).

Fight to the Sea. In this new translation, Xenophon's Anabasis (literally, "the journey upward") emerges as tense, exciting journalism. Infantrymen have changed little: a Greek footslogger grumbles that "I'm tired out packing up and marching and doubling and carrying arms and falling in and keeping guard and fighting. I want a little rest." Xenophon describes a rough-and-ready means of getting stubborn prisoners to talk: kill one in front of the other to loosen the survivor's tongue.

The Greeks moved deep into the Persian Empire (see map) when Cyros, the Persian governor of Asia Minor, hired 12,900 of them to help overthrow his brother. King Artaxerxes. They clashed with the Persian forces at Cunaxa, near ancient Babylon. After Cyros was killed by a javelin, his native troops fled the field, leaving the Greeks surrounded. To make matters worse, the Persians slew the Greek commanders by treachery.

Then the long march began. Xenophon rallied the panic-stricken Hellenes, got them to elect five new leaders--himself included--and fight their way to the sea. The heavily armed Greeks moved laboriously across the plain, while clouds of Persian cavalry showered them with arrows. The only way out was to turn north into the mountains of Kurdistan, whose warlike inhabitants had just chopped to pieces a Persian army of 112,000 men. In seven days of ceaseless fighting with the Kurds, the Greeks suffered more than in all their battles with the Persians.

Fifteen Hundred Miles. After the Kurds came the Taochians, bitter-end tribesmen who, when one of their forts was stormed, committed mass suicide. Next were the Chalybeans, the "stoutest men" the Greeks had yet faced, who fought them hand to hand and, when they killed a Greek, cut off his head and "sang and danced," waving it in front of the survivors. Armenia was an agony, a land filled with blizzards. Men "who had been blinded by the snow or lost their toes by frostbite" had to be left behind.

In one of Xenophon's most moving passages, as the exhausted troops climb slowly up one more mountain, there suddenly rises from the front rank a tremendous cry. "Xenophon, hearing this, thought that more enemies were attacking in front; for some were following behind them from the burning countryside . . . But when the shouts grew louder and nearer, as each group came up it went pelting along to the shouting men in front, and the shouting was louder and louder as the crowds increased. Xenophon mounted his horse, and took Lycios with his horsemen, and galloped to bring help. Soon they heard the soldiers shouting 'Sea! Sea!' and passing the word along . . . When they all reached the summit then they embraced each other, captains and officers and all, with tears running down their cheeks.''

They had reached the coast of the Black Sea. The long battle odyssey of some 1,500 miles was over, for here were Greek cities, and here should have been an end of fighting. But the end of fighting brought the beginning of distrust. The soldiers turned against each other. Xenophon had to use all his oratorical skill to keep them from stoning him to death because the troops suspected he planned to use them to found a city instead of taking them home. The glorious march up country ends on this pitiful note of bickering and betrayal. Scarcely half the Greeks who had started to overthrow Persia survived, and they were all much poorer than when they began. Only the world was richer by Xenophon's Anabasis.

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