Anabasis by Xenophon: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Anabasis
📖 Click to Read the Opening Pages Online Preview
Book I, the opening: the two sons of Darius
Darius and Parysatis had two sons: the elder was named Artaxerxes, and the younger Cyrus. Now, as Darius lay sick and felt that the end of life drew near, he wished both his sons to be with him. The elder, as it chanced, was already there, but Cyrus he must needs send for from the province over which he had made him satrap, having appointed him general moreover of all the forces that muster in the plain of the Castolus. Thus Cyrus went up, taking with him Tissaphernes as his friend, and accompanied also by a body of Hellenes, three hundred heavy armed men, under the command of Xenias the Parrhasian (1).
Now when Darius was dead, and Artaxerxes was established in the kingdom, Tissaphernes brought slanderous accusations against Cyrus before his brother, the king, of harbouring designs against him. And Artaxerxes, listening to the words of Tissaphernes, laid hands upon Cyrus, desiring to put him to death; but his mother made intercession for him, and sent him back again in safety to his province. He then, having so escaped through peril and dishonour, fell to considering, not only how he might avoid ever again being in his brother’s power, but how, if possible, he might become king in his stead. Parysatis, his mother, was his first resource; for she had more love for Cyrus than for Artaxerxes upon his throne. Moreover Cyrus’s behaviour towards all who came to him from the king’s court was such that, when he sent them away again, they were better friends to himself than to the king his brother. Nor did he neglect the barbarians in his own service; but trained them, at once to be capable as warriors and devoted adherents of himself. Lastly, he began collecting his Hellenic armament, but with the utmost secrecy, so that he might take the king as far as might be at unawares.
The excerpt is the first two paragraphs of Book I. Darius lies dying and sends for his younger son Cyrus, who is satrap of the province and general of the plain of the Castolus; the elder son is already at court. When Darius dies and Artaxerxes is established, Tissaphernes accuses Cyrus, the king seizes him, and their mother Parysatis intercedes and sends him back to his province. The excerpt breaks off as Cyrus, having escaped, begins collecting a Greek force in secret so that the king will not learn of it.
Download Full EPUBc. 370 BC
Memoir
~88,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 4.9 hours
Standalone
Western Asia Minor, the Syrian desert, the mountains of Armenia and the Black Sea coast, on a march that runs from the muster at Sardis to Byzantium and the Troad, in the years 401-399 BC.
Seven books, in ten groups
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.28 MB (EPUB) · 0.44 MB (AZW3) · 0.31 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #1170
A young Persian prince, Cyrus, raises an army in Asia Minor and marches inland to take the throne from his elder brother. Half his force is Greek, hired under one pretext and then another, and at the decisive battle the Greeks break the troops in front of them while Cyrus is killed charging the king. The court then invites the Greek generals to a conference and kills them. Ten thousand soldiers are left leaderless in the middle of the empire. Xenophon’s account follows the officers they elect, the road they take north, and the bargaining that finally gets them to the sea.
The book is in seven books, and Xenophon narrates his own part in the third person, as though watching a stranger. The translation is H. G. Dakyns’s, published in 1890, and this page follows the Project Gutenberg text. The campaign, the persons and the places are set out in the Wikipedia article on the Anabasis, and the whole book is free here in three formats. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #1170.
Anabasis by Xenophon: Summary, Ideas & Arguments
This page is a summary and analysis of the Anabasis, Xenophon’s account of the march of the Ten Thousand into the Persian empire and their retreat to the sea, in the translation by H. G. Dakyns. The work is in seven books and divides roughly in two: the advance inland behind Cyrus, which ends in a battle and a murder, and the withdrawal north and west that fills the last five books. Xenophon was an Athenian who joined the expedition as a friend of one of its officers and was elected general after the others were killed; the article on Xenophon covers the public life that the book leaves out. Here the text stands with the other free classics, and the two books linked at the foot of the page are its nearest company. It is also one of the few accounts of a Greek army written by a man who led part of it.
The army is assembled in pieces, and the book is careful about how. Cyrus draws garrisons from the Greek cities of Asia, takes a force raised in the Chersonese by the Spartan exile Clearchus, and accepts troops from his own friends, while the stated target is a campaign against the Pisidians. The men learn at Tarsus that the march is aimed at the king and refuse to go on until Clearchus talks them round. Xenophon records the numbers, the pay, the markets and the quarrels, and he keeps the difference between what the soldiers were told and what they suspected. The mustering takes months, and the reader is shown a conspiracy built out of separate bargains rather than a single order. Each contingent arrives with its own commander and its own reason, and the book keeps the pieces distinct even after they have become one army.
At the battle the Greek line breaks the troops in front of it and loses almost nothing, but Cyrus is killed charging the royal guard and the victory is his brother’s. The Greeks are now an army without an employer in a hostile country. Phalinus, a Greek in the king’s service, comes to demand their arms; Clearchus answers that they will fight their way out rather than surrender them. A truce follows, and the generals go up to Tissaphernes’ tent, where they are seized and their captains killed. Xenophon reports the deaths plainly, then gives short characters of the four, which is the first sign that the book is written by a man answering critics. The battle itself is described from the Greek side, in the order of march and the dust, and the death of Cyrus is reported as a fact before its consequences are drawn.
What follows is the retreat: north through the Carduchian mountains, across the Centrites, into Armenia, over the snow and past the sources of the Tigris, then down to the sea at Trapezus and west along the coast. The narrative is as much political as military. The soldiers meet in assembly, elect and depose generals, try offenders, argue about whether to go by land or by sea, and sometimes vote down their officers. Xenophon’s own proposals are resisted, and at Cotyora he is accused of consulting the sacrifices for private ends and has to answer the charge before the whole army. The route is given stage by stage, with the parasangs and the days, which is why the book has been used as a map as well as a memoir, and the men’s morale is not hidden: they are frightened, hungry and quarrelsome, and the narrative says so.
The last books are a study in how a victorious army is paid off and dissolved, and in how little a commander can do about it. At Byzantium the Spartan admiral orders the men out of the city without their wages and they surge toward the gates; on the Thracian coast Seuthes hires them for a winter and is slow with the pay; at Pergamus the troops are finally handed to Thibron, who takes them into a new war. Xenophon ends with his own thin finances and the horse his friends buy back for him, a private kindness after a public failure that left him short of money. The Aeneid and Meditations take up two of the book’s later concerns, the journey that founds a home and the discipline a commander imposes on himself. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #1170.
Historical Context
The campaign is conventionally dated to 401-399 BC, in the years after the Peloponnesian War, when Greek cities had soldiers to spare and the Persian empire had satraps who hired them. Cyrus was the younger son of Darius and was given command of the coast; his brother Artaxerxes held the throne. The book does not date its own events, and the fixed points that let historians place the march are outside it. What the text does show is the ordinary machinery of the age: mercenary pay, city garrisons, satrapal courts, and a Greek army that treats its own assembly as the nearest thing to a state it has. The king’s court, the satrapies and the Greek cities of the coast are the frame in which the march happens, and the book assumes a reader who knows them.
When Xenophon wrote is not known, and the guesses are wide. The work was composed after the events it narrates and by a participant who had had time to be criticized; the usual estimate puts it late in his life, near 370 BC, but the text itself gives no date and no patron. It is written in the third person, which lets the narrator praise Xenophon’s decisions and explain his sacrifices without appearing to speak of himself, and it is defensive in ways that suggest an audience already hostile. Xenophon wrote other works as well, and the book belongs to a lifetime of writing about command, horses, hunting and the education of a ruler. The book’s silence about its own date is part of its manner: it reports, and it does not cite.
The English text here is H. G. Dakyns’s translation, published in 1890 as part of his edition of the works of Xenophon, and it follows the Project Gutenberg transcription of that text. Dakyns keeps the Greek order of names and the numbering of the chapters, and his English has the slightly formal movement of late nineteenth-century prose, with its long sentences and its full stops. The chapter numbers are the edition’s, and the ten groups below keep them. The book was read in antiquity and has been read ever since as a soldier’s narrative, a manual of leadership and a source for the Persian empire; its most quoted sentence, the shout at the sea, is a few words near the end of Book IV.
Key Ideas & Arguments
- Two marches in one book: The advance and the retreat are built as a pair. The first is a march into the interior under a prince who has hired the army; the second is a march out again with no employer at all. The same officers, the same order of march and the same markets recur, and the reversal is the argument: the army’s problem was never the enemy in front but the absence of anyone with the right to command it.
- Command by consent: No one in the book can give an order that will simply be obeyed. Generals are elected by the assembled soldiers, can be tried by them, and must talk them into every hard decision. Xenophon’s authority rests on his speeches and on the men’s memory of his usefulness, not on a commission, and the book is honest about how quickly that authority can be questioned, as it is at Cotyora and again at Byzantium.
- The camp as a city: With no state behind it, the army improvises one. It holds assemblies, appoints judges, fines and flogs, divides spoil, fixes prices in its market, and negotiates with cities as a body. The comparison is never stated, but the narrative keeps returning to it: what a Greek city does through its institutions, the Ten Thousand do on the march, badly and by argument, and they hold together long enough to reach the coast.
- Sacrifice and the reading of signs: Decisions are taken after sacrifice, and the victims are read by professional soothsayers. Xenophon sacrifices before battles, before marches and before accepting a command, and in Book VI the signs plainly forbid him to take sole command, which he obeys. The practice is not decoration: it is the procedure by which a course of action is authorized when no one has the power to authorize it, and the book treats a bad sign as a real reason to wait.
- Speech as the instrument of command: The book is full of speeches, and they do the work that orders do in a modern army. Clearchus talks down a mutiny at Tarsus; Xenophon turns a despairing camp into an assembly that elects officers; he defends himself at Cotyora and again before the soldiers when the pay is in dispute. The speeches are composed, not recorded, and their presence is part of the argument: an army of Greeks is governed by persuasion, and its general is a speaker before he is a tactician.
- The narrator in the third person: Xenophon writes about Xenophon as though about another officer, and the device is more than modesty. It allows the narrator to report his own advice, his dreams and his sacrifices with apparent detachment, and to answer accusations without the appearance of self-praise. The reader is never told who the narrator is, and the book’s authority depends on that gap: the man who explains the retreat is also the man whose conduct the retreat tested.
Core Arguments & Influence
- Leadership without legitimacy: The book’s central problem is command without a constitution. After the generals are killed there is no one who can order the army home, and every later decision has to be manufactured: by election, by speech, by the prestige of a man who has been useful, by the fear of being left behind. Xenophon shows the cost of that arrangement as well as its success. The army reaches the sea, but it also splits in three at Heraclea, quarrels over pay, and hands itself to whichever commander will feed it. The argument is not that consent is weak but that it is the only thing available, and that it can be made to work for a season.
- Mercenaries and the city: Every man in the army is a citizen of some Greek city and a soldier for hire at the same time, and the book never lets the two identities settle. The men expect pay, markets and a share of spoil; they also expect to be treated as free citizens, to speak in assembly and to refuse an unlawful order. Cities on the route treat them as a market and a danger at once. Xenophon records the negotiations with Sinope, Heraclea and Byzantium in detail, and the details make a case: a hired army is a political body that no city can own and no commander can simply use.
- The gods, the omens and the general: Sacrifice runs through the book as a procedure, not an ornament. Xenophon sacrifices before he acts, waits when the signs are bad, and reports the soothsayers by name. The most telling episode comes at Harmene, where the soldiers want him to be sole commander and the victims forbid it, so he refuses; the refusal costs him nothing in the text and gains him the appearance of a man who obeys the god rather than the camp. The argument is double: the general’s piety is real, and it is also the strongest available check on a popularity he could otherwise abuse.
- Discipline, punishment and the assembly: The army punishes. It flogs, fines, stones and tries, and Xenophon is careful to show the assembly acting as a court with the power to acquit as well as condemn. He is himself accused, at Cotyora, of striking men without cause, and his answer lists the cases and the reasons. The book’s position is that a volunteer army can be led only through laws it has agreed to, and that the moment punishment looks like private temper the command is lost. The episodes are small and they carry the argument.
- Memory, self-defence and the making of a reputation: The Anabasis is written years after the march by a man who had been blamed for parts of it. The third-person narration, the character sketches of the dead generals, the repeated explanations of sacrifices and refusals, all point to an audience that had heard other versions. The book does not present itself as a neutral record, and its influence comes partly from that: it is the first extended account of a campaign written from inside by a commander who expects to be argued with, and later memoirs of retreat and disaster have followed its shape.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Anabasis?
The download is the whole book, not an abridgement or a selection. All seven books are here in Dakyns’s translation, from the quarrel of the brothers at the opening to the handover of the troops at Pergamus, with the chapter numbers and the book divisions of the printed edition kept in place. Nothing has been cut and no passage has been rewritten to make the retreat easier to follow than the text makes it.
The page is arranged to be read beside the text. The ten groups below follow Xenophon’s own books, and three of them are split once each so that no group runs much longer than the next. Each summary is short enough to be read before the passage it covers, and the section on the key ideas collects the arguments that the narrative makes across several books rather than in one place.
The files come in three formats. The EPUB opens in any reader, the AZW3 in a Kindle, and the KEPUB in a Kobo, and all three hold the same text with a linked table of contents. There is no account to create, no lock and no expiry; the files work offline once they are on the device, and the book can be copied to another reader without asking anyone for permission.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1170 — the complete text of Dakyns’s translation, unabridged, with the book and chapter divisions and the translator’s notes.
- Seven books, ten groups The summaries follow the edition’s own book divisions, with Books I, IV and VII each split once, so that every group stays inside a single book and none covers ground the book does not contain.
- The whole campaign in one file From the muster at Sardis to the handover at Pergamus, the entire march is in one download, with a linked table of contents and no need for a second file.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB Three formats for three kinds of reader, all free, all without a lock, and all carrying the same text and the same divisions.
- Virgil’s Aeneid is the other great journey of the ancient world, and it runs the other way: a fleet looking for a shore it has been promised, a war it did not choose, and a narrative that turns a defeat into a founding. Read beside the Anabasis, it shows how differently the ancient world wrote about a road with no certain end. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Marcus Aurelius wrote his notebook while commanding the armies of an empire, and the entries are the private record of a man holding himself to a discipline. Set beside Xenophon’s speeches to his soldiers, it makes a pair: one general explains his decisions to a camp, the other explains his to himself. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The rest of the shelf: the free classics on the site, grouped by series and author, with the translation and the text source of each edition noted on its page. It is the quickest way to find the books that the Anabasis is usually read with. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The ten groups below follow the book’s own divisions and keep its order. Xenophon’s seven books are used as they stand, and the three longest, Books I, IV and VII, are each split once where the narrative turns, so that a group never crosses from one book into another. No book has been merged with its neighbour and no group has been given a title the edition does not use.
- Book I — The muster at Sardis and the march to Tarsus: Cyrus collects his army in pieces and gives out that the Pisidians are the target. The Greeks march east through Lydia, Phrygia and Cilicia, are paid, reviewed and counted, and at Tarsus suspect the truth and refuse to go further until Clearchus talks them round with a speech about their own safety.
- Book I — The Euphrates and the battle where Cyrus fell: The army crosses the Euphrates at Thapsacus and marches through the desert to the king’s trench. In the battle the Greek line routs the troops in front of it, but Cyrus charges the royal guard, is struck down, and the victory belongs to his brother. His head and right hand are cut off.
- Book II — The truce and the murder of the generals: Leaderless and unpaid, the Greeks send to Ariaeus and parley with Phalinus, the king’s Greek herald, who demands their arms. Clearchus refuses, saying they will fight their way out. A truce is made, the generals go up to Tissaphernes’ tent, and they and their captains are seized and killed.
- Book III — New officers and the turn to the north: Xenophon, an Athenian who came as a friend of Proxenus, wakes in despair, calls the surviving officers together and argues that surrender means death. New generals are elected, the wagons are burned, slingers and a few horsemen are raised, and the army turns north toward the mountains. His appeal is the hinge of the book.
- Book IV — The Carduchians and the crossing into Armenia: The army fights its way through the Carduchian mountains, where the villages are abandoned and the passes are held, then crosses the Centrites into Armenia. In the snow the men suffer hunger-faintness, and the villages’ underground houses, barley wine and stores keep them alive. The Carduchians hang on the column and the army fights for every ridge.
- Book IV — The sight of the sea and the road to Trapezus: Past the Taochians and the Chalybes the army reaches Gymnias, whose chief offers a guide. On the fifth day the men in front begin shouting, and the rearguard runs up to hear it: the sea. Two more stages bring them to Trapezus, a Greek city on the coast, where they rest and hold games.
- Book V — Trapezus, the Mossynoecians and Cotyora: At Trapezus the men want to go home by sea and wait for ships that do not come. They raid the Drilae, march along the coast, fight the Mossynoecians, and halt forty-five days at Cotyora, where envoys from Sinope accuse them of plundering and Xenophon answers for the army’s conduct.
- Book VI — The Paphlagonian coast and the split of the army: A treaty is made with the Paphlagonians and the men dance in armour in the camp. At Harmene they want Xenophon as sole commander; he sacrifices, the god forbids it, and Cheirisophus is chosen. The army divides into three, and the Arcadians are badly cut up at Calpe. Xenophon is left with a smaller division.
- Book VII — Byzantium, Seuthes and the winter campaign: At Byzantium the Spartan admiral orders the army out without pay and the men surge toward the gates. Xenophon quiets them. Seuthes hires the troops for a winter war against the Thynians; the villages are taken in deep snow, but the pay is disputed and delayed, and the men are kept in the field by promises.
- Book VII — Lampsacus, Pergamus and the handover to Thibron: At Lampsacus Xenophon has barely enough to get home and his friends buy back his horse. At Pergamus he raids the estate of Asidates. The army is then handed to Thibron, who takes it into his own force and marches against Tissaphernes. The book ends with the army already at war again.
Anabasis: Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Anabasis about?
Who was Xenophon?
Is it history or memoir?
Why did the Greek army march inland?
What happened to the generals?
How did the army get home?
Why is the shout at the sea so famous?
How do I read the free downloads?
Part of: Classic Fiction · Xenophon
