Xenophon’s Anabasis: Empire, Contact, Archaeology

Catalog description

Xenophon’s Anabasis is a gripping first-person account of the "Ten Thousand," a Greek mercenary army stranded in the heart of the Persian Empire after a failed coup in 401 BCE. Led in part by Xenophon—an Athenian student of Socrates—the army undertook a perilous two-year retreat through Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Kurdistan to reach the Black Sea. The narrative is remarkable on several counts: its cinematic scope, its reflections on leadership, and its ethnographic and geographic commentary. It shaped Alexander the Great's Persian campaign and was read for millennia as a core humanistic text. Yet, in recent decades, it has all but disappeared from educational curricula. In this course we will rediscover Xenophon’s Anabasis and its many readers, considering the text from archaeological, historical, literary, and ethnographic angles. No knowledge of Ancient Greek is required.