Xenophon
Anabasis, Book 4 — the march to the sea
Ἀνάβασις δ΄ · The march is of 401–400 BCE; Xenophon wrote perhaps forty years later, c. 370.
Ten thousand Greek mercenaries, stranded deep inside Persia after the man who hired them is killed, march north for the Black Sea. Book 4 is the worst of it — hostile tribes in the passes, then frostbite and snow-blindness on the plateau — and ends with the shout from the ridge when they see the sea.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Carleton L. Brownson's Loeb version (1922) is a facing-page translation, built to be read against the Greek rather than instead of it. It is accurate and close, and slightly stiff: Brownson keeps Xenophon's participial chains and his military vocabulary, which in English can read as flat reportage where the Greek is simply economical. He also tidies. Xenophon's abruptness — the short sentence dropped after a long one — often disappears into smoother English periods, and that abruptness is frequently where the feeling is.