In the year 401 BC, at the height of the period known as the Greek Golden Age, a Persian

prince named Cyrus the Younger was fighting a bitter civil war against his brother and was

trying to seize the throne of Persia. To help him in this fight, he hired a mercenary

army of mostly Greek soldiers, 10,000 men who travelled the long road to Persia to fight

on his behalf. Among them was the Greek writer and adventurer named Xenophon, and he later

wrote about this expedition in his work entitled Anabasis. Xenophon and his companions met

the enemy Persian army at the Battle of Koonaksa on the banks of the Euphrates River, and

they gave the Persian prince Cyrus value for his money. The Greek heavy troops beat the

Persian's back and delivered a victory for the man who had hired them, but when the dust

of battle had cleared they heard the bad news. Cyrus the Younger had been killed, apparently

knocked from his horse by a young common soldier. His claim to the throne of Persia had died

with him and the war was over. For the Greeks this must have been heartbreaking. Their long

journey, the victorious battle and all their sacrifices had been for nothing. Their general

had also been killed and all of their senior commanders captured, leaving them without

a leader and stranded in the middle of a foreign land. Now Xenophon and what remained of his

10,000 men had to find their way home to Greece. They knew that their only route was to

reach the Black Sea, which lay across the wide deserts of what is today Iraq. They were

terrified, they had few supplies, and the enemy army was already pursuing them close behind.

They hastily elected some leaders from among them and Xenophon was one of them. He told

his men to throw away everything they carried, shedding weight in order to outrun their enemies,

and so they pelted across the deserts and the fertile riverlands dotted with date palms,

following the course of the River Tigris north. And it's while they fled in this manner

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