Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/14

4 of his own age, at that period, as rendering him diffident in offering counsel to the other captains of the Greek army. He mentions himself as youngest of the seven officers chosen to conduct the retreat; he relates his own constant performance of duties requiring youthful activity; and he records that the Thracian chief, Seuthes, thinking that he was possibly unmarried, offered him the hand of his daughter. From all this we may fairly gather that Xenophon, at the time of the expedition of Cyrus (401 ), was not more than thirty years of age. His birth may, with great probability, be placed about the year 431, contemporaneously with the commencement of the Peloponnesian war.

Through the successive phases of that twenty-eight years' war, Xenophon grew up to manhood. He was probably unconscious of the horrors of the plague which raged at Athens during the second and third years of the war. But he may well have remembered in his early boyhood the annual invasion of Attica by the Spartans, and the ravaging of the country up to the very city walls. When about seventeen years old he probably shared in the enthusiasm connected with the sending off of the Athenian expedition against Sicily; and two years later he witnessed the national grief and consternation at the news of the utter destruction of the Athenian force at Syracuse. When about twenty-eight years old, he saw the blockade, and finally the capitulation, of Athens, which in some respects might be compared to the capitulation of Paris in the year 1871. Such comparisons must not