Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/64

54 and the historian of the march, will form the subject of our next chapter. The preceding pages have reflected a brilliant episode of Greek military history. It is true that the Cyreian force encountered no enemies who combined bravery of spirit with the arts of war. Their opponents were effeminate Orientals or half-savage mountaineers. Yet the Greeks had always the odds of either overwhelming numbers, or of difficulties of the ground, against them. Through these their untiring energy and courage, and the prestige created by their bold front and their élan, alone carried them. They were favoured, of course, by fortune, and also by the errors and the backwardness of their foes. After the affair of Cunaxa, it would seem easy for the King to have wasted the country with his cavalry, to have kept them outside the Median wall, and to have starved them into submission. Again, after Tissaphernes had murdered their officers, it is difficult to see why he did not hold the passage of the Zab against them, or why in the succeeding days he did not attack them in force. Doubtless he would have done so if their march through the plain had continued longer, because his troops were gradually getting accustomed to the idea of encountering Greeks. But from this danger, to which they must ultimately have succumbed, the mountains of Kurdistan opportunely saved them. After that point the difficulties were of a different kind, and such as their Greek versatility and buoyancy of spirit were able to cope with.

The graphic memoir in which Xenophon recorded the fortunes of the Ten Thousand divulged a secret to