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49-609: Anabasis ( / ə ˈ n æ b ə s ɪ s / ; Ancient Greek : Ἀνάβασις [anábasis] ; an "expedition up from") is the most famous work of the Ancient Greek professional soldier and writer Xenophon . It gives an account of the expedition of the Ten Thousand , an army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to help him seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II , in 401 BC. The seven books making up

98-537: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

147-670: A Persian army many times its size. Besides military history, the Anabasis has found use as a tool for the teaching of classical philosophy ; the principles of statesmanship and politics exhibited by the army can be seen as exemplifying Socratic philosophy. Traditionally, Anabasis is one of the first unabridged texts studied by students of classical Greek, because of its clear and unadorned prose style in relatively pure Attic dialect —not unlike Caesar 's Commentarii de Bello Gallico for Latin students. Perhaps not coincidentally, they are both autobiographical tales of military adventure, told in

196-472: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and

245-669: A large army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger , who intended to seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II . Although Cyrus' mixed army fought to a tactical victory at Cunaxa in Babylon (401 BC), Cyrus was killed, rendering the actions of the Greeks irrelevant and the expedition a failure. Stranded deep in Persia, the Spartan general Clearchus and the other Greek senior officers were then killed or captured by treachery on

294-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in

343-481: A mercenary commander in the winter of 401/400 BC, describes Seuthes as the subordinate of Amadocus I. Xenophon and his mercenaries (remnants of the Ten Thousand who had followed Cyrus the Younger into Persia) assisted Seuthes during a brief but effective campaign that eliminated local opposition to his rule in eastern Thrace. The mercenaries then passed into Spartan service in Asia Minor, and soon afterwards Seuthes sent

392-543: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

441-671: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek , and Koine may be classified as Ancient Greek in a wider sense. There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek

490-509: A simple and direct manner. The Greek term anabasis referred to an expedition from a coastline into the interior of a country. While the journey of Cyrus is an anabasis from Ionia on the eastern coast of the Aegean Sea, to the interior of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, most of Xenophon's narrative is taken up with the return march of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, from the interior of Babylon to

539-609: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as

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588-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

637-556: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of

686-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

735-644: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to

784-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

833-486: The Anabasis were composed c.  370 BC . Although as an Ancient Greek vocabulary word, ᾰ̓νᾰ́βᾰσῐς means "embarkation", "ascent", or "mounting up", the title Anabasis has been rendered by some translators as The March Up Country or as The March of the Ten Thousand . The story of the army's journey across Asia Minor and Mesopotamia is Xenophon's best known work and "one of the great adventures in human history". Xenophon, in his Hellenica , did not cover

882-745: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

931-636: The Tranipsi ) west of Byzantium , but he had been expelled in unclear circumstances. His young son Seuthes then became the ward of Medocus/ Amadocus I , who eventually restored him in parts of his father's lands, including Bisanthe , although others remained in the possession of another paradynast, a certain Teres II. Amadocus I and Seuthes II appear to have been ruling by 405 BC, when the exiled Athenian commander Alcibiades boasted of his friendship with them to his fellow Athenians. Xenophon, whom Seuthes II hired as

980-626: The Umayyad emir Abd ar-Rahman I . Shane Brennan's memoir In the Tracks of the Ten Thousand: A Journey on Foot through Turkey, Syria and Iraq (2005) recounts his 2000 journey to re-trace the steps of the Ten Thousand . Valerio Massimo Manfredi 's 2007 novel L'armata perduta ( The Lost Army ) tells the story of the army through Abira, a Syrian girl, who decides to follow a Greek warrior named Xeno (Xenophon). The cry of Xenophon's soldiers when they reach

1029-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

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1078-530: The third person . Since the narrative mainly concerns a marching army, a common term used in Anabasis is ἐξελαύνω ( exelauno ), meaning "march out, march forth". Throughout the work, this term is used 23 times in the 3rd person singular present indicative active (ἐξελαύνει) and five additional times in other forms. In the late 19th century, a tongue-in-cheek tradition arose among American students of Greek who were all too familiar with Xenophon's usage of this vocabulary item: March 4th (a date phonetically similar to

1127-508: The 10,000 had to fight their way northwards through Corduene and Armenia , making ad hoc decisions about their leaders, tactics, food supplies, and destiny, while the King's army and hostile natives barred their way and attacked their flanks. Ultimately this "marching republic" managed to reach the Black Sea at Trabzon (Trebizond), a destination they greeted with their famous cry of exultation on

1176-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

1225-490: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

1274-468: The Athenians , that Xenophon had attributed Anabasis to a third party to distance himself as a subject from himself as a writer. While the attribution to Themistogenes has been raised many times, the view of most scholars aligns substantially with that of Plutarch and certainly that all the volumes were written by Xenophon himself. Xenophon accompanied the Ten Thousand (words that Xenophon does not use),

1323-476: The Authorship of Anabasis refers to the various interpretations of the word "φέρεται", which give rise to different interpretations and different problems.) Aside from these two references, there is no authority for there being a contemporary Anabasis written by "Themistogenes of Syracuse" and no mention of such a person in any other context. By the end of the 1st century , Plutarch had said, in his Glory of

1372-660: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs,   Seuthes II Seuthes II was the son of Maesades (Maisadēs), and a descendant of Teres I . Maesades had ruled as paradynast over several tribes in southeastern Thrace (the Melanditi , Thyni , and

1421-784: The Spartan commander Dercylidas as Thracian auxiliaries in Bithynia 200 horsemen and 300 peltasts. However, with the declining fortunes of the Spartans in the area, Seuthes shifted to an alliance with Athens and Persia by 394 BC. As Seuthes II's position improved, he rebelled against Amadocus I: Seuthes despised and attacked his overlord by 391 BC, and the Athenian general Thrasybulus had to reconcile Amadocus I and Seuthes II and to renew their alliance with Athens in 390/389 BC. Seuthes may have quarreled with Amadocus II or his successor Hebryzelmis again; he

1470-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

1519-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

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1568-744: The campaigns of Alexander the Great , specifically his conquest of the Persian Empire between 334 and 323 BC. The Akhbār majmūʿa fī fatḥ al-Andalus ("Collection of Anecdotes on the Conquest of al-Andalus"), compiled in 11th-century Al-Andalus, makes use of the Anabasis as a literary embellishment, recording how, during the Abbasid Revolution , an army of ten thousand under a certain Balj marched to al-Andalus to support

1617-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West

1666-545: The coast of the Black Sea . Socrates makes a cameo appearance, when Xenophon asks whether he ought to accompany the expedition. The short episode demonstrates the reverence of Socrates for the Oracle of Delphi . Xenophon's account of the exploit resounded through Greece, where, two generations later, some surmise, it may have inspired Philip of Macedon to believe that a lean and disciplined Hellene army might be relied upon to defeat

1715-563: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

1764-663: The forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been

1813-556: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from

1862-472: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to

1911-448: The mountain of Theches (now Madur ) in Hyssos (now Sürmene ): " Thalatta! Thalatta! " , "The sea, the sea!". "The sea" meant that they were at last among Greek cities but it was not the end of their journey, which included a period fighting for Seuthes II of Thrace and ended with their recruitment into the army of the Spartan general Thibron . Xenophon related this story in Anabasis in

1960-499: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

2009-483: The part of the Persian satrap Tissaphernes . Xenophon, one of three remaining leaders elected by the soldiers, played an instrumental role in encouraging the 10,000 to march north across foodless deserts and snow-filled mountain passes, towards the Black Sea and the comparative security of its Greek coastal cities. Abandoned in northern Mesopotamia , without supplies other than what they could obtain by force or diplomacy,

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2058-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

2107-525: The phrase "march forth") became known as "Exelauno Day". The origin of this niche holiday is connected with the Roxbury Latin School in Massachusetts . Xenophon's book has inspired many literary and audio-visual works, both non-fiction and fiction. Non-fiction books inspired by Anabasis include: The Anabasis of Alexander , by the Greek historian Arrian (86 – after 146 AD), is a history of

2156-417: The retreat of Cyrus but instead referred the reader to the Anabasis by "Themistogenes of Syracuse"—the tenth-century Suda also describes Anabasis as being the work of Themistogenes, "preserved among the works of Xenophon", in the entry Θεμιστογένεης. (Θεμιστογένης, Συρακούσιος, ἱστορικός. Κύρου ἀνάβασιν, ἥτις ἐν τοῖς Ξενοφῶντος φέρεται: καὶ ἄλλα τινὰ περὶ τῆς ἑαυτοῦ πατρίδος. J.S. Watson in his Remarks on

2205-651: The sea (" Thalatta! Thalatta! ") is mentioned in the second English translation of Jules Verne 's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) when the expedition discovers an underground ocean (though the reference is absent from the original French text). The Paul Davies novella Grace: A Story (1996) is a fantasy that details the progress of Xenophon's army through Armenia to Trabzon. Michael Curtis Ford wrote The Ten Thousand (2001); it follows Xenophon from his childhood until death. The Sol Yurick novel The Warriors (1965)

2254-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

2303-475: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

2352-490: Was directly based on Anabasis . The novel was adapted into the cult classic film The Warriors (1979). The metalcore band Parkway Drive released a song called "Anasasis (Xenophontis)". The guitarist and composer Michael Pisaro Released "Anabasis" in October of 2014, as part of the album "Continuum Unbound". Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes

2401-447: Was rescued from unspecified foes by the Athenian commander Iphicrates . Seuthes II is last mentioned in 387 BC, among the Athenian allies represented at the conclusion of the Peace of Antalcidas /King's Peace. Seuthes II had a daughter, whom he offered in marriage to Xenophon in 401/400 BC, and possibly another daughter, whom he offered in marriage to Thrasybulus in 390/389 BC. Seuthes II

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