Anabasis

After confirming this agreement by giving and receiving pledges they departed. The next day they returned, bringing with them three hundred canoes, each made out of a single log and each containing three men, two of whom disembarked and fell into line under arms, while the third remained in the canoe.

Then the second group took their canoes and sailed back again, and those who stayed behind marshalled themselves in the following way. They took position in lines of about a hundred each, like choral dancers ranged opposite one another, all of them with wicker shields covered with white, shaggy ox-hide and like an ivy leaf in shape, and each man holding in his right hand a lance about six cubits long, with a spearhead at one end[*](cp. Xen. Anab. 4.7.16 and note thereon.) and a round ball at the butt end of the shaft.

They wore short tunics which did not reach their knees and were as thick as a linen bag for bedclothes, and upon their heads leathern helmets just such as the Paphlagonian helmets, with a tuft in the middle very like a tiara in shape; and they had also iron battle-axes.

After they had formed their lines one of them led off, and the rest after him, every man of them, fell into a rhythmic march and song, and passing through the battalions and through the quarters of the Greeks they went straight on against the enemy, toward a stronghold which seemed to be especially assailable.

It was situated in front of the city which is called by them Metropolis and contains the chief citadel of the Mossynoecians. In fact, it was for the possession of this citadel that the war was going on; for those who at any time held it were deemed to be masters of all the other Mossynoecians, and they said that the present occupants did not hold it by right, but that it was common property and they had seized it in order to gain a selfish advantage.

The attacking party was followed by some of the Greeks, not under orders from their generals, but seeking plunder. As they approached, the enemy for a time kept quiet; but when they had got near the stronghold, they sallied forth and put them to flight, killing a considerable number of the barbarians and some of the Greeks who had gone up the hill with them, and pursuing the rest until they saw the Greeks coming to the rescue;

then they turned and fell back, and after cutting off the heads of the dead men displayed them to the Greeks and to their own enemies, at the same time dancing to a kind of strain which they sang.

And the Greeks were exceedingly angry, not only because the enemy had been made bolder, but because the Greeks who went to the attack with the barbarians had taken to flight, though in very considerable numbers—a thing which they had never done before in the course of the expedition.

Then Xenophon called the Greeks together and said: Fellow-soldiers, do not by any means lose heart on account of what has happened; for be sure that a good thing also has happened, no less important than the evil thing.

In the first place, you know that those who are to guide us are really enemies to the people whose enemies we also are compelled to be; secondly, and touching our own men, those among them who took little thought of the battle formation we use and got the idea that they could accomplish the same results in company with the barbarians as they could with us, have paid the penalty,—another time they will be less likely to leave our ordered lines.

But you must make ready to prove to our friends among the barbarians that you are better men than they, and to show the enemy that they are not going to fight against the same sort of men now as the disorderly mass they met before.

It was thus that the Greeks spent that day; but on the next, after obtaining favourable omens from their sacrifices, they took breakfast, formed the companies in column, and began the march, with the barbarians in the same formation posted on the left, the bowmen distributed in the spaces between the companies, and the van of the hoplites a little farther back.

For the enemy had some nimble troops who kept running down the hill and pelting the Greeks with stones, and these fellows were held back by the bowmen and peltasts. The rest of the Greek army, proceeding at a walk, advanced first against the stronghold from which the barbarians and those with them had been put to flight on the preceding day; for it was there that the enemy were now drawn up to oppose them.

The barbarians did, indeed, meet the attack of the peltasts and engaged them in battle, but when the hoplites got near them, they turned to flight. The peltasts at once made after them and pursued them up the hill to the city, while the hoplites followed along, still keeping their lines.

When they were at the top and near the houses of Metropolis, at that moment all the troops of the enemy massed together and did battle; they hurled their lances, and with other spears which they had, so thick and long that a man could only carry them with difficulty, tried to defend themselves in hand to hand fighting.

As the Greeks, however, refused to give way, but kept pushing on to close quarters, the barbarians took to flight from that point also, every man of them abandoning the fortress. Their king in his wooden tower built upon the citadel, whom all the people jointly maintain and guard in his abiding place there, refused to come forth, as did also the commander of the stronghold[*](i. e., the one mentioned above, 14, 23.) which had been captured earlier, so they were burned up where they were, along with their towers.

In plundering the strongholds the Greeks found in the houses ancestral stores, as the Mossynoecians described them, of heaped up loaves, while the new corn was laid away with the straw, the most of it being spelt.

They also found slices of dolphin salted away in jars, and in other vessels dolphin blubber, which the Mossynoecians used in the same way as the Greeks use olive oil;

and on the upper floors of the houses there were large quantities of flat nuts, without any divisions.[*](i. e., such as walnuts have. Xenophon probably means chestnuts.) Out of these nuts, by boiling them and baking them into loaves, they made the bread which they used most. The Greeks also found wine, which by reason of its harshness appeared to be sharp when taken unmixed, but mixed with water was fragrant and delicious.

When they had breakfasted there, the Greeks took up their onward march, after handing over the fortress to the Mossynoecians who had helped them in the fighting. As for the other strongholds which they passed by, belonging to those who sided with the enemy, the most accessible were in some cases abandoned by their occupants, in other cases surrendered voluntarily.