Anabasis

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.

The greater part of these places were of the following description: The towns were eighty stadia distant from one another, some more, and some less; but the inhabitants could hear one another shouting from one town to the next, such heights and valleys there were in the country.

And when the Greeks, as they proceeded, were among the friendly Mossynoecians, they would exhibit to them fattened children of the wealthy inhabitants, who had been nourished on boiled nuts and were soft and white to an extraordinary degree, and pretty nearly equal in length and breadth, with their backs adorned with many colours and their fore parts all tattooed with flower patterns.

These Mossynoecians wanted also to have intercourse openly with the women who accompanied the Greeks, for that was their own fashion. And all of them were white, the men and the women alike.

They were set down by the Greeks who served through the expedition, as the most uncivilized people whose country they traversed, the furthest removed from Greek customs. For they habitually did in public the things that other people would do only in private, and when they were alone they would behave just as if they were in the company of others, talking to themselves, laughing at themselves, and dancing in whatever spot they chanced to be, as though they were giving an exhibition to others.

Through this country, both the hostile and the friendly portions of it, the Greeks marched eight stages, reaching then the land of the Chalybians.[*](Apparently an outlying tribe of the people whose territory the Greeks had previously passed through. cp. Xen. Anab. 4.7.15 ff.) These people were few in number and subject to the Mossynoecians, and most of them gained their livelihood from working in iron.

Next they reached the country of the Tibarenians, which was much more level and had fortresses upon the seacoast that were less strong. The generals were desirous of attacking these fortresses, so as to get a little something for the army, and accordingly they would not accept the gifts of hospitality which came from the Tibarenians, but, directing them to wait until they should take counsel, proceeded to offer sacrifices.

After many victims had been sacrificed all the seers finally declared the opinion that the gods in no wise permitted war. So then the generals accepted the gifts of hospitality, and proceeding as through a friendly country for two days, they arrived at Cotyora, a Greek city and a colony of the Sinopeans, situated in the territory of the Tibarenians.

[*](Section 4 in the manuscript is as follows. This passage is regarded by edd. generally as an interpolation. [18,600 stadia = c. 2050 English miles.])[As far as this point the army travelled by land. The length in distance of the downward journey, from the battlefield near Babylon to Cotyora, was one hundred and twenty-two stages, six hundred and twenty parasangs, or eighteen thousand, six hundred stadia; and in time, eight months.]

There they remained forty-five days. During this time they first of all sacrificed to the gods, and all the several groups of the Greeks, nation by nation, instituted festal processions and athletic contests.