The Ten Thousand

Michael Curtis Ford

The Ten Thousand

HISTORICAL NOTE

The late fifth century B.C. brought bloodshed and upheaval to the Western World. During the previous hundred years Athens had been experiencing a Golden Age, a magnificent flowering of culture and thought culminating in the establishment of the world's first functioning democracy under Pericles, the vast literary achievements of Sophocles and Euripides, and the construction of the Parthenon. Enormous maritime fleets brought untold wealth from every corner of the Mediterranean, and Greek military prowess had become the envy and dread of the ancient world, through two important i

Now the monumental city of marble had been brought to its knees-its massive fortifications toppled, the powerful navy by which it had ruled the seas destroyed, its fields burnt and poisoned, its population impoverished and plague-ridden. A murderous and vindictive puppet government remembered as the Thirty Tyrants was installed by the victors to rule the defeated city, prompting cycles of rebellion and reprisal and further complicating an already chaotic political landscape. Thousands of battle-hardened soldiers from both sides in the conflict simply remained abroad after their discharge, seeking to satisfy their lingering taste for blood and plunder by hiring themselves out to the highest bidder for mercenary assignments. The rest of Greece, indeed the entire Western World, looked no longer to the vanquished Athens for political leadership-but rather to the secretive, xenophobic military state of Sparta.

The upheaval had shaken the moral foundations of society, and new leaders were needed, ones who could put the horrors of the internecine war behind them and look to rebuild Athens and restore Greece's preeminence in the world. Other centers of power, however, would not let Athens rise again so easily. Persia, in particular, an enormous empire sprawling from India to Egypt, had much to gain. Twice in the past century its plans for world domination had been thwarted by humiliating defeat in Greece-yet its ambitions continued to smolder, and it bankrolled the Spartans in the final years of the Pelopo

The Greek city-states of Thebes and Corinth also had legitimate claims to leadership, and Syracuse, which in alliance with Sparta had destroyed Athens' formidable navy, remained a powerful force as well. Even the Spartans, though nominally the rulers of the eastern Mediterranean, were only reluctant leaders at best, fearing the sea and unwilling to open their own society and economy to the corrosive influences of the outside world. The various competing forces had effectively neutralized each other, creating a balance of impotence.

Within this milieu of chaos, oppression, and past glory following the Pelopo

Give me but a little leave, and I will set before your eyes in brief a stupend, vast, infinite Ocean of incredible madness and folly; a Sea full of shelves and rocks, sands, gulfs, Euripuses, and contrary tides, full of fearful monsters, uncouth shapes, roaring waves, tempests, and Siren calms, Halcyonian Seas, unspeakable misery, such Comedies and Tragedies, such absurd and ridiculous, feral and lamentable fits, that I know not whether they are more to be pitied or derided, or may be believed, but that we daily see the same still practiced in our days, fresh examples, new news, fresh objects of misery and madness in this kind, that are still represented to us, abroad, at home, in the midst of us, in our bosoms.

PROLOGUE

It was the dragons of Phyle that defeated us in the end.

They and Thrasybulus, that rebel, that madman. As a general he had dined at our own table in Athens more times than I could count, but after ru

Critias was charged with assembling the army and leading us in the assault, but Critias was no soldier; he was a politician, the leader of the extreme faction of the Thirty, precisely the sort of man Thrasybulus most despised. A fine show he made even in the pouring rain, all bombast and bluff, ordering his foot soldiers here and his archers there, posing with a new sword while his fine Carthaginian charger pranced beneath him. Admittedly, the fact that he kept himself surrounded by a squad of silent, scarlet-cloaked Spartans lent him a certain authority. But the ca