The Ten Thousand

Xenophon stood stiffly, a soldier's posture, facing his mentor. His eyes were directed toward Socrates, but were focused on the middle distance, like one whose mind has already been set. Socrates noticed this too, and paused, searching his face. He sighed.

"Xenophon," he said gently. "One thing more: You are not yet married, and you're not likely to find a suitable wife among Cyrus' camp followers. Your father will be expecting a grandson soon. You have a family here, friends, a fortune, a future ahead of you and an Athens that will soon be reconciled with itself again." Socrates smiled sadly. "I know that Proxenus is your blood relation and your friend, and there are ties between you that I can never loosen. But please, consider your position carefully. Talk to your father, or if you feel that his opinion is a foregone conclusion, at least take the trouble to sacrifice to the gods, and ask the oracle at Delphi for guidance in making your decision."

We walked back to the house in silence. That afternoon we rode, still in silence, to the old family estate at Erchia, which he had not visited in years. The weather was cold, windy and rainy, and as soon as we arrived Xenophon strode through the dusty hallways to his old room, closing the door behind him. For two days I scarcely saw him as he remained shut inside, reading the books he had brought with him, writing letters, working assiduously on his notes. I ca

On the morning of the third day he burst into my room, bathed and well-rested and with blood-stanching cobwebs still dangling parasitically from his jaw as the result of his hurried shaving. The transformation in him was so dramatic that I was momentarily startled, though at the same time delighted to see him having returned to himself. Xenophon was not in the mood for idle chatter, however.

"Pack up, Theo," he a

BOOK TWO

He arrived at Krissa beneath snow-peaked Parnassus,

Where a foothill turns to face the west: A cliff overhangs it

From above, a rugged hollow glade lies hidden beneath:

There the lord Phoebus Apollo resolved to build his glorious temple.

– HOMERIC HYMN

BLOODY BATTLE AND homecoming embrace, lightning-studded skies and Arcadian pastures, riddles, mirrors, smoke, illusion, the love of a woman, the wrath of the gods. Life is drama, a tragedy and comedy both, and we the actors. A trite observation, one decidedly inspired by some other man's muses. Yet for all the horrors and triumphs of the stage, I have found that the arts of Dionysus offer little to compare with the struggles and achievements, the lives and deaths of real men, or at least men of thought and action, men who renounce the apathy and ignorance of those who pass through life as if they were mere temporary visitors, gawking occasionally but for the most part simply following the meaty desires of their bellies and loins. Sophocles said as much when he wrote a few years ago,

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man.

His is the power to cross the storm-driven seas…

His are speech and wind-swift thought…

But there is little that can be recited on the stage that can match any true story of men who have sought to rise above base passivity, men who have taken their lives into their own hands, shaping other men and their surroundings into something more amenable to their own desires, and in the process irrevocably changing their world. Men truly live just as passionately as in the great dramas. They die just as brutally; they love just as fiercely. But in the real world they do not wear plaster masks that are hung on the wall at the end of a performance. Men's actions endure beyond their faces and names, and their effects are not finite and temporary, but encompass their descendants and the descendants of their fellow protagonists in widening yet ever fainter rings for all eternity. How odd that we seek through drama to depict, or to escape from, our own world, the infinite variety and cosmic timelessness of which puts even that of the gods to shame.

My pen rambles and the impatient Muses urge me to move on with my tale.

CHAPTER ONE

THE TRIP TO Delphi was long, though not without interest. Xenophon was the perfect pilgrim, stopping at every roadside attraction, keeping a purse full of obols to tip the young guides importuning us to visit this or that sacred spring, never letting a table of fruit set up outside a farmstead be passed by without a sample. The roads were crowded with men and women, merchants, shysters and prostitutes, all traveling to Delphi to attend the a

As it happened, Xenophon had carefully chosen the pilgrims near whom he had dismounted. He quickly struck up a conversation with a cheerful, heavyset country girl named Aglaia, who was traveling to Delphi for the first time, to ask the oracle for guidance on choosing a husband from among her three suitors. Oddly, she was traveling unaccompanied by any male guardian, a fact that would have raised disapproving eyebrows among the other travelers had it not been for the formidable, glowering old crone she was dragging in tow, who turned out to be her grandmother. Though dressed in the rough clothes of a village lass, a goatherd really, Aglaia was plump and lovely, with strong, fleshy arms ta

"Xenophon!" I said under my breath. "Don't be an idiot! Can't you see she's got you pegged to be suitor number four?" I tried to elbow him over to another group of travelers heading in our direction.