Note 39 — Chapter LXIX · CYRUS THE YOUNGER AND THE TEN THOUSAND GREEKS.

These three marches, each of ten parasangs, from Keramôn-Agora to Käystru-Pedion,—are the longest recorded in the Anabasis. It is rather surprising to find them so; for there seems no motive for Cyrus to have hurried forward. When he reached Käystru-Pedion, he halted five days. Koch (Zug der Zehn Tausend, Leipsic, 1850, p. 19) remarks that the three days’ march, which seem to have dropped out of Xenophon’s calculation, comparing the items with the total, might conveniently be let in here; so that these thirty parasangs should have occupied six days’ march instead of three; five parasangs per day. The whole march which Cyrus had hitherto made from Sardis, including the road from Keramôn-Agora to Käystru-Pedion, lay in the great road from Sardis to the river Halys, Kappadokia, and Susa. That road (as we see by the March of Xerxes, Herodot. vii, 26; v, 52) passed through both Kelænæ and Kolossæ; though this is a prodigious departure from the straight line. At Käystru-Pedion, Cyrus seems to have left this great road; taking a different route, in a direction nearly south-east towards Ikonium. About the point, somewhere near Synnada, where these different roads crossed, see Mr. Ainsworth, Trav. in the Track, p. 28.

I do not share the doubts which have been raised about Xenophon’s accuracy, in his description of the route from Sardis to Ikonium; though the names of several of the places which he mentions are not known to us, and their sites cannot be exactly identified. There is a great departure from the straight line of bearing. But we at the present day assign more weight to that circumstance than is suited to the days of Xenophon. Straight roads, stretching systematically over a large region of country, are not of that age; the communications were probably all originally made, between one neighboring town and another, without much reference to saving of distance, and with no reference to any promotion of traffic between distant places.

It was just about this time that King Archelaus began to “cut straight roads” in Macedonia,—which Thucydides seems to note as a remarkable thing (ii, 100).