Note 79 — Chapter LXIX · CYRUS THE YOUNGER AND THE TEN THOUSAND GREEKS.

From Pylæ to the undefended trench, there intervened three entire days of march, and one part of a day; for it occurred in the fourth day’s march.

Xenophon calls the three entire days, twelve parasangs in all. This argues short marches, not full marches. And it does not seem that the space of ground traversed during any one of them can have been considerable. For they were all undertaken with visible evidences of an enemy immediately in front of them; which circumstance was the occasion of the treason of Orontes, who asked Cyrus for a body of cavalry, under pretence of attacking the light troops of the enemy in front, and then wrote a letter to inform Artaxerxes that he was about to desert with his division. The letter was delivered to Cyrus, who thus discovered the treason.

Marching with a known enemy not far off in front, Cyrus must have kept his army in something like battle order, and therefore must have moved slowly. Moreover the discovery of the treason of Orontes must itself have been an alarming fact, well calculated to render both Cyrus and Klearchus doubly cautious for the time. And the very trial of Orontes appears to have been conducted under such solemnities as must have occasioned a halt of the army.

Taking these circumstances, we can hardly suppose the Greeks to have got over so much as thirty English miles of ground in the three entire days of march. The fourth day they must have got over very little ground indeed; not merely because Cyrus was in momentary expectation of the King’s main army, and of a general battle (i, 7, 14), but because of the great delay necessary for passing the trench. His whole army (more than one hundred thousand men), with baggage, chariots, etc., had to pass through the narrow gut of twenty feet wide between the trench and the Euphrates. He can hardly have made more than five miles in this whole day’s march, getting at night so far as to encamp two or three miles beyond the trench. We may therefore reckon the distance marched over between Pylæ and the trench as about thirty-two miles in all; and two or three miles farther to the encampment of the next night. Probably Cyrus would keep near the river, yet not following its bends with absolute precision; so that in estimating distance, we ought to take a mean between the straight line and the full windings of the river.

I conceive the trench to have cut the Wall of Media at a much wider angle than appears in Col. Chesney’s map; so that the triangular space included between the trench, the Wall, and the river, was much more extensive. The reason, we may presume, why the trench was cut, was, to defend that portion of the well-cultivated and watered country of Babylonia which lay outside of the Wall of Media—which portion (as we shall see hereafter in the marches of the Greeks after the battle) was very considerable.