Note 110 — Chapter LXX · RETREAT OF THE TEN THOUSAND GREEKS.

Xen. Anab. ii, 2, 13. Ἐπεὶ γὰρ ἡμέρα ἐγένετο, ἐπορεύοντο ἐν δεξιᾷ ἔχοντες τὸν ἥλιον, λογιζόμενοι ἥξειν ἅμα ἡλίῳ δύνοντι εἰς κώμας τῆς Βαβυλωνίας χώρας· καὶ τοῦτο μὲν οὐκ ἐψεύσθησαν.

Schneider, in his note on this passage, as well as Ritter, (Erdkunde, part. x, 3, p. 17), Mr. Ainsworth (Travels in the Track, p. 103) and Colonel Chesney (Euph. and Tigr. p. 219), understand the words here used by Xenophon in a sense from which I dissent. “When it was day, the army proceeded onward on their march, having the sun on their right hand,”—these words they understand as meaning that the army marched northward; whereas, in my judgment, the words intimate that the army marched eastward. To have the sun on the right hand, does not so much refer either to the precise point where, or to the precise instant when, the sun rises,—but to his diurnal path through the heavens, and to the general direction of the day’s march. This may be seen by comparing the remarkable passage in Herodotus, iv, 42, in reference to the alleged circumnavigation of Africa, from the Red Sea round the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Gibraltar, by the Phœnicians under the order of Nekos. These Phœnicians said, “that in sailing round Africa (from the Red Sea) they had the sun on their right hand”—ὡς τὴν Λιβύην περιπλώοντες τὸν ἠέλιον ἐπὶ δεξιᾷ. Herodotus rejects this statement as incredible. Not knowing the phenomena of a southern latitude beyond the tropic of Capricorn, he could not imagine that men in sailing from East to West could possibly have the sun on their right hand; any man journeying from the Red Sea to the Straits of Gibraltar must, in his judgment, have the sun on the left hand, as he himself had always experienced in the north latitude of the Mediterranean or the African coast. See Vol. III. of this History, ch. xviii, p. 282.

In addition to this reason, we may remark, that Ariæus and the Greeks, starting from their camp on the banks of the Euphrates (the place where they had passed the last night but one before the battle of Kunaxa) and marching northward, could not expect to arrive, and could not really arrive, at villages of the Babylonian territory. But they might naturally expect to do so, if they marched eastward, towards the Tigris. Nor would they have hit upon the enemy in a northerly march, which would in fact have been something near to a return upon their own previous steps. They would moreover have been stopped by the undefended Trench, which could only be passed at the narrow opening close to the Euphrates.