previous next

When the soldiers learned what had taken place, at the moment they were panic-stricken and all rushed to arms in great disorder, since there was no one to command; but after this, since no one disturbed them, they elected a number of generals and put the supreme command in the hands of one, Cheirisophus the Lacedaemonian. [2] The generals organized the army for the march on the route they thought best and proceeded toward Paphlagonia. Tissaphernes sent the generals in chains to Artaxerxes, who executed the others but spared Menon alone, since he alone, because of a quarrel with his allies,1 was thought to be ready to betray the Greeks. [3] Tissaphernes, following with his army, clung to the Greeks, but he did not dare to meet them in battle face to face, fearing as he did the courage and recklessness of desperate men; and although he harassed them in places well suited for that purpose, he was unable to do them any great harm, but he followed them, causing slight difficulties, as far as the country of the people known as the Carduchi. [4]

Since Tissaphernes was unable to accomplish anything further, he set out with his army for Ionia; and the Greeks made their way for seven days through the mountains of the Carduchi, suffering greatly at the hands of the natives, who were a warlike people and well acquainted with the region. [5] They were enemies of the King and a free people who practised the arts of war, and they especially trained themselves in hurling the largest stones they could with slings and in the use of enormous arrows, with which missiles they inflicted wounds on the Greeks from advantageous positions, slaying many and seriously injuring not a few. [6] For the arrows were more than two cubits long2 and pierced both the shields and breastplates, so that no armour could withstand their force; and these arrows they used were so large, we are told, that the Greeks wound thongs about those that had been shot and used them as javelins to hurl back. [7] Now after they had traversed with difficulty the country we have mentioned, they arrived at the river Centrites, which they crossed, and entered Armenia. The satrap here was Tiribazus, with whom they made a truce and passed through his territory as friends.

1 Or "with his fellow commanders".

2 About three feet.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (7 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: