abstract
| - The 10,000 marched inland and fought the Battle of Cunaxa and then marched back to Greece during the years 401 BC to 399 BC. During the battle Xenophon stated that the Greek heavy troops scattered their opposition twice; only one Greek was even wounded. Only after the battle did they hear that Cyrus had been killed, making their victory irrelevant and the expedition a failure. The 10,000 were in the middle of a very large empire with no food, no employer, and no reliable friends. They offered to make their Persian ally Ariaeus king, but he refused on the grounds that he was not of royal blood and so would not find enough support among the Persians to succeed. They offered their services to Tissaphernes, a leading satrap of Artaxerxes, but he refused them, and they refused to surrender to him. Tissaphernes was left with a problem; a large army of heavy troops, which he could not defeat by frontal assault. He supplied them with food and, after a long wait, led them northwards for home, meanwhile detaching Ariaeus and his light troops from their cause. The Greek senior officers accepted the invitation of Tissaphernes to a feast, where they were made prisoner, taken up to the king and decapitated. The Greeks then elected new officers and set out to march northwards to the Black Sea through Corduene and Armenia.
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