Cyrus the Younger's Revolt and the March of the Ten Thousand

What happened

By the late 5th century BCE the Achaemenid throne had passed through Xerxes's successors to Artaxerxes II, whose younger brother Cyrus the Younger, satrap of western Anatolia, decided to seize the kingship by force in 401 BCE. Cyrus assembled an army whose core was 14,000 Greek mercenaries under the Spartan commander Clearchus, including the Athenian Xenophon, who held a minor position in the expedition and would later write its history. The two brothers' armies met at Cunaxa near Babylon. The Greek mercenaries on Cyrus's right defeated the opposing Persian cavalry and archers under the satrap Tissaphernes, but Cyrus personally led his own left wing directly at Artaxerxes, opening a gap in his line that Tissaphernes's forces exploited to attack Cyrus's camp; Cyrus himself was killed in the melee. With their employer dead, the roughly ten thousand Greek soldiers found themselves stranded deep in hostile Persian territory and had to fight their way north over harsh terrain to the Black Sea coast, a retreat Xenophon later recorded in his Anabasis, the most important surviving account of the whole campaign.

How we know

Xenophon's Anabasis is a first-hand account by a participant, the single most detailed surviving narrative of any Achaemenid-era military campaign, though as the author's own memoir it necessarily reflects his perspective and interests.

Sources

• Livius.org (Jona Lendering). Cyrus the Younger · Reputable sourcelivius.org · The domain "livius.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica. ANABASIS · General sourceiranicaonline.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)