Under the command of their own officers, the Cyreians now marched
from Kalpê across Bithynia to Chrysopolis,[252] (in the territory of
Chalkêdon on the Asiatic edge of the Bosphorus, immediately opposite
to Byzantium, as Scutari now is to Constantinople), where they
remained seven days, turning into money the slaves and plunder which
they had collected. Unhappily for them, the Lacedæmonian admiral
Anaxibius was now at Byzantium, so that their friend Kleander was
under his superior command. And Pharnabazus, the Persian satrap
of the north-western regions of Asia Minor, becoming much alarmed
lest they should invade his satrapy, despatched a private message
to Anaxibius; whom he prevailed upon, by promise of large presents,
to transport the army forthwith across to the European side of the
Bosphorus.[253] Accordingly, Anaxibius, sending for the generals and
the lochages across to Byzantium, invited the army to cross, and gave
them his assurance that as soon as the soldiers should be in Europe,
he would provide pay for them. The other officers told him that they
would return with this message and take the sense of the army; but
Xenophon, on his own account, said that he should not return; that he
should now retire from the army, and sail away from Byzantium. It was
only on the pressing instance of Anaxibius that he was induced to go
back to Chrysopolis and conduct the army across; on the understanding
that he should depart immediately afterwards.
[252] Nearly the same cross march was made by the Athenian
general Lamachus, in the eighth year of the Peloponnesian war,
after he had lost his triremes by a sudden rise of the water
at the mouth of the river Kalex, in the territory of Herakleia
(Thucyd. iv, 75).
[253] Xen. Anab. vii, 1, 2. Πέμψας πρὸς Ἀναξίβιον τὸν ναύαρχον,
ἐδεῖτο διαβιβάσαι τὸ στράτευμα ἐκ τῆς Ἀσίας, καὶ ὑπισχνεῖτο πάντα
ποιήσειν αὐτῷ ὅσα δέοι.
Compare vii, 2, 7, when Anaxibius demanded in vain the fulfilment
of this promise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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