It is highly probable that the Cyreian soldiers, though excellent in the field, yet having been disappointed of reward for the prodigious toils which they had gone through in their long march, and having been kept on short allowance in Thrace, as well as cheated by Seuthes,—were greedy, unscrupulous, and hard to be restrained, in the matter of pillage; especially as Xenophon, their most influential general, had now left them. Their conduct greatly improved under Derkyllidas. And though such improvement was doubtless owing partly to the superiority of the latter over Thimbron, yet it seems also partly ascribable to the fact that Xenophon, after a few months of residence at Athens, accompanied him to Asia, and resumed the command of his old comrades.[361] [361] There is no positive testimony to this; yet such is my belief, as I have stated at the close of the last chapter. It is certain that Xenophon was serving under Agesilaus in Asia three years after this time; the only matter left for conjecture is, at what precise moment he went out the second time. The marked improvement in the Cyreian soldiers, is one reason for the statement in the text; another reason is, the great detail with which the military operations of Derkyllidas are described, rendering it probable that the narrative is from an eye-witness. Derkyllidas was a man of so much resource and cunning, as to have acquired the surname of Sisyphus.[362] He had served throughout all the concluding years of the war, and had been harmost at Abydus during the naval command of Lysander, who condemned him, on the complaint of Pharnabazus, to the disgrace of public exposure with his shield on his arm;[363] this was (I presume) a disgrace, because an officer of rank always had his shield carried for him by an attendant, except in the actual encounter of battle. Having never forgiven Pharnabazus for thus dishonoring him, Derkyllidas now took advantage of a misunderstanding between that satrap and Tissaphernes, to make a truce with the latter, and conduct his army, eight thousand strong, into the territory of the former.[364] The mountainous region of Ida generally known as the Troad,—inhabited by a population of Æolic Greeks (who had gradually Hellenized the indigenous inhabitants), and therefore known as the Æolis of Pharnabazus,—was laid open to him by a recent event, important in itself as well as instructive to read. [362] Xen. Hellen. iii, 1, 8; Ephorus, ap. Athenæ. xi, p. 500. [363] Xen. Hellen. iii, 1, 9. ἐστάθη τὴν ἀσπίδα ἔχων. [364] Xen. Hellen. iii, 1, 10; iii, 2, 28.