This remarkable scene at Tarsus illustrates the character of the Greek citizen-soldier. What is chiefly to be noted, is, the appeal made to their reason and judgment,—the habit, established more or less throughout so large a portion of the Grecian world, and attaining its maximum at Athens, of hearing both sides and deciding afterwards. The soldiers are indignant, justly and naturally, at the fraud practised upon them. But instead of surrendering themselves to this impulse arising out of the past, they are brought to look at the actualities of the present, and take measure of what is best to be done for the future. To return back from the place where they stood, against the wish of Cyrus, was an enterprise so full of difficulty and danger, that the decision to which they came was recommended by the best considerations of reason. To go on was the least dangerous course of the two, besides its chances of unmeasured reward. As the remaining Greek officers and soldiers followed the example of Klearchus and his division, the whole army marched forward from Tarsus, and reached Issus, the extreme city of Kilikia, in five days’ march,—crossing the rivers Sarus[54] and Pyramus. At Issus, a flourishing and commercial port in the angle of the Gulf so called, Cyrus was joined by his fleet of fifty triremes,—thirty-five Lacedæmonian and twenty-five Persian triremes; bringing a reinforcement of seven hundred hoplites, under the command of the Lacedæmonian Cheirisophus, said to have been despatched by the Spartan Ephors.[55] He also received a farther reinforcement of four hundred Grecian soldiers; making the total of Greeks in his army fourteen thousand, from which are to be deducted the one hundred soldiers of Menon’s division, slain in Kilikia. [54] The breadth of the river Sarus (Scihun) is given by Xenophon at three hundred feet; which agrees nearly with the statements of modern travellers (Koch, Der Zug der Zehn Tausend, p. 34). Compare, for the description of this country, Kinneir’s Journey through Asia Minor, p. 135; Col. Chesney, Euphrates and Tigris, ii, p. 211; Mr. Ainsworth, Travels in the Track of the Ten Thousand, p. 54. Colonel Chesney affirms that neither the Sarus nor the Pyramus is fordable. There must have been bridges; which, in the then flourishing state of Kilikia, is by no means improbable. He and Mr. Ainsworth, however, differ as to the route which they suppose Cyrus to have taken between Tarsus and Issus.