Among the many Greeks admitted to the conversation and to the table of Cyrus, was Clearchus, a Lacedæmonian; who, after serving in the armies of his own commonwealth, through the Peloponnesian War, found himself, at the age of fifty, still uneasy in rest. Seeking opportunity for military employment, he thought he had discovered it in the Thracian Chersonesus, where the Greek settlers were harassed by incursions of the neighbouring barbarians; and he persevered in representation and solicitation to the ephors till he obtained a commission for a command there. Hastening his departure, at Corinth an order of recall overtook him. The disappointment was more than he could bear; he resolved to disobey the revered scytale; and proceeded, in defiance of it, to act in pursuance of his commission received. For this he was, in absence, condemned to death; a sentence operating to his banishment for life. What fair hope now remained to Clearchus does not appear; but the need of military talents, continually and extensively occurring among the various warring commonwealths and scattered colonies of the Greeks, always offered some prospect for adventurers of any considerable military reputation; and, in the moment, a still more inviting field, possibly always in his view, appeared in the court of Cyrus. Thither he went, and, under a forbidding outside, a surly countenance, a harsh voice, and rough manners, the prince discovering in him a character he wanted, after short intercourse, made him a present of ten thousand darics, near eight thousand pounds sterling. Clearchus did not disappoint this magnificent generosity. Employing the whole of the prince’s present in raising troops, he offered, as an individual adventurer, that protection to the Chersonesites which, as a general of the Lacedæmonian forces, he had been commissioned to give, but which the Lacedæmonian government, though claiming to be the protecting power of the Grecian name, had finally refused to afford. His service was accepted; and his success against the barbarians, together with the uncommon regularity and inoffensiveness of his troops in the friendly country, so gratified, not the Chersonesites only, but all the Hellespontine Greeks, that, while he generally found subsistence at the expense of the enemy, they provided large pay for his army by voluntary contribution. Hence, with a discipline severe sometimes to excess, he preserved the general attachment of those under him; and thus a body of troops was kept in the highest order, ready for the service of Cyrus.