Free The Ten Thousand by Michael Curtis Ford Page A

position in which Gryllus himself had started his illustrious career many years before.
    In this role, Xenophon cut a fine figure. He had grown to a man of medium height, but quite muscular, his broad chest tapering to a slender waist and well-defined thighs. Gryllus even had to order a special cuirass made for him, to be more comfortable around his collar and shoulders. His glossy black hair was cut short and left curly, military style, and unlike many heavily bearded officers, he kept a clean jaw. His eyes were still as round and limpid as they had been when he was a boy, but since his recovery from the chest wound years earlier, they had lost their sweetness and innocence, and instead glinted with a hardness that belied the boyishness of the rest of his face. When introduced for the first time to his men or to other officers, his features often gave the initial impression of a young man promoted too quickly to a level beyond his experience. This view was corrected as soon as he issued his first orders in a deep and commanding voice, and fixed his eyes on their recipient with an expression that brooked no dissent.
    I regularly attended morning gymnasium with Xenophon and cared for his animal, reporting to Gryllus on his son's whereabouts and traveling with him as his squire to his postings at Athens' dwindling garrisons. He was a model officer, possessing not an ounce of frivolity, the ideal of his father's virtue. Yet during his infrequent leaves he would disappear for days on end, spurning both his fellow officers in the barracks and the comforts of Gryllus' house, where his father vainly awaited his arrival, eager to trade camp stories and discuss military tactics. Only I know the hours he spent in drab civilian clothes, quietly accompanying Socrates as he made his rounds throughout the city, and how Xenophon would discreetly scratch cryptic notes of the philosopher's words on a small travel tablet and transcribe them at night. Only I know the days he spent with a bitter, discredited old general named Thucydides, who was busy writing a history of the war, and who occasionally used Xenophon as an aide to check his calculations and organize his notes. Only I know these things because Xenophon told them to me, and swore me to secrecy. Gryllus considered Socrates a frivolous charlatan, and Thucydides a revisionist madman, and though he would have raged at Xenophon for frequenting the former, he would have disinherited him for assisting the latter.
    The city's military situation progressively worsened, and over the next few years Xenophon found himself increasingly occupied in defensive activities more befitting a besieged provincial garrison than the center of the Hellenic world. He was in Athens the night the vessel Paralus arrived, bearing shocked sailors carrying the terrifying news of the Spartan admiral Lysander's sacking of Athens' colonies. He remained in the besieged city that year, riding the walls in its defense against the gathering land and sea forces of the Spartan alliance. He heard the tragic moaning of the people, both for those lost and for their own fate; and he watched as the city's fortresslike Long Walls were destroyed to the rhythmic wailing of the reedy auloi, played unceasingly by weeping young girls whom Lysander had ordered to accompany the city's dismantling.
    Thus the war's dismal end, and in the shadowy, shifting political alliances that emerged to rule Athens immediately afterwards, Xenophon's star began to wane. His wound at Phyle was the least of his worries, for he soon recovered full strength in the injured leg. When the Thirty Tyrants were overthrown by the democrats, Xenophon, who never outwardly supported any regime but merely followed the orders of his father and his superiors, found himself in actual disgrace, if not in outright danger of his life. The cavalry were disbanded and Xenophon's wages rescinded. There were even calls in the assembly for former cavalry troops to return all