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Overview
After decades of war, mighty Athens has been ravaged-- its navy destroyed, its city walls toppled, its army disbanded. The fierce military state of Sparta has triumphed, but passions and hate linger on. Thousands of battle-hardened veterans from both sides in the conflict remain scattered across the Greek islands, restless and dangerous-- until the young Persian prince Cyrus issues a call to arms from his base in Asia Minor. The rogue nobleman is raising an enormous mercenary army to wrest control of all of Persia, the most powerful empire on earth, from his half-brother the king.
The young philosopher-warrior Xenophon, scion of a noble Athenian family and follower of Socrates, risks his father's wrath and embarks on the adventure with high hopes for glory. Joining his cousin Proxenus, the war-maddened Spartan general Clearchus, and a huge body of Cyrus' native troops, he and ten thousand Greek mercenaries depart on an astounding march of a thousand miles, across the searing desert. Their near-deadly journey culminated in a massive, bloody battle at the very threshold of Babylon-- a battle that proves disastrous for them. Their leaders are betrayed and murdered, their supply lines cut, and their route home across the desert blocked by the furious Persian king, bent on revenge. The Fates call on Xenophon to lead the devastated Greek soldiers in their escape, though he has little experience in commanding men. As the army flees toward the snowy north, its situation appears desperate.
Months later, ten thousand battered, half-starved soldiers stagger out of the frozen mountains of Armenia into a small Greek trading post on the Black Sea. Their true tale of survival, and of the heroic expedition Xenophon led through the heart of an enemy empire, astonished the incredulous natives and has been the stuff of legend ever since.
Michael Curtis Ford combines his expertise on fifth-century B.C. Greek warfare with explosive page-turning action to give us an epic novel of struggle and survival. Not since Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire has any book so vividly captured the glory, beauty, and savage bloodshed that was ancient Greece.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429904360 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 376,808 |
| File size: | 582 KB |
About the Author
Michael Curtis Ford, a native of Washington State, worked for many years as a consultant and banker. He currently lives in Oregon, working as a translator and helping his wife, Cristina, educate their two children at home. The Ten Thousand is his first novel.
MICHAEL CURTIS FORD has worked variously as a laborer, a ski patrolman, a musician, a consultant, a banker, a Latin teacher, and a translator. He holds degrees in economics and linguistics and lives in Oregon, where he and his wife educate their three children at home. His novels include The Ten Thousand, Gods and Legions, The Last King, The Sword of Attila, and The Fall of Rome.
Read an Excerpt
The Ten Thousand
By Michael Curtis Ford
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Michael Curtis FordAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-0436-0
CHAPTER 1
Like the gods, or perhaps completely unlike them, I was always with him. My very nickname, Theo, reflects this fact. My earliest memories are identical to his, though my final recollections, I fear, have extended far beyond his own. I was present when he was born, assisting with his cleaning and attending to his tears. I will be there when he dies, no doubt engaged in precisely the same tasks. Throughout my life I tended him well, a guardian spirit, a muse, a scold, and a nuisance. Together we walked with shades and fought with Spartans, served princes and earned favor from kings. With him I entered hell and returned to the living. And with the exception of a brief interlude in a distant, muddy village on the Black Sea when my soul was not my own, or better said, when it was not his, I stood by him always. Having it otherwise would have been unthinkable for us both.
I was born, I am told, in Syracuse at a time when my people were involved in one of their numberless, dreary little wars with the Athenians. My parents and I were captured on the seas through circumstances unknown to me — whether by pirates, or through an attack by an Athenian naval trireme on the Syracusan merchant ship on which we were traveling, who can say? The little I have been told is that my soldier father was troublesome and my parents were sold as slaves, possibly several times, until they obtained positions in Gryllus' household while I was still a babe in arms. The only memory I retain of those times is a fragment of an ancient song in a language I do not speak, a discordant, tuneless chanting, which, though in days long past it may have brought meaning and even pleasure to those who heard it, to me remains indecipherable, even nightmarish.
My parents soon died of one of the terrible plagues that periodically swept through the city, one that unaccountably spared me. Orphans abounded in those times, of course, many of them born of pure Athenian stock, the children of parents who had been victims of the ongoing hostilities. These were raised by the State, lauded and praised at public events, and if their parents had died in the war, they were portrayed as heroes. Others, however, of nebulous ancestry, were subject to fortunes less clear — some prospered, if taken in by a kindly sponsor, while others were simply ignored and left to fend for themselves. So much the worse for those who, like myself, were born as slaves, or more ill-fated yet, as slaves from enemy peoples. I was mercifully kept on at the house, despite being only an infant unable to earn my keep. Possibly it was as a charity case in propitiation of the deities, or as a favor to the kindly old nurse who cared for me. My master, however, never concerned himself with my provenance, nor even seemed the least bit curious. It was simply another mystery, like the origin of the gods or the omnipotence of his father, that he accepted as a matter of course, forming, as it did, a part of his earliest understanding of life, one of those subjects it never occurred to him to question.
Those times were not easy. Athens was mired in a decades-long, self-destructive war with the Spartans, who after the defeat of the Persians by the Greek alliance had refused to submit to Athens' claim to leadership. Virtually every able-bodied man of means on both sides had been incorporated into the battalions of hoplites, heavily armed infantry troops that formed the core of the Athenian and Spartan armies. Each of these men, in turn, took one or more male slaves to serve as squires and baggage carriers, and this heavy commitment of resources to war left precious little manpower at home to do all such things for which men are needed, to keep a city prosperous and vibrant.
This made life difficult for the family of Gryllus, a wealthy Athenian landowner who maintained a rural estate in the deme of Erchia, twelve miles east of Athens. It was there that I was taken as an infant, and it was there that I spent the first years of my life raised by and serving a company of women. Most of the men, masters and slaves alike, spent the season at the front, with only a few months passed on the farm between campaigns, fruitlessly trying to make up for lost time and correct the ravages caused by neglect. Gryllus at one point had spent two years away from the estate, appearing at home only once for a single day before again returning to the front at the Council's orders. During that brief interlude, he managed to sire a son.
For Gryllus' wife, Philomena, however, a life of attempting to manage the rambunctious boy as well as the dwindling household and farm staff, while Gryllus battled the Spartans or served in the assembly at Athens, was too much. In the end, she threw up her hands, boarded up the house, sold most of the remaining farmhands, and moved in with her husband's widowed cousin, Leda, who maintained a house in Athens while her own husband's estate in Boeotia went untended. This city house had room to spare, though with the continued shortage of able-bodied men it was falling apart. Lamp and cooking oil was hard to come by in the city, even for the comparatively wealthy. Stove wood was hoarded and counted out splinter by splinter, and clothing was patched and repatched, made to serve long past the point that, in better times, it would have been given to the beggars. Only the plainest of foods were available, the staple consisting of a pasty lentil porridge. Figs, nuts, and olives were sometimes added for taste, and occasionally the family was able to obtain a bit of mutton or pork, smuggled into the city from the old sharecroppers in Erchia. Grasshoppers abounded in the vacant lots and were a handy source of protein for us slaves and kitchen staff, since even the most gristly scraps of meat were sucked dry by the patrons rather than left for the household help. Our only comfort was that Spartan food was known to be even worse. Gryllus often said that it was not surprising that the Spartans were so willing to die on the battlefield — death had to be better than living on food like theirs.
And so in Athens we made a new life, and it was while there that I was given permanent charge of the young urchin over whom I had been at least informally responsible since we were both barely old enough to walk. Gryllus' son, who until moving to Athens had never left the confines of the rural estate or been away from the watchful eyes of his mother or myself, viewed Athens as a paradise. To me, charged with monitoring his safety, the city was something else entirely. I close my eyes and can envision, as clearly as if it were today, walking through the stifling heat and dust of the streets of Athens during those years before its fall, surrounded by the shouts and curses of mule drivers and young street toughs gazing at them in admiration for their exquisite command of the colloquial; the constant stream of vagrants, who included not only the usual lot of the deformed, blind, old and rachitic, but also foreigners fallen upon hard times who were attracted by the city's glory; thinkers who relished and even sought out such hard times as a badge of pride and a source of inspiration for their various schools of philosophy; and idle crowds of able-bodied men, soldiers on leave and sailors awaiting their proximate consignment. I see the flurry of sundry musicians, snake handlers, acrobats, heralds, pickpockets, and prostitutes of both sexes or of not quite either; the assorted legitimate street-dwellers of all kinds, construction workers and shopkeepers, money lenders, food and water peddlers, scribes, fishwives, tattoo artists, tinkers and tailors; and the hair-plucking paratiltrioi from the baths, resting their falsettos and drying their tweezers as they sought a bite to eat. So, too, I see a hundred other colorful personages, actors, priests, bear trainers, soldiers, pimps, and midwives, shouting their individual calls, striving to be heard above the rest, contributing to the deafening uproar that was the excitement, the filth, the ambition, and the madness of this city that was the center of the world.
In my mind's eye I pass from these chaotic streets through a humble, unmarked doorway in the side of a long stone wall, into a dark, cool passageway. Upon closing the stout oaken door I hear the roar of the city muffled into a faint and distant throb. My memory's corridor leads toward a sunlit courtyard at the end, where the dominant sounds are the tinkling of water in the tiny fountain, the soft clinking and scraping of cooking, and servants' gentle laughter from the kitchen adjacent to the main house. Most incongruous of all is the sound of birds — dozens of them, for every corner is furnished with one or more cages filled with tiny, colorful songbirds, chosen for the exquisite designs of their feathers and the sweetness of their warbling. Rising above the household patter are the high-pitched voices of two young boys as they play in the dust at the foot of the fountain with a handful of marbles fashioned out of clay.
Ever since he had moved to the house, the younger boy, Gryllus' son, had filled the courtyard with his singing, matching the caged birds note for note in beauty and tunefulness. He was never happier than when sitting in the sun at his mother's feet, chanting children's songs and Homeric verses she had taught him by drill, striving to hold to the complex rhythms and sing-song stresses of her training.
Though not much to look at — he was short in stature and thin-chested for his age — he was talented. This much everyone knew, for he had sung already at a few of the banquets hosted by his father, attended by some of Athens' most renowned citizens and artists. The boy had received the highest of praises from both statesmen and poets for the clear, bell-like quality of his voice, and for his poise. To the boy, however, the compliments of diplomats were as water to a drunkard when compared to the praise of his father, which was rarely and grudgingly bestowed, for exceptionally fine performances only. Even then it was more from gratification at having pleased his guests than from any inherent pleasure he took in the boy's singing.
The boy had a name, of course, but his mother called him by it only when reprimanding him, and his father rarely addressed him directly at all. He most often answered to his nickname, one that had most naturally developed as a resume of his skill. He was called Aedon, the songbird, and the unusual nickname seemed to auger further fortune for his developing talent. Not, of course, that such talent had any long-term prospects: His family was ancient and wealthy, and the life of a singer or poet was not something to which great families aspired for their children. Nevertheless, it was diverting, it garnered him a bit more attention from his father than he might otherwise have received, and it helped keep the boy occupied in the home until his formal education was to begin.
The older boy, Aedon's second cousin and two years his senior, was Proxenus, a squarely built little ruffian with an irrepressible grin and a swagger. Just as Aedon was a born poet and singer, Proxenus was a soldier from birth, and despite their different inclinations and interests, the two were fast friends, beyond a mere blood relationship. At least daily, Proxenus would startle Aedon out of his frequent reveries in the courtyard by whacking him on the head with his make-shift wooden sword, sending him into a chase that would end with the boys racing through the house, wrestling on the hard tile floors and getting underfoot of the long-suffering elderly servants who attempted to maintain order. Proxenus being the older and stronger of the two, Aedon invariably got the worst of their battles, but he rarely gave in to the bigger boy's repeated demands to surrender. When pinned, he preferred to disarm Proxenus by grinning spastically and singing faintly obscene ditties that would soon have his older cousin collapsed in paroxysms of laughter.
But even on the few occasions that Proxenus was not present, Aedon was never alone, for he played and talked animatedly with an imaginary friend, a being who, he said, was always with him yet whom he refused to name, saying only that he was a little god. This was a source of great hilarity to the family at first, as Proxenus and the slaves would sometimes pretend to trip and fall, saying that Aedon's little god had gotten underfoot, or they would blame missing articles on the covetousness of his little god. Over the godlet made his way into the pantheon of the famliy's household deities, at first as a joke, then more as an unconscious habit. Long after the boy had grown older and ceased to openly communicate with his mysterious friend, his mother and slaves still occasionally referred to the deity's presence in passing.
During this time we rarely saw Aedon's dour, distant father. Even during his brief forays home from his diplomatic or military duties, Gryllus had little time for boys, having constantly to attend to the comings and goings of strange men, men important and self-important, who would come to talk and argue with him far into the night. Gryllus' reputation as an officer was formidable, and he had thus far acquitted himself well in the war. He had even managed to retain most of his body parts, with the exception of the loss of an eye injured by a glancing blow from a Spartan spear point, which had become infected from, he swore, a quack army surgeon's treatment of it with plaster of cow dung and vinegar. The eye had to be removed, which Gryllus insisted on doing himself with a spoon, to avoid exposing himself further to the perils of the physician's science. The eye's cavity healed sufficiently, although it occasionally leaked a watery fluid tinged with blood if Gryllus engaged in strenuous physical activity, and the wound was a source of pride and wonder for the boy.
Occasionally Gryllus would take the boys and his old battle squire Leon back to the abandoned estate at Erchia, by this time practically a ruin. Gryllus retained a deep love for the land, and although his plans to make the fields productive had to be constantly postponed because of the exigencies of the war, he was nevertheless determined that his son not be deprived of familiarity with the earth. He maintained several fine horses, cared for by Leon's lame son, and would take them on long forays and hunts in the countryside. Even when Aedon was too young to ride by himself, he would sit up on his father's mount between Gryllus's strong thighs. Gryllus was so fond of riding that when his son tired he would take him back to the house for a nap, and then depart again immediately for the remainder of the day, without the slightest rest. He once took me along for company, lending me a smaller horse that he intended to give his son when he became older. Gryllus said that if the war continued, Aedon himself would serve as an officer, and that if I were to be his battle squire, I would need to have at least the same riding and military skills as my master. "I will be proud," he would say, "when my son kills his first Spartan."
Gryllus talked ceaselessly about the war, and his hatred for the Spartans and their destruction of Athens' prosperity was unfathomably deep. He despised their crudeness and lack of culture, and their swaggering, domineering attitude toward other Greek cities, allies and enemies alike. He ridiculed their blind devotion to their pathetic little mud-hut city, and their willingness to expend unimaginable effort to impose their overbearing system of police control on the grand cities they conquered. I vividly recall the time Gryllus used the Spartans as a lesson to Aedon, Proxenus and me, when he felt us to be lacking in diligence in some task or another.
"Aedon," he snapped after roughly lining up the three of us before him, "do Spartan boys shirk their duties? Do they argue with their parents?"
"No, Father," the boy automatically replied, but his voice lacked sincerity and his eyes were merry. Gryllus looked in disgust from Aedon's face, to Proxenus', to mine and back again, and his own expression took on a hard cast.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ten Thousand by Michael Curtis Ford. Copyright © 2001 Michael Curtis Ford. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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