Cunaxa

Coordinates: 33°19′29.48″N 44°04′46.33″E / 33.3248556°N 44.0795361°E / 33.3248556; 44.0795361

The Battle of Cunaxa was fought in 401 BC between Cyrus the Younger and his elder brother Arsaces, who had inherited the Persian throne as Artaxerxes II in 404 BC. The great battle of the revolt of Cyrus took place 70 km north of Babylon, at Cunaxa, on the left bank of the Euphrates River. The main source is a Greek eyewitness and soldier, Xenophon.

Preparations

Cyrus gathered an army of Greek mercenaries, consisting of 10,400 hoplites and 2,500 peltasts, under the Spartan general Clearchus, and met Artaxerxes at Cunaxa. He also had a large force of levied troops under his second-in-command Ariaeus. Xenophon gives the strength of the Persian army at an impossible 1,200,000 men, excluding the scythed chariots. No modern commentator finds this figure credible, but educated guesswork is now the only way to fill the gap in our knowledge. Artaxerxes certainly seems to have enjoyed a superiority in cavalry.

Battle

The Greeks, deployed on Cyrus's right and outnumbered, charged the left flank of Artaxerxes' army, which fled (or executed a planned evasive manoeuvre) before they came within arrowshot. However, on the Persian right the fight between Artaxerxes' army and Cyrus was far more difficult and protracted. Cyrus personally charged his brother's bodyguard and was killed by a javelin, which sent the rebels into retreat. Only the Greek mercenaries, who had not heard of Cyrus's death and were heavily armed, stood firm. Clearchus advanced against the much larger right wing of Artaxerxes' army and sent it into retreat. Meanwhile, Artaxerxes' troops took the Greek encampment and destroyed their food supplies.

Aftermath

According to the Greek soldier and writer Xenophon, the Greek heavy troops scattered their opposition twice; only one Greek was even wounded. Only after the battle did they hear that Cyrus himself had been killed, making their victory irrelevant and the expedition a failure. They were in the middle of a very large empire with no food, no employer, and no reliable friends. They offered to make their Persian ally Ariaeus king, but he refused on the grounds that he was not of royal blood and so would not find enough support among the Persians to succeed. They offered their services to Tissaphernes, a leading satrap of Artaxerxes, but he refused them, and they refused to surrender to him. Tissaphernes was left with a problem; a large army of heavy troops, which he could not defeat by frontal assault. He supplied them with food and, after a long wait, led them northwards for home, meanwhile detaching Ariaeus and his light troops from their cause.

The Greek senior officers foolishly accepted the invitation of Tissaphernes to a feast. There they were made prisoner, taken up to the king and there decapitated. The Greeks elected new officers and set out to march northwards to the Black Sea through Kurdistan and Armenia. Their eventual success, the march of the Ten Thousand, was recorded by Xenophon in his Anabasis.

In popular culture

The battle is referenced at the start of the The Warriors (film).

References

Full text of Xenophon's Anabasis online:

• Freely downloadable, at Project Gutenberg [2]
• Directly readable, at The University of Adelaide Library, Australia [3]

Further reading

• Xenophon, The Persian Expedition, trans. by Rex Warner, Penguin, 1949.
• Montagu, John D. Battles of the Greek and Roman Worlds, Greenhill Books, 2000.
• Prevas, John. Xenophon's March: Into the Lair of the Persian Lion, Da Capo, 2002.
• Waterfield, Robin. Xenophon's Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age, Belknap Press, 2006.

External links

• Battles of Artaxerxes II, in Mark Drury's Achaemenid Persian Page, a reinterpretation of the Anabasis from a supposedly Persian point of view. For example:
  «Unfortunately the stubbornness of the Greeks to accept defeat, and the inability of both sides to overcome ethnic and cultural biases, led to the unnecessary loss of many lives in the Greek's courageous, but wasted retreat» (sic).