Band on the Run

400 BC. The Persian prince Cyrus the Younger hires a mercenary army of Ten Thousand Greek soldiers to oust his brother from the throne. When Cyrus dies in battle during the army’s trek through the Middle East, the army is stranded deep in enemy territory.

Led by Xenophon, a young Athenian philosopher turned soldier, the Ten Thousand fought their way home through deserts and mountains, snowstorms, starvation, and relentless attacks, evolving into one of the most fearsome forces of the ancient world. Their journey, chronicled in Xenophon’s Anabasis, is one of antiquity’s greatest military stories.

In Band on the Run, Robert O’Connell not only gives us an exciting and witty retelling of this story but does so with a wise contemporary spin. In his estimation, this was the battle that gave birth to the use of mercenary armies. The attempted conquest by the Ten Thousand begins a historical line through European history, among them the eventual disaster of the Thirty Years’ War, the later use of mercenaries to carry out various colonial enterprises, and, leading up to the present day, private military companies such as Blackwater and Wagner. As O’Connell shows, much misery and tragedy in human history has been due to this trajectory. This is a brilliant revisionist history with important lessons for our time.

For fans of 300, a riveting retelling of The March of the Ten Thousand, when Greek mercenary Xenophon led a stranded band of soldiers on a treacherous escape from the Persians.