ABSTRACT
The Anabasis chronicles two years of Xenophon's life, 401–399 bce, which Herodotus spends travelling into the hinterland of the Persian empire and back out again. The Herodotus's Histories narrate the great wars between the vast Persian Empire and the Greeks in the early fifth century BCE, using the expansion of the Persian Empire as the guiding thread and providing ethnographies of peoples the Persians conquer as their empire grows. Xenophon flashes forward briefly a few times in the Anabasis to provide snippets of personal information outside the chronological framework of the journey. There is no doubt that Xenophon views the world through a Hellenic lens and there has been much work done on the Anabasis to explore Xenophon's presentation of the Greek/barbarian polarity. Xenophon several times mentions the good relations between the various Greek cities and the barbarians in this region, and usually does so when he is about to relate the mercenaries' aggressive and unprovoked disregard for these relations.
