Thalatta!

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The Anabasis was written in the first decades of the 4th century BCE. Its title refers to a military expedition, literally “a march up from the coast” or “a march up country.” Xenophon took part in such an expedition in 401, as one of 10,000 Greek mercenaries who, along with a much greater number of Persians, agreed to follow Cyrus the Younger from the Aegean Sea up into Ionia, western Turkey today, to attack a Persian tributary who ruled Ionia. The real target of Cyrus’ massive army, however, was his older brother Artaxerxes II, the emperor of Persia. Near Tarsus, in what is now south central Turkey, the Greek soldiers discovered this appalling deception and refused to go further east, but were convinced to do so by a Spartan general named Clearchus. After surviving battle with Artaxerxes’ army in what is now the heart of Iraq, Clearchus was invited to a peace conference by Artaxerxes, who betrayed and murdered him. Far from the sea and surrounded by hostile forces, the Ten Thousand elected new leaders (Xenophon one of them) and fought their way out of Persia, north to the Black Sea. From there they made their way home via the Bosporus.

When the young men at the end of Oxen begin to think of their walk from the maternity hospital to Burke's pub as a military march, someone says, "Thence they advanced five parasangs." This must be Mulligan again recalling the language of the Anabasis. The parasang was a Persian unit of walking distance equivalent to several miles. Herodotus writes of armies traveling five parasangs a day (the term was transliterated into Greek, and later into Latin), and numerous passages in Xenophon's work speak of marching such distances––e.g., "From there he marched one stage, five parasangs, to the Pyramus river... Thence he marched one stage, five parasangs, to the Gates between Cilicia and Syria.... Thence Cyrus marched one stage, five parasangs, to Myriandus, a city on the sea coast" (1.4, trans. Carleton L. Brownson). There is some humor in applying the phrase to a walk which covers less than two city blocks.