n his feelings were excited. Had he kept his
Six Hundred well in hand, checked their pursuit, and abstained from
thrusting his own person into unnecessary danger, he might have joined
the Greeks as they returned from their first victory and participated
in their final triumph. At the same time, Clearchus cannot but be blamed
for pushing his suit too far. If, when the enemy in his front fled, he
had at once turned against those who were engaging Cyrus, taking them
on their left flank, which must have been completely uncovered, he might
have been in time to prevent the fatal results of the rash charge made
by his leader.

Thus the death of Cyrus, though a calamity to Persia, was scarcely the
great loss which it has been represented. A far worse result of the
Cyreian expedition was the revelation which it made of the weakness of
Persia, and of the facility with which a Greek force might penetrate
to the very midst of the Empire, defeat the largest army that could be
brought against it, and remain, or return, as it might think proper.
Hitherto Babylon and Susa had been, even to the mind of a Greek
statesman, remote localities, which it would be the extreme of rashness
to attempt to reach by force of arms, and from which it would be
utter folly to suppose that a single man could return alive except by
permission of the Great King. Henceforth these towns were looked upon
as prizes quite within the legitimate scope of Greek ambition, and their
conquest came to be viewed as little more than a question of time. The
opinion of inaccessibility, which had been Persia's safeguard hitherto,
was gone, and in its stead grew up a conviction that the heart of the
Empire might be reached with very little difficulty.

It required, however, for the production of this whole change, not
merely that the advance to Cunaxa should have been safely made, and the
immeasurable superiority of Greek to Asiatic soldiers there exhibited,
but also that the retreat should have been effected, as it was effected,
without disaster. Had the Ten Thousand perished under the attacks of the
Persian horse, or even under the weapons of the Kurds, or amid the
snows of Armenia, the opinion of Persian invulnerability would have been
strengthened rather than weakened by the expedition. But the return to
Greece of ten thousand men, who had defeated the hosts of the Great King
in the centre of his dominions, and fought their way back to the
sea without suffering more th