was hanging on their flanks and on their rear, and making
the most incessant efforts to surround and capture them. This retreat
occupied two hundred and fifteen days. It has always been considered
as one of the greatest military achievements that has ever been
performed. It is called in history the Retreat of the Ten Thousand.
Xenophon acquired by it a double immortality. He led the army, and
thus attained to a military renown which will never fade; and he
afterward wrote a narrative of the exploit, which has given him an
equally extended and permanent literary fame.

Some time after this, Xenophon returned again to Asia as a military
commander, and distinguished himself in other campaigns. He acquired a
large fortune, too, in these wars, and at length retired to a villa,
which he built and adorned magnificently, in the neighborhood of
Olympia, where Herodotus had acquired so extended a fame by reading
his histories. It was probably, in some degree, through the influence
of the success which had attended the labors of Herodotus in this
field, that Xenophon was induced to enter it. He devoted the later
years of his life to writing various historical memoirs, the two most
important of which that have come down to modern times are, first,
the narrative of his own expedition, under Cyrus the Younger, and,
secondly, a sort of romance or tale founded on the history of Cyrus
the Great. This last is called the Cyropaedia; and it is from this
work, and from the history written by Herodotus, that nearly all our
knowledge of the great Persian monarch is derived.

The question how far the stories which Herodotus and Xenophon have
told us in relating the history of the great Persian king are true, is
of less importance than one would at first imagine; for the case is
one of those numerous instances in which the narrative itself, which
genius has written, has had far greater influence on mankind than the
events themselves exerted which the narrative professes to record. It
is now far more important for us to know what the story is which
has for eighteen hundred years been read and listened to by every
generation of men, than what the actual events were in which the tale
thus told had its origin. This consideration applies very extensively
to history, and especially to ancient history. The events themselves
have long since ceased to be of any great interest or importance to
readers of the present day; but the _accounts_, whether they