Band on the Run

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. 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 solider, 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 he has done so with a wise contemporary spin. For in his estimation, this was the battle that gave birth to the use of mercenary armies. The attempted conquest of the Ten Thousand begins a historical line through European history, among them the eventual disaster of the Thirty Years War, and somewhat later the use of mercenaries to carry out various colonial enterprises, and finally working up to Blackwater and Wagner in our present day. And, 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.