American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America from the Mexican War to Iraq

The Marines? march up to Baghdad, Sherman's trail of destruction in Georgia, an army of Missouri volunteers trekking across the Great Plains to Mexico?this wide-ranging and imaginative book tells for the first time the story of how American armies from the sands of Iraq to the halls of the Montezuma have followed figuratively in the footsteps of the original Anabasis, the famous Greek march into the interior of Asia made by Xenophon and the Ten Thousand in 400 BC. Starting with the Iraq War, Tim Rood turns back to the conquest of the American West and to the Civil War, showing how one of the most famous episodes in classical antiquity was first appropriated in the name of military expansion, and then used to express conflicting responses to the most controversial campaign of the Civil War. Allusions to Xenophon in speeches, newspaper reports, and military memoirs are throughout read against Xenophon's own story.