Ten Thousand [Paperback]

Michael Curtis Ford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2002

Winter, 401 BC. When leadership is forced upon Xenophon after the treacherous slaughter of his senior comrades in arms, it is up to him to inspire the few remaining officers of the Greek army to rally their troops. Trapped far from home in hostile Persian territory, they are only ten thousand men against an enemy ten times larger. Months later, ten thousand battered, half-starved Greek soldiers stagger out of the frozen mountains of Armenia into a small Hellenic trading post on the Black Sea. Told from the viewpoint of Theo, Xenophon's battle squire, this is a unique view of the brutality and heroism of 5th-century BC Greek warfare.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The ill-fated campaign of Xenophon's army in the political chaos following the Peloponnesian War is the subject of Ford's debut, a long and labyrinthine affair that begins with the army's successful journey to Babylon and an initial battle in which the Persian forces are routed. But the tide quickly turns when the Persians sneak behind enemy lines and pillage the Greek camp, leaving Xenophon's army stranded hundreds of miles from home with few supplies. Rather than starve by taking the desert route back, Xenophon decides to attempt a perilous journey through hostile enemy terrain populated by several dangerous tribes, and as they progress the Greeks are forced to endure a horrific series of hardship just to survive. The more intriguing scenes: the Greeks use a tribe of deadly slingshot artists to defeat a formidable enemy; they get waylaid by a cache of poisonous honey; a winter march results in the death of dozens of soldiers . The major subplot in the book narrated by Xenophon's alter ego, Themostigenes (nicknamed Theo) concerns the protagonist's adventurous but tortured affair with a royal Persian woman named Asteria who is traveling with the Greek army, and whom he saves from death during battle. Ford has some compelling material, and his account includes authentic details about ancient peoples, customs and battle strategies. But his melodramatic, turgid prose produces a rather monotonous story delivered in heroic overtones, with little feel for pace, no true climax and a dearth of fully realized characters. The result is a novel that fails to live up to its subject's potential. (June)Forecast: The publisher hopefully compares this novel to Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, but this is no match and won't match Gates's sales, either.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

When Darius II, King of Persia, died and was succeeded by his brother Artaxerxes, Darius's son, Cyrus the Younger, collected a force of 100,000 Persians and 13,000 Greek mercenaries, mainly Spartans, and marched on Artaxerxes's stronghold in an attempt to win the throne for himself. In 401 B.C.E., the armies of Cyrus met those of Artaxerxes in battle at Cunaxa, near the Euphrates River. After Cyrus was gruesomely killed in battle, the Greeks wanted nothing more than to return to their beloved homeland. Without the provisions needed to return by way of the desert over which they had come, they struggled 1000 miles through Kurdistan and over the Armenian mountains in the dead of winter until finally reaching the Black Sea. Along the way, the "Ten Thousand" were decimated by hostile forces, starvation, frostbite, and disease. Based primarily on the writings of Xenophon, a junior officer who assumed command of the Spartan forces after most of the senior officers were treacherously slaughtered, this novel retains much of the flavor of the soldier's memoirs. Ford, a Romance linguistics scholar, combines historical accuracy with eloquent storytelling to create an epic story that will capture the imagination of anyone interested in the history of ancient Greece. A worthy successor to Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire (LJ 9/1/98), this is highly recommended for all public libraries.
-. Jane Baird, Anchorage Municipal Libs., AK
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Orion Paperbacks (April 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0752844857
• ISBN-13: 978-0752844855
• Product Dimensions: 4.4 x 1.2 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (98 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,177,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very fine rendering of a much older tale!, September 20, 2001

By 

Stuart W. Mirsky "swm" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Ten Thousand: A Novel of Ancient Greece (Hardcover)

I read the Anabasis, the narrative by the Greek historian Xenophon, upon which this book is based, many years back and, when I saw this book, I was pleasantly surprised that someone had actually taken a crack at novelizing it.

The original text of the Anabasis essentially records the vicissitudes of a troop of Greek mercenaries who got stuck in the middle of the Persian empire, far from their native Hellenic hills, on the wrong side of a civil war between two Persian bluebloods. With their leader and employer taking an untimely powder in the midst of the critical battle, they are left without a patron, ten thousand against a hundred thousand or more, and no way out across a vast inhospitable desert lying between them and their Mediterranean road home, while being shadowed by a treacherous Persian general.

How they pull it together in the face of incredible hardships and fight their way home again is the crux of this tale . . . and it's a rousing one. Still, having read Xenophon, I was faced with the fact that there was little suspense for me in this adventure since I already knew how the basic narrative would work itself out. Worse, the interior sub-plots were all too easy to second guess, while the characters were not as sharply drawn as I'd have liked and so not as compelling, for their part, as they might have been.

More, there was a rather distant, abstractness to the writing itself that tended to leave me a trifle cold. It did not engage me as much as Pressfield's GATES OF FIRE had, the novel about the Spartan stand against Xerxes' invading Persians, roughly a generation or so before the events which Xenophon recorded. In fact, Pressfield's book's success probably inspired the decision to publish this one, though that, by itself, is not necessarily an adverse comment on this work. This tale is, in fact, nicely written and a well-wrought tribute to the Anabasis, despite my carping above. It is, despite its flaws, a vivid and convincing recreation of the ancient world in the time of the Greek Golden Age and that mighty Persian empire with which the Greeks alternately fought and dickered. Although the philosophizing built into the narrator's voice left me a trifle cold, as it seemed to be more for effect (to mimic the Greek penchant for reflecting deeply), than to really present a coherent and insightful world view . . . or to raise great questions . . . I found the narrator's "voice" reasonably convincing despite the modern tone it set.

I did find a few irritating errors, however, the most annoying being the reference to the upper Euphrates River near the end when a glance at the map on the inside cover clearly shows the upper Tigris to have been meant (unless that map got it wrong -- I don't know, myself, since I didn't go back to check my atlas).

Oh and one rather clever maneuver kind of stuck out for me: a quote attributed to the Gallic Yourcenar, a personage with which I am entirely unfamiliar, though I note the author thanks a colleague of the SAME last name in his afterword! A clever ploy indeed.

On balance, I really did like this one since it brought Xenophon's narrative to life in a somewhat modern idiom which still manages to sucessfully evoke the ancient world from which it was sprung. And, if it was not wholly satisfying for lack of suspense and vivid characters, well, at the least, it did its job in breathing life into the ancient text. I looked for more from this book than I got. But, in truth, I got enough. If you like ancient worlds and fascinating adventure, this true life tale reported by Xenophon and novelized by Mr. Ford, is worth the money and the time!

SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good not Great, December 18, 2002

By 

Rusir-10 (Gaithersburg, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ten Thousand: A Novel of Ancient Greece (Hardcover)

As someone who reads mostly science fiction and fantasy, this book represented a nice change of pace. Similar subject matter to what I typically read, but with the added spin of reality. Michael Ford gets high marks for conveying a very real world. Yes, I know it is a real world, but presumably Mr. Ford wasn't around when the actual events took place. Based on the detail that he included in the story from the marching and camp conditions, politics, geography, etc., he obviously did an excellent job of researching his topic and really bringing ancient Greece to life.

Having said that, I have to say that the story left me somewhat flat. Its a heroic tale by anyone's definition, but the characters didn't really come to life for me. Maybe its because I'm used to a fictional tale, but I can't say that I cared overly much about Xenophon nor did I feel like I really knew him.

Despite my vague dissatisfaction upon completion of the book, I do have to say that it kept my interest and was a pretty quick read. I also feel like I learned something from reading the book and would recommend it to friends.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the Great Historic Adventures, October 4, 2001

By 

Newt Gingrich (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
("THE")   

This review is from: The Ten Thousand: A Novel of Ancient Greece (Hardcover)

Xenophon's Anabais is one of the great historic adventures of the ancient world. It recounts the extraordinary epic of ten thousand Greek mercenaries abandoned around eastern Iraq who fought and marched across modern Turkey against overwhelming odds and returned to Greece by way of the Black Sea.

This novel is a sound first novel, openly based on Xenophon's work, and a good introduction to the challenges faced by Xenophon both in the failing Greece in which Athens had been defeated by the Peloponnesian Wars and the economy and society were both battered and in the long ordeal of first service and then a march of extraordinary endurance.

For anyone interested in thinking about the ancient world, the degree to which cultures have clashed, and the process of survival this is a thought-provoking book.