Xenophon & The Ruins of Assyria // Ancient Greek Primary Source

General of the elite Greek mercenary army 'The Ten Thousand', student of Socrates, effusive historian; Xenophon (431 - 354 BC) was a monumental figure in ancient Greek history. Here we have an extract from his Magnus Opus, 'The Anabasis' in which he describes encountering the ruins of two ancient cities as he and his men crossed Persia on their long journey home after taking part in a Persian civil war. He calls these cities Larisa and Mespila. Today they are generally assumed to have been ancient Assyrian cities, perhaps Nimrud and Nineveh, destroyed centuries earlier as the Neo-Assyrian Empire collapsed under the weight of its subject peoples, amongst them the Persian Achaemenids. Inspiring the famous Shelley poem 'Ozymandias', Xenophon describes the vast proportions of these ancient ruins; long deserted, looming large against the desert, a ruined shadow of a vast forgotten empire.

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