Robin Waterfield's excellent book tells at least three stories about retreat. The first, originally narrated in Xenophon's Anabasis, is a tale of the heroic escape of the ten thousand or so mercenaries from perhaps hundreds of Greek cities who followed Cyrus to overthrow his brother, Artaxerxes II, as king of kings in Persia in 401 BC. Upon the death of Cyrus at the battle of Cunaxa in Persian-controlled Babylonia, these men found themselves trapped in a hostile empire. The ten thousand had to force their march through hundreds of miles of seemingly impassable rivers, deserts, mountains, and ravines while fighting Persians and numerous barbarian tribes along the way. The second story is one about emotion: the emotional withdrawal of Xenophon, one of the generals in command of the Greeks, as it is told that he abandoned the optimism of the fifth century for the pessimism of the sixth. The third story of retreat is Xenophon's intellectual retreat from the active life to the scholarly life in Sparta and later in Athens—after he had won fame for bringing his soldiers home to Greece and acquired a substantial fortune seized from Persians along the way.

The first story begins slowly with Waterfield setting the historical context for the famous military retreat by explaining how the Greeks wound up deep inside of Persia. The story picks up dramatically, however, when Xenophon's depiction of the long path home becomes the center of attention. Not only do we get vivid portrayals of the hundreds of battles and skirmishes between Cunaxa and the Black Sea, through which the army was able to sail toward Greece, but we also get to view Xenophon somewhat as he viewed himself, as a student of Socrates who also happened to be a general. Political theory is not Waterfield's primary interest, but his account shows that it was central to virtually everything Xenophon ever wrote, even while he was campaigning in Persia. During the retreat, the soldiers changed their regime, or form of martial regimentation, several times from oligarchy (the rule of numerous experienced officers by some means of consent) to democracy (the rule of the soldiers when their officers could not control them or necessity demanded total commitment from the troops) to kingship (the rule of one general when unity and decisiveness were the most necessary qualities for the army's survival). Waterfield also shows that Xenophon never compromised his ideals in means to achieve ends. Service to the common good, understood as a way of achieving safety of the army, was the standard by which he measured the utility of the various regimes. The flexibility of the Greek officers towards changing these regimes as circumstances required contributed significantly to their eventual escape from almost certain death or slavery. The standard by which Xenophon measured individual commanders was self-discipline, understood as the ability of these commanders to control their passions, including their passion to rule, in service to the common good of their troops. Through this example, Waterfield suggests that the philosophical standard for guardians that we see in Plato's Republic had become the practical ethos of stoic Roman generals. At the dawn of our own country's history, when officers still read the classics, this classical ethos—”duty, honor, country”—was embodied in the honor code of West Point. It remains powerful in other schools of leadership where martial virtue is still held in high regard. Thus, due to the great retreat, Xenophon was able to reflect on theory and practice and to become one of the greatest teachers of generals and other leaders in Western history.

The second story is the sad and perhaps necessary consequence of the first, as Xenophon learned that both human nature and the character of mercenaries pose severe limits to the ability to stamp form upon matter. Like the crews of Odysseus's ships, they were at their most courageous and disciplined when they had no other way to survive. The Greek soldiers and the officers, however, succumbed to greed and plunder once they were safe from the Persians. Consequently, faction was bred and the unity of an army that Xenophon had hoped to settle as a city was destroyed. There is great irony in this. The quarrels within the army mirrored those among and within the Greek cities that crippled Greece during the Peloponnesian War, which had ended just a few years before the retreat began. Moreover, Xenophon, himself an exile from Athens, failed to found a city or polis, perhaps due to the fact that he began with the outcasts of Greece, true brigands without a country. Completely unintentionally, Xenophon instead wound up helping found an empire. His Anabasis confirmed the vulnerability of Persia to the Greeks and later to the Macedonians, whose panhellenism was rooted, in part, in a desire to surpass the exploits of the celebrated ten thousand by advancing in the opposite direction.

The third story is the least satisfactory, though arguably the most important to reflect on within the realms of philosophy and history. Like many generals, Xenophon retired to write his memoirs; indeed, he may have invented this particular genre. Like many historians, Waterfield seeks critical distance from his subject by situating Xenophon in Waterfield's view of his historical context. Tragically, he was trapped in Plato's cave with no true retreat, that is, no way to transcend his conventional world. Since Xenophon was born an oligarch, he thought like an oligarch. Since he was raised in an orthodox religious society, he was a conventionally pious man, despite his association with that notorious free-thinker, Socrates. As the Greek world crashed down around him in the wake of the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon's writings must be interpreted as nostalgic for the Golden Age and pessimistic about the fate of Greece.

These common, though facile, modern historicist assumptions deserve to be questioned. They seem to patronize Xenophon and undermine even Waterfield's efforts to transcend Xenophon's horizon. Waterfield's own account of the changing leadership of the army shows why Xenophon could overcome his oligarchic preferences when circumstances required. Though conventionally pious words and deeds abound in Xenophon's writings, he was not Nicias during the Sicilian expedition, so fearful of the gods that he sacrificed an entire army to avoid their wrath. Like a child playing with Tarot cards or a statesman counting votes, Xenophon had a knack for shuffling the deck until the omens (today we say opinion polls) were in his favor. Perhaps he was savvily pious, or piously savvy, but like Socrates himself, he was not religious in any conventional way. Xenophon has taught officers that nothing is more debilitating than to lose hope, even against seemingly impossible odds, like those he faced retreating from Persia. Thus, overstating his pessimism runs against the grain of Xenophon's account of the Greeks' retreat. Waterfield has opened the door for others to reflect on Xenophon's efforts to transcend history in search of philosophy, which is no small accomplishment.