Xenophon
/ˈzɛnəfən/proper noun
The Athenian soldier and writer who led the Ten Thousand home and wrote the Anabasis.
The Greek roots
Literally: “stranger voice”
The story of the word
The name means something like foreign-sounding voice, and its owner lived up to it. Xenophon was an Athenian gentleman who took service with a Persian prince, found himself elected general when the prince was killed and the Greek commanders murdered, and walked ten thousand men from Mesopotamia to the Black Sea. He wrote it up in the Anabasis, which is still the first continuous prose most students of Greek ever read, and he was exiled from Athens for keeping Spartan company.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
Same family
In a sentence
Xenophon gives the only eyewitness account of the retreat.
She had translated Xenophon at school and remembered the shout when they saw the sea.