Xenophon

Born in Athens around 430 BC, Xenophon joined a Greek mercenary force backing Cyrus the Younger's attempt to seize the Persian throne. When Cyrus died at the Battle of Cunaxa, the 30-year-old was elected to lead the stranded Ten Thousand on their retreat - a march he later chronicled in the Anabasis. Though Athenian by birth, he became Sparta's biographer, producing the only detailed accounts of its society and king Agesilaus that survive. His Cyropaedia, a study of Cyrus the Great's conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, laid out military and political methods that Alexander would carry into his own campaigns against Persia in 331 BC. The Hellenica picked up where Thucydides stopped, covering the Peloponnesian War's final years and the four decades after. For two millennia the question lingered: general, historian, or philosopher? Diogenes Laërtius called him the "Attic Muse" for the sweetness of his prose; Quintilian placed him beside Plato. He died around 354 BC, leaving behind the first known descriptions of flanking maneuvers in Western military writing.