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…