Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/175

KLEANDER IS APPEASED. 153 The prospects of the army appeared thus greatly improved; the more so, as Kleander, on entering upon his new functions as commander, found the soldiers so cheerful and orderly, that he was highly gratified, and exchanged personal tokens of friendship and hospitality with Xenophon. But when sacrifices came to be offered, for beginning the march homeward, the signs were so un- propitious, for three successive days, that Kleander could not bring himself to brave such auguries at the outset of his career. Ac- cordingly, he told the generals, that the gods plainly forbade him, and reserved it for them, to conduct the army into Greece ; that he should therefore sail back to Byzantium, and would receive the army in the best way he could, when they reached the Bosphorus. After an interchange of presents with the soldiers, he then depart- ed with his two triremes. 1 The favorable sentiment now established in the bosom of Kle- ander will be found very serviceable hereafter to the Cyreians at Byzantium ; but they had cause for deeply regretting the unpro- pitious sacrifices which had deterred him from assuming the actual command at Kalpe. In the request preferred to him by them that he would march as their commander to the Bosphorus, we may recognize a scheme, and a very well-contrived scheme, of Xenophon ; who had before desired to leave the army at Herakleia, and who saw plainly that the difficulties of a commander, unless he were a Lacedaemonian of station and influence, would increase with every step of their approach to Greece. Had Kleander ac- cepted the command, the soldiers would have been better treated, while Xenophon himself might either have remained as his adviser, or might have gone home. He probably would have chosen the latter course. Under the command of then- own officers, the Cyreians now marched from Kalpe across Bithynia to Chrysopolis, 2 (in the ter- ritory of Chalkedon on the Asiatic edge of the Bosphorus, imme- diately opposite to Byzantium, as Scutari now is to Constantinople), where they remained seven days, turning into money the slaves 1 Xen. Anab. vi. 6, 36, 37. 1 Nearly the same cross march was made by the Athenian general Lam- achus, in the eighth year of the Peloponnesian war, after he had lost hi* triremes by a sudden rise of the water at the mouth of the river Kalcx, in the territory of Herakleia (Thucyd. iv, 75). 7*