The Immortals

[Paralus]

And Xenophon more or less confirms this rough number for the Persians which no other Greek author does afaik, this speaks against his anti-Persians agenda, at least at the time he wrote the Cyropaedia or due to new Persian information he got by that time.

Unless scholarship has passed me by recently, Anabasis was written sometime during the 370s or 360s. The Cyropaedia is generally slated at sometime in the 360s. In Anabasis Xenophon assigns Cyrus some 115,900 and Artaxerxes 900,000 (subratcting 300,000 for the tardy bastard Abrocomas).

Perhaps, though, the point of Anabasis may be summed up by quoting (III.2.24f)

I am certain that the King would offer the Myesians all the guides they wanted and would give them numbers of hostages to guarantee his good faith in sending them out of the country and would actually build roads for them, even though they wanted to go away in four horse chariots. And I am sure he would be three times as pleased to do all this for us, if he saw that we were planning to stay here. No, what I am really afraid of is that, if we once learn to live a life of ease and luxury, enjoying the company of these fine great women, the wives and the daughters of these Medes and Persians, we might be like the Lotus-Eaters and forget the road home. So I think it is right and reasonable to make it our first endeavour to reach our own folk in Greece and to demonstrate to the Geeks that their poverty is of their own choosing, since they might see people who have a wretched life in their own countries grow rich by coming out here.

Ahh...music to Isocrates' ears. All of it is there: that the King would gladly supply guides and roads to help these valiant and unbeatable Greeks home; the beautiful women; the luxury; the effete Persians who cannot hold their own possessions and, most crucially, Hellenic lebensraum in the Persian east.

Xenophon would set about this with....almost gusto...under Dercyllidas and then with his hero, Agesilaos. Unfortunately, for the panhellenists, the despotic Great King had one characteristic of nobility in abundance: gold and silver. In quick succession Spartan aggrandisement was brought to heel with Cnidus and war in Greece.

It did not behove Xenophon's virtuous Spartans to attempt a reneging on the terms of their alliance with the King. When the dust settled it would be the "peace of Antalcidas" that would baldy assert the King's price of Spartan hegemony: the cities of Asia. Not that Xenophon wished to write of it.