Xenophon

"'The Sea! The Sea! ' tells the story of 'Thalatta! Thalatta!', the shout first uttered on a mountains in eastern Turkey by the famous Ten Thousand, the army of Greek mercenaries whose adventures in what are now Turkey, Syria and Iraq were described by the Athenian historian and philosopher Xenophon. The shout itself has had an extraordinary afterlife, playing a persistent part in the European and American cultural tradition over the last two hundred years. Tim Rood tells its story for the first time, taking in literary masterpieces by writers such as Heine, Shelley and Joyce, books of travel and adventure set in the Middle East and elsewhere, articles in Victorian periodicals, popular romance novels, newspaper editorials at the time of the British evacuation from Dunkirk, a painting by the nineteenth-century artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, an unpublished radio play by Louis MacNeice, and a modern novel and film which transfer Xenophon's story to New York City. 262p. illus. bibliography.index Book