Xenophon wrote the Anabasis, his story of ten thousand Greek soldiers walking home after a failed war in Persia. This is Book 6. Book 5 left them on the Black Sea at Trapezus, in northeastern Turkey, where they feasted, raided, and began to split over loot and whether to found a city.

At Heraclea, a Greek city on that coast, the Arcadians and Achaeans, men from two parts of Greece, peel off for plunder and are nearly destroyed in Bithynia, in northwest Turkey. Xenophon brings the rest in time. They vote, reverse the vote, and vote again for Cheirisophus, for Neon, for anyone who promises a market. Cheirisophus dies of a fever. At Calpe they camp on a headland and fight the Bithynians until the dead are piled. Cleander, the Spartan governor at Byzantium — Istanbul — will not take them in. They have reached the Bosporus and found the door shut: an unbeaten army the Greek cities do not want on the wharf.