The Cyreans did not walk from Sardis to Cunaxa, to the sea and Byzantium. They marched, and marching and walking are not the same. Walking means individuality and freedom. A solitary hiker, for example, determines her own route and sets her own pace. A hiker can stop for lunch, or just to admire the view, when and where she chooses. Confronted with an obstacle, say a fallen tree, she steps over or around it at her leisure. Marching, in contrast, demands obedience to the patterns of a larger organism. A soldier in column must follow the route his officers choose, keep pace with the others in his formation, stop and start only on command. That fallen tree may present only a moment's hindrance to an individual hiker, but for a unit of a hundred or a thousand, the cumulative effect of small deviations as each soldier passes an obstacle can build into a wave of disruptive motion, amplified all the way down the formation.

For the Cyreans, then, marching meant loss of control, the submergence of self in a larger physical entity. Yet, this same submergence brought soldiers closer. The very act of moving together in formation hour after hour, day after day, month after month, fostered a rhythmic, emotional bond among the members of each lochos. No drillmaster needed shout a cadence for them to fall naturally into step – not the artificial, measured pace of the parade ground but a synchronized shuffling tramp.