In the last chapter, we saw how herodotus's histories integrates what we have been calling the countercartographic tendencies of his style within a relatively seamless and encyclopedic whole, in part through the successful alliance of geography and narrative form. I showed how Herodotus's prose compensates for some of the failings of cartography, by expanding instead of miniaturizing and by following a model that is diachronic and dynamic instead of synchronic and “still.” In Xenophon's Anabasis, however, all of these aspects of the countercartographic plot are pushed to an extreme in the long, sequential journey of the Ten Thousand through the unknown landscape of Asia Minor, resulting in a certain amount of interference between the form of the narrative and the landscape it is describing. This creates a text that expresses a sense of being lost in its own environment, from which the notion of home and homeland is repeatedly evoked and deferred, and which fails to orient the plot and the reader in a number of suggestive ways.

The narrative details of the Anabasis are well known.