called upon to provide armies for continuous service on distant
expeditions. When, after the earlier campaigns of the Peloponnesian War,
the necessity for such expeditions arose, the system was often strained
almost to breaking point, (e.g. in the case of the Athenian expedition
to Syracuse), and ultimately the states of Greece were driven to choose
between unprofitable expenditure of the lives of citizens and recruiting
from other sources. Mercenaries serving as light troops, and
particularly as _peltasts_ (a new form of disciplined "light infantry")
soon appeared. The _corps de bataille_ remained for long the old phalanx
of citizen hoplites. But the heavy losses of many years told severely on
the resources of every state, and ultimately non-national
recruits--adventurers and soldiers of fortune, broken men who had lost
their possessions in the wars, political refugees, runaway slaves,
&c.--found their way even into the ranks of the hoplites, and Athens at
one great crisis (407) enlisted slaves, with the promise of citizenship
as their reward. The Arcadians, like the Scots and the Swiss in modern
history, furnished the most numerous contingent to the new professional
armies. A truly national army was indeed to appear once more in the
history of the Peloponnesus, but in the meantime the professional
soldier held the field. The old bond of strict citizenship once broken,
the career of the soldier of fortune was open to the adventurous Greek.
Taenarum and Corinth became regular _entrepots_ for mercenaries. The
younger Cyrus raised his army for the invasion of Persia precisely as
the emperors Maximilian and Charles V. raised regiments of
_Landsknechte_--by the issue of recruiting commissions to captains of
reputation. This army became the famous Ten Thousand. It was a marching
city-state, its members not desperate adventurers, but men with the calm
self-respect of Greek civilization. On the fall of its generals, it
chose the best officers of the army to command, and obeyed implicitly.
Cheirisophus the Spartan and Xenophon the Athenian, whom they chose,
were not plausible demagogues; they were line officers, who, suddenly
promoted to the chief command under circumstances of almost overwhelming
difficulty, proved capable of achieving the impossible. The merit of
choosing such leaders is not the least title to fame of the Ten Thousand
mercenary Greek hoplites. About the same time Iphicrates with a body of
mercenary _peltasts_ destroyed a _mora_ or corps of Spartan hoplites
(391 B.C.).