Although historians would only later append 'the Younger' to the name of Prince Cyrus--to distinguish him from his father--he was worthy of that epithet already. He was barely twenty-two. He kept a short black beard, the best he could manage in his youth, and the Persian habit of painting his eyes with kohl. He sat a horse loosely and without effort. At close quarters one could see the scars, white and ridged where his coat opened at the neck and where his sleeve met his hand, which were rumored to have been earned in deadly contest with a bear. He was, from his birth, serious and thoughtful. Often, he sent wine or meat from his own table to men who pleased him. Men who displeased him left his court short a hand, a foot, or an eye.

His seat was in Sardis, the old Lydian capital at the foot of Mount Tmolus. The timber and mud-brick houses of Sardis crowded around the narrow Pactolus, whose sands had once made Lydian kings rich. Above them the acropolis ascended a sheer ochre crag, so that the city seemed to be shaded by a fortress. Lydian craftsmen, Greek traders, Persian officials, and soldiers from half a dozen countries jostled in its markets. It was prosperous and ancient, but not peaceful by nature. Cyrus the Great had taken it from Croesus, and Greek rebels had burned it a century before. Its present tranquility was yet another anomaly of the age maintained by Persian spears.

It was there, in Sardis, that Cyrus ordered his scattered Greek contingents to assemble. Two thousand men gathered by his guest-friend Proxenus of Boeotia, fifteen hundred hoplites, another five hundred light-armed men with javelins, slings, or bows. The Peloponnesian War had ended only three years before. Many among them faced the prospect of neglected farms, inherited debts, or cities which disdained their return, and so had not yet left the service.

Their present task, so they were told, was to put down the hill tribes which were troubling the Prince's lands in Pisidia. It was to be a short and predictable campaign, no more than a season's march, with a few villages spoiled and plundered, some Pisidian barbarians butchered. A common enough kind of war, and to many, a last chance at redemption or glory or fortunes, before the inevitable retirement.