The Sea! The Sea!: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination

The Sea! The Sea! tells the story of "Thalatta! Thalatta!" the shout that first echoed through the mountains of Eastern Turkey by the famous Ten Thousand, the army of Greek mercenaries whose adventures in what are now Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, were described by the Athenian historian and philosopher Xenophon, who was himself a participant in the long march to the coast. The shout itself had an extraordinary afterlife, playing a persistent part in the European and American cultural tradition over the last two hundred years and Tim Rood tells its story for the first time, taking in literary masterpieces by writers such as Heine, Shelley, and Joyce, books of travel and adventure set in the Middle East and elsewhere, articles in Victorian periodicals, popular romantic novels, newspaper editorials at the time of the British evacuation from Dunkirk, and much more.