I’m taking inspiration from an ancient Athenian

How sorry I felt for the poor man who died this week stuck up a 290ft chimney in Carlisle despite desperate attempts — helicopter; cherry-picker — by the emergency services to rescue him. We’re so used to the idea that no matter how precarious or remote our plight — be it stranded kids deep inside a flooded cave in Thailand or tourists who’ve had their feet bitten off while snorkelling in Australia’s Whitsundays — those amazing emergency services will get us to safety in the end. It comes as quite a shock to be reminded that survival isn’t always inevitable.

But is this a sign, I wonder, that we’ve all become a bit too pampered and complacent for our own good? One of the reasons, I’m sure, for the existence of Generation Snowflake is all those pathetically indulgent parents — myself included, I’m afraid — who would happily drop everything at a moment’s notice to try to sort out their darling ones’ minor emotional crises. Maybe what we should be instilling in ourselves is a bit more resilience and self-reliance — just like the author of my new favourite classic, Anabasis.

Anabasis — or ‘The March of the Ten Thousand’, as it’s sometimes translated — was written around 370 bc by the Athen-ian nobleman Xenophon. It has been described as ‘one of the great adventures in human history’ — and rightly so. The set-up and denouement are so extraordinary that it reads more like the plot for a ten-part Netflix drama than something (give or take a bit of poetic licence) that actually happened to real people.

The story goes like this: in search of excitement and money, Xenophon joins a 10,000-strong Greek mercenary army to fight in the service of the great Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, who is trying to seize the Persian throne from his brother Ataxerxes.