Anabasis

That's today's word of the day. It's a noun, meaning:

1 : a military advance
2 : a difficult and dangerous military retreat

And that second definition has a pretty cool origin:

In 401 B.C., Greek mercenaries fighting for Cyrus the Younger marched into the Persian Empire only to find themselves cut off hundreds of miles from home. As a result, they were forced to undertake an arduous and embattled retreat across unknown territories. Xenophon, a Greek historian who accompanied the mercenaries on the march, wrote the epic narrative Anabasis about this experience, and consequently "anabasis" came to mean a dramatic retreat as well as an advance.

But what they don't tell you is that Xenophon's epic is actually the basis for the wonderfully awesome movie The Warriors, where a whole bunch of Brooklyn kids are trying to make their way home from the Bronx back to Coney Island. Can you dig it?

Oh, by the way: I'm only gonna write about awesome Greek things from now on. Cool?