I have on multiple occasions within the past few years mentioned Xenophon's March. Few knew anything about it, including some people with some advanced degrees from good universities, and even a professor with a philosphy Ph.D. And this shows how our teaching of everything has changed.

FWIW, Xenophon was a Greek who with a Greek mercenary force went to preseant-day Iraq, for a war involving two claimants to the Persian throne in about 401 B.C. One claimant died in the one battle of the war, and so the war was over. The Persians then acted to get rid of the Greeks. The Greeks eventually made it back to Greece.

Xenophon wrote the story and his version of the story was studied into the 19th Century by people learning Greek. If you knew any one with a university education in the 19th Century, you could make a good bet that they knew greek and that part of their study of Greek included reading Xenophon story of the March. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophon.

Same thing goes for Cicero and people who studied Latin. These langauges were a a part of most university educations, prior to the 20th century. Now, few people know of these things because history has been written out of courses on other topics besides history. When we study language, we rarely study the historic writings of that language or anything to do with history.

Same goes for things we read for our own language. In the U.S., we rarely read things with any historical significance when we study English. Instead, students read mostly works of fiction with little or no history in them but which are written to invoke a theme or view point.

We are not a culture that respects history, because for the msot part, many do not wish to learn the lessons it has to teach. It is much easier to ignore these lessons, when knows nothing of it. For this same reason, you find people who do not prepare for potentially likely disasters, unlike most of the people who post here and have prepared to some extent.