Many things survive from antiquity. In Egypt alone every rubbish heap seems almost routinely to disburse some precious fragment from a forgotten philosopher or a sliver of verse by a once celebrated poet. This is how an unknown long poem by the Greek poet Archilochus came to light a few years ago, and the fact that it was both exquisite and salacious heightened the excitement of its discovery. Who knows how many mummies lie swaddled in the lost stanzas of Sappho or how many middens conceal the vanished dialogues of Aristotle? These at least, fragmentary and tattered as they are, somehow may survive, along with temples and statuary, coins, amphorae, oil lamps and lekythoi. But the voices of antiquity, like its music, have been stilled forever.

Yet, rather amazingly, one famous shout continues to ring on and echo through European literature, two and a half millennia after it was uttered. That shout is the cry, “The sea! The sea!” (in Greek, Thalatta! Thalatta!). Most readers will recall this from the first chapter of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” when “stately, plump” Buck Mulligan, shaving gear in hand, gazes at the sea from the top of the Martello tower and remarks to Stephen Dedalus, “Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snot green sea. The scrotum tightening sea … Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta!”

The cry in fact comes from the “Anabasis” of Xenophon, the Athenian general, historian and braggart (and sometime disciple of Socrates) who was born into a wealthy family around 430 B.C. and died, an exile, probably in Corinth, sometime in the 350s. Thucydides had been a general – a disgraced one – in the Peloponnesian War, and Xenophon seems consciously to have emulated his formidable predecessor (he devoted part of his life to writing a continuation of Thucydides’s history under the title “Hellenica”). In his “Anabasis,” Xenophon provides a personal, and quite self-serving, account of the March of the Ten Thousand.

The “Ten Thousand” were Greek mercenaries (there were actually 13,000, but who’s counting?) who hired themselves out to the Persian pretender Cyrus. The disgruntled Cyrus, however, scheming to topple his brother Artaxerxes from the imperial throne, tricked the Greek force, who thought they were marching against the Pisidians, a fractious tribe in southern Turkey. Only when it was too late did the Greeks realize Cyrus was leading them to Babylon and a coup d’etat against an overwhelming, defensive army of archers, cavalry, and “scythe-wheeled” chariots.

In the decisive battle, Cyrus was killed by a javelin-thrust below the eye. The Greek force found itself defeated, leaderless, and stranded in hostile territory. The only recourse was cautious retreat, and this they accomplished, crossing the Tigris and heading north, all the while harried and bushwhacked by Persian outriders. Xenophon himself provided the rearguard. After terrible hardships, scaling mountains in Kurdistan and fording rivers, the straggling remnants reached Theches, the “holy mountain.” Here the scouts spotted the distant Black Sea and sent up the shout, “The sea! The sea!”

The sea meant a way out, passage home and refuge. But the tremendous exuberance of that signal-shout has resounded ever since: Even if we don’t recall Xenophon’s account, the very repetition of the word moves us; even if we don’t feel the full exhilaration of deliverance the sea represented to the 10,000, we understand its force (in the same way perhaps that we are moved by Martin Luther King’s repeated “Free at last! Free at last!”).

Now the Oxford classicist Tim Rood has had the ingenious idea of tracing the history of those two Greek words. His “The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination” (Overlook Press, 262 pages, $35), which has just appeared, leaves no literary echo of that ancient shout unsounded. Mr. Rood’s reading has been vast, and not only in the usual sources. He has ransacked the accounts of travelers and soldiers; he has read long-forgotten authors (how many know the works of “the Canadian poet John Reade,” who used the Greek words as a title in his 1870 collection? Or the effusions of the Rev. M. G. Watkins or Henry Nehemiah Dodge?). Better, he has new things to say about well-known authors, such as Byron and Thoreau, and about painters, such as the megalomaniacal “historical painter” Benjamin Robert Haydon, the friend of Keats. (The book is illustrated with fascinating old photos, movie stills, and cartoons that provide a running and often amusing visual commentary.)

Some of the quoted excerpts are deliciously bad, like these rapturous lines from a poem by Henry Ellison:

Up the stern cliff the wave comes bounding still,
Like a great shaggy hound that leaps to kiss
His unregarding master’s hand, and ill
Denial brooks …

Xenophon wrote “thalatta,” but the cry is often given as “thalassa,” the usual form in classical Greek. (In “Finnegans Wake,”Joyce transformed it into “Tha lassy! Tha lassy!”) Mr. Rood has a number of amusing anecdotes on this consonant-switch. For instance, he tells us that the 6-year-old Ronald Knox was asked by his brother Wilfred when both were at the seashore, “Ronnie, do you consider that Xenophon’s men cried ‘thalatta’ or ‘thalassa’?” and the whizkid replied, “The latter.” (The pun, as Mr. Rood reminds us, appears also in George MacDonald Fraser’s immortal “Flashman at the Charge,” when the rascally Harry Flashman, cornered by the Aral Sea, mutters to himself “Thalassa or thalatta, the former or the latter?”) In a fascinating note, Mr. Rood tells that the late H.D.F. Kitto, a leading classicist of his generation, stated that the word “thalassa” is not even Indo-European in origin, let alone Greek. Kitto theorized that Xenophon’s troops were taught the word by local barbarians in the Balkans.

This is an unusual and fascinating book, all the more so because Mr. Rood uses the famous phrase to illumine national attitudes, especially among the English, over the centuries, from Defoe to Virginia Woolf and both the Lawrences, T.E. and D.H. I hope that I won’t seem ungrateful if I say that in the end, this is more than I ever thought, or wished, to know about Xenophon’s immortal quote. I once wrote a book about the history of a single short sentence over eight centuries, and I know it takes a certain obsessiveness to carry it through, but Mr. Rood puts me to shame.

There seems to be nothing Mr. Rood hasn’t read on the subject – from the Greeks to modern Dutch, German, Polish, and Irish poets – but what might have been deadly in other hands, the sort of thing crusty German philologists used to devote their lives to, in his grip turns delightfully compelling. He writes with wit and grace and has a fine flair for the unnoticed source. In discussing the great Irish poet Louis MacNiece, for example, he even comes up with an unpublished radio script, “The March of the Ten Thousand,” from the BBC archives, which MacNiece wrote during the Blitz. Perhaps as an antidote to Henry Ellison, he cites a stanza from what may be MacNiece’s last poem, fittingly entitled “Thalassa”:

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhale dares us to be free;
By a high course our star is set,
Our end is life. Put out to sea.

Now “Thalatta! Thalatta!” keeps running through my head like a jingle and I can’t help wondering how, after so exhaustive an analysis, the words retain their ancient and mysterious force. It’s a tribute to Mr. Rood’s tact, as well as his scholarship, that he doesn’t dispel this riddle. Instead, he proves just how far the voice can carry when it stirs us.