I am reading Xenophon's Anabasis, and as he describes Cryus' army marching East he feels the need to note that when they come to a town it is οἰκουμένη, that is "inhabited." This sounds to me like there must have been lots of empty cities that the army marched past, so that Xenophon felt like he needed to specifically say a town was inhabited.
Did something make people abandon lots of towns? Was he referring to ruins of earlier civilizations? Am I reading too much into this?
Hello!
I'm looking at the gutenberg.org translation at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm#link2H_4_0005
specifically
Crossing it, he marched through Phrygia a single stage, of eight parasangs, to Colossae, an inhabited city (4), prosperous and large.
There's a footnote that says
(4) Lit. "inhabited," many of the cities of Asia being then as now deserted, but the suggestion is clearly at times "thickly inhabited," "populous."
So one conclusion is that it means densely populated.
In other cases, cities are uninhabited because they've been evacuated or abandoned. In the above linked section (bk I.ii), the city of Tarsus
"had been deserted by its inhabitants, who had betaken themselves, with Syennesis, to a strong place on the hills."
Another is that inhabited means simply "lived in [by X]". As in, "Dallas is inhabited by Texans." OR "Weirdos inhabit Florida."
From this point Cyrus pursued his march, through Syria a single stage—five parasangs—to Myriandus, a city inhabited by Phoenicians, on the sea-coast.