by Xenophon
That raises, finally, the questions of when and where, rather than why (to which we shall return below), he wrote his various works. Certainty, be it stated straightaway, is impossible; even probability is usually well beyond our grasp. One extreme, ‘unitarian’ view would place all his works – or, to be more specific, the whole of all his works – in the post-Leuctra 360s and 350s. At the other extreme, there are those who argue that at least all The Persian Expedition and the relevant portions of A History of My Times and Agesilaus, and perhaps also the Memoirs of Socrates, were composed at Scillous and also published close to the time of the events and situations they describe or presuppose. Even an extreme ‘analyst’ view, however, would still have to assign a large proportion, if not the bulk, of the œuvre in its final, published form to the post-Leuctra period. My own impression is that Xenophon, like many another ex-politician compelled to fill a vacuum of unwanted and unwonted inactivity, devoted himself to the publication of written work in polished form only in his final decade or decade and a half. It would not surprise me, either, though I could not consider it anything remotely approaching a racing certainty, if their publication had been crucially stimulated by the author’s restoration to the vibrant intellectual atmosphere of Athens, to what Plato (Protagoras 337d) once styled the ‘city hall’ (prutaneion) of sophia.10
In the city hall of wisdom
The conventional translation of sophia as ‘wisdom’ suits well a straight rendering of philosophia (literally, ‘love of sophia’) as ‘philosophy’. But ancient Greek sophia, although it included knowing-that as well as knowing-how, was more than the wisdom of the philosopher as we might understand it. It connoted also the idea of professionalism, the possession of a relevant skill, knack or technique in any particular area – be it medicine, or politics, or shipbuilding, or whatever. To meet the growing complexity of public life in the developing Athenian democracy, there was a correspondingly increased demand for professional instruction in relevant skills and techniques. The sophists, though definitely not constituting a school, and perhaps only secondarily linked together as part of a single intellectual movement, offered themselves as teachers of useful knowledge and usable skills.11
Since they charged high fees affordable only by the seriously wealthy, they pitched their appeal especially to the adolescent and young adult sons of the propertied leisure class. This was a section of society that in democratic Athens was finding itself increasingly out of sympathy with the shift in the balance of power from the elite few to the – as the elite saw them – untutored and unwashed masses. The pseudo-Xenophontic ‘Old Oligarch’ neatly reflects both the anti-democratic outlook of this elite and the consequences of sophistic teaching. The sophists themselves, however, were by no means all necessarily anti-democratic. The instruction they provided in the arts of persuasive rhetoric could have been as well deployed on the democratic side of an argument. For it was argument, one of the several meanings of the Greek word logos, that their teaching was principally about, in both theory and practice.
One of their main pedagogical gambits was to ask a pupil to distinguish between ideas or practices that were traditional and yet intellectually respectable and those that were merely conventional but rationally indefensible. It was not difficult therefore for conservatives to paint the sophists as dangerous radicals undermining the traditional foundations of social solidarity. This was how Aristophanes comically represented Socrates and his ‘Thinkery’ in his Clouds of 423. But that was not at all how Socrates’ own pupils saw him. Indeed, it was they who in their all too successful efforts to distinguish their revered mentor as sharply as possible from the sophists gave them their bad name (and us the negative term ‘sophistical’). What Plato seems to have objected to most about the sophists was their claim both to know and to be able to teach wisdom, when really they were merely clever-clever tinkerers with words and ignorant of what true wisdom was. What Xenophon, however, seems to have principally feared was that their teaching would legitimize and foster the irreligion that he saw as in any case steeply on the increase, thanks to an unholy combination of factors fostered by the morally debilitating circumstances of the Peloponnesian War. In this regard, as in many others, Xenophon’s outlook was far more conventional and traditional than that of Plato.12
In one respect, however, Xenophon was very much a child of his progressive times. Although he spent almost half of his life, and perhaps as much as three-quarters of his adulthood, in exile, he had been born and raised at the epicentre of the panhellenic intellectual ferment associated with the ‘sophists’. He thus became willy-nilly part of the revolution in intellectual discourse that these newfangled thinkers set in train. A subsidiary but vital part of this revolution was the transformation of a broadly oral intellectual culture into a broadly written one. Strictly, Greek had no word for a ‘reader’. The word that did service for it, akroates, meant literally a ‘hearer’. Likewise, one of the Greek verbs used to mean ‘to read’, anagignoskein, meant literally ‘to recognize again’, that is recognize again in their concretized, written form the sounds of words that one had first heard. Most Greeks most of the time would primarily hear words rather than read texts. But from the second half of the fifth century onwards, intellectual interchange increasingly relied on the written word. It is not therefore accidental that Xenophon’s work should contain some of the earliest known references to the ownership of books. In The Persian Expedition (7.5.14), for example, we are told that among the items carried on a trading ship wrecked off Salmydessus in the northern Aegean would be found ‘numbers of written books [bibloi, papyrus book-rolls] and a lot of other things of the sort that sea-captains carry in their wooden chests’; and in Memoirs of Socrates 4.2.1 Socrates is said to have ‘discovered that the handsome Euthydemus had collected a great many writings (grammata) of the best-known poets and sages’. A little later in that same vignette (4.2.8), however, a characteristically Socratic note of doubt is sounded: ‘Is it true what I hear’, Socrates enquires of Euthydemus, ‘that you have collected a large number of books (grammata) by reputed experts (sophoi)?’ The key word here, of course, is ‘reputed’: the reference is to the writings of sophists. Socrates, born in about 470, apparently never wrote a word of his teaching, whereas the sophists, some of whom were older than he, more flexibly employed both oral and written means. Socrates, it seems, distrusted the medium as well as the message of these pseudo-experts. Xenophon, born over forty years after Socrates, fully shared his master’s distrust of sophistic doctrine but did not shun the use of the written word.
Not that the traditional methods of education and instruction through face-to-face dialogue and practical demonstration were entirely superseded by any means. Apart from anything else, written texts, if they were to be made available in any numbers, had to be laboriously transcribed on valuable Egyptian papyrus by specially trained slaves, and so were in Xenophon’s day fairly rare and expensive commodities. Their target audiences, which included the intended readerships of these treatises, must therefore normally be sought among only the highest socio-economic echelons of Greek and Athenian society.13
Xenophon the pedagogue
Xenophon’s range of publications in terms of their genre and subject matter was quite exceptionally wide: from history, personal memoirs and biography, through philosophical dialogues and a philosophical novel, to technical treatises. In more than one field, moreover, he was a pioneer working at the intellectual and literary cutting edge. The quality of his intellect is a separate issue. It is perhaps doubtful, for example, whether Xenophon can be shown to be a penetrating or even consistent philosophical theorist.14 On the other hand, there can be no doubting that all his œuvre, not only the more overtly philosophical works, was intended as a teaching of practical philosophy by examples. It was informed throughout by a high moral and especially religious purpose.
Thus Xenophon’s account of the civil war at Athens in 404–403 has little or nothing in common with Thucydides’ famously pr
agmatic analysis of the civil war on Corcyra (modern Corfu), in 427 (3.82–3). Its essential theme is rather friendship, and its betrayal, and how breaches of friendship can and should be overcome by ritually negotiated reconciliation. Friendship recurs prominently at Memoirs of Socrates 1.2.8, where Xenophon’s Socrates is credited with locating the main profit to be gained from his philosophy in the fact that it rendered his associates good friends to each other (compare 2.4–10). The theme that dominates all others, however, is religion or rather piety. Again and again, conventional piety is recommended and impiety condemned, usually in a simple or even simplistic way. Being pious is indeed represented by Xenophon uncomplicatedly (rather than critically defined, in the Platonic manner) as a matter of fulfilling the conventionally practised rituals, and conforming to the traditional articles of belief, regarding the gods (or ‘the god’, ‘the divine’). Religious nonconformity, in Xenophon’s unswerving view, deservedly brought disaster to both individuals and communities. ‘Many examples could be given from both Greek and foreign history to show that the gods are not indifferent to irreligion or to evil doing’ is how Xenophon, commenting on an admittedly egregious instance of sacrilege, introduces and explains the major public political process of the Greek world in his day, Sparta’s downfall as a great Greek power (History of My Times 5.4.1). Xenophon’s underlying framework for the explanation and evaluation of human affairs was, in short, profoundly but somewhat naively theological.
His other major preoccupation besides proper piety towards the gods was the leadership of men. Three of the six treatises translated here, Hiero, Agesilaus and Cavalry Commander, are explicitly and centrally about leadership in its various forms, on and off the battlefield, within a city and on the international stage. The theme also reappears importantly in the possibly not (entirely) authentic treatises on horsemanship and hunting. Successful leadership, Xenophon predictably argued, was crucially dependent on the leader’s showing true piety. Apart from piety in the leader, what the disciplinarian author primarily looked for and inculcated was unquestioning obedience in the subordinate. Xenophon’s ‘devotion to the principle of order’, which he ranked well above the value of freedom, is perspicuous throughout his writings.15
Reception
Taken at face value, therefore, Xenophon looks like a classic exponent of conservatism and counter-enlightenment. One distinguished contemporary specialist in ancient philosophy, indeed, once dismissed him as ‘quite closely resembl[ing] a familiar British figure – the retired general, staunch Tory and Anglican, firm defender of the Establishment in Church and State’.16 But it is only fair to Xenophon to add that there are the glimmerings of new readings in sight. One reviewer of a commentary on The Estate-manager, for example, wrote that ‘The distinct possibility exists that to take at face value the words of Xenophon’s characters may mean that we in turn fail to understand the point of the [work].’ 17
Such new readings are part of the ongoing process of competitive reception that characterizes all writers deemed worthy of inclusion in a literary canon. Xenophon himself was full of self-righteous ambition to be so included. He seems to have written The Persian Expedition, for example, in response to a less pro-Xenophon version, and to have published the Agesilaus as a pre-emptive strike in an anticipated posthumous pamphlet war over Agesilaus’ legacy. He would therefore have expected his work to be at least controversial and controverted. On the whole, though, the judgement of antiquity proved favourable: ‘most learned’ was how the second century BC historian Polybius (6.45.1) found him; and ‘the sweetest and most graceful Xenophon’ was the opinion of Athenaeus of Naucratis in Egypt, the voraciously learned compiler in about AD 200 of a prodigiously extended bout of invented literary table talk (Athen. 504c). One Greek writer of the second century AD, Flavius Arrianus, actually identified himself quite literally as the new Xenophon and modelled his history of Alexander the Great on Xenophon’s Persian Expedition in both its name and its seven-book structure.18 It was such approbation, coupled with Xenophon’s good Attic Greek, that ensured the continued manuscript copying of his texts throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages on papyrus and vellum and thence his survival into the age of printing.19
The modern reception of Xenophon, however, has been considerably more chequered. The third Earl of Shaftesbury, in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711), praised Xenophon fulsomely as the author of ‘an original system of works, the politest, wisest, usefullest, and (to those who can understand the divineness of a just simplicity) the most amiable and even the most elevating and exalting of all uninspired and merely human authors’. Towards the end of the eighteenth century Edward Gibbon rated highly the lively narrative prose of the supposedly veristic Persian Expedition, but found the fictional Cyropaedia (Education of Cyrus, an invented biography of the founder of the Persian empire) correspondingly tedious. The appreciably lower current estimate of the quality of Xenophon’s mind (though not of his prose) seems to have set in first in early to mid nineteenth-century Germany, whence it passed to Britain and points further west. The main reason for this negative rating, I suspect, is unfavourable comparison of Xenophon with other writers in the many genres he attempted, most conspicuously with Plato in philosophy, and with Thucydides in history. But that depreciation has probably also been aggravated by failure to appreciate duly the nature of Xenophon’s rhetoric – an aspect of ancient (as of modern) writers to which a great deal of attention is now belatedly being paid. It remains to be seen whether as a result of such fresh reassessments of his style Xenophon’s stock will continue to rise significantly on the scholarly market. The present collection will, it is hoped, help to make any re-evaluation of Xenophon, if not necessarily wiser, at any rate better informed.
NOTES
1. In Penguin Classics the Memoirs of Socrates is translated by H. Tredennick and R. Waterfield in the volume entitled Conversations of Socrates (1990); The Persian Expedition (1972) and A History of My Times (1979) are by R. Warner, with introductions and notes by G. Cawkwell. For these and other bibliographical details and recommendations, see Further Reading.
2. The ‘Old Oligarch’ is conveniently available in English translation with commentary in J. M. Moore, Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy (Chatto & Windus and University of California Press, 2nd edn., 1983). On sophistry, see the next section of this Introduction.
3. Spartan Society (Lakedaimonion Politeia) is translated with commentary in the Penguin Plutarch on Sparta (1988), pp. 166–84. Modern scholarship on Xenophon is reviewed in the works by Morrison and Nickel.
4. Further detail, and references to the relevant passages in Xenophon’s works, may be found in Cawkwell’s excellent introductions to the Penguin Persian Expedition and History of My Times; it was a particular privilege for the present writer to attend George Cawkwell’s Oxford lectures on Xenophon in the early 1970s.
5. For an attempt to situate Aristophanes’ plays within their social and political context, see Cartledge, Aristophanes and His Theatre of the Absurd (Duckworth, 1995).
6. The Apology (as Socrates’ Defence) is included in the Penguin Conversations of Socrates.
7. Xenophon’s account of the defeat of Athens and its oligarchic aftermath is given in the first two books of A History of My Times; these may usefully be read with the commentary of P. Krentz (Aris & Phillips, 2 vols., 1989–94). See also his The Thirty at Athens (Cornell University Press, 1982).
8. A History of My Times 7.4.35 (and note), 7.5.1. On Xenophon’s exile, see Green.
9. On Spartan education, see Xenophon’s Spartan Society, in the Penguin Plutarch on Sparta. For the career of Agesilaus generally, see Cartledge, Agesilaos.
10. The extreme ‘unitarian’ view is argued or assumed by Higgins; the extreme ‘analyst’ position by Delebecque, Essai sur la vie.
11. On the sophists see Kerferd, Rankin and de Romilly.
12. The view that the sophists caused rather than exploited or contributed to a grave
spiritual crisis in Greece, not confined to Athens, is argued by Burkert, Greek Religion, pp. 311– 17.
13. On changing patterns of literacy and orality in Greece generally and in democratic Athens specifically, see Thomas.
14. See Waterfield’s introduction to Memoirs of Socrates, but contrast more favourable assessments in Vander Waerdt.
15. The phrase quoted is that of Dillery, Xenophon and the History.
16. T. H. Irwin, as quoted in Cartledge, Agesilaos, p. 61.
17. Y. L. Too, Classical Review 45 (1995), 248 reviewing Pomeroy. See also n. 14.
18. See J. R. Hamilton’s Penguin Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander (1971).
19. See L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn. (Oxford University Press, 1991).
FURTHER READING
I. GENERAL CONTEXT
a. History of the times
Buckley, T., Aspects of Greek History 750–323 B.C.: A Source-based Approach (Routledge, 1996)
The Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd edn., vol. V The Fifth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1992), vol. VI The Fourth Century (1994)
Cartledge, P., Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta (Duckworth and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)
—— (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press, 1997, corr. pb. repr. 2000)
Daverio Rocchi, G. and Cavalli, M. (eds.) Il Peloponneso di Senofonte (Monduzzi Editore, 2004)
Davies, J., Democracy and Classical Greece, 2nd edn. (Fontana/HarperCollins, 1993)
Finley, M. I., Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 1983)