Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free

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 competitivereception 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
,