Xenophon

• 1. Introduction

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  Xenophon of Athens was born around 430 BC, in the deme of Erchia, into an aristocratic family - and he would go on to become one of the most versatile minds of the ancient world. He was a soldier who led ten thousand stranded mercenaries home across hostile territory. He was a historian who picked up exactly where Thucydides left off. He was a philosopher who sat at Socrates' feet and later defended that teacher's memory in writing. The question of which of those three identities defined him most has been debated for at least two millennia, and it has never been settled. What drew him to consult the oracle at Delphi before marching into Persia? What made a born Athenian spend the best years of his life fighting for Sparta? And how did a man who wrote in plain, unfussy Greek come to be called the Attic Muse?

• 2. The March and the Man

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  In 401 BC, Xenophon sailed to Ephesus at the personal invitation of Proxenus of Beotia, a captain in the mercenary army of Cyrus the Younger. Cyrus had assembled a massive force under the pretext of fighting Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap of Ionia. The Greek soldiers did not learn until they reached Tarsus that their real mission was to depose King Artaxerxes II of Persia. Many refused to march further. A Spartan general named Clearchus persuaded them otherwise.

  At the Battle of Cunaxa, Cyrus was killed. Clearchus was subsequently lured to a feast by Tissaphernes, where he and four other generals, along with many captains including Xenophon's friend Proxenus, were captured and executed. The Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries were left leaderless, deep inside Mesopotamia, with no obvious path home.

  The mercenaries elected new commanders, and Xenophon was among those chosen. Military historian Theodore Ayrault Dodge would later write that "the centuries since have devised nothing to surpass the genius of this warrior." Dodge also called Xenophon the father of the systematic military retreat, crediting him with reducing its management to a perfect method. Xenophon's conduct of the march home would earn him recognition as the greatest general who preceded Alexander the Great.

• 3. Fighting Through the Unknown

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  The early phases of the retreat forced Xenophon to improvise constantly. Persian missile cavalry harassed the column with volleys of arrows and javelins. One night, Xenophon formed a body of archers and light cavalry from within his own force. When the Persian horsemen closed to within several yards the next day, he unleashed his new unit, routing them and killing many.

  The land of the Carduchians, in the mountains of what is now southeastern Turkey, proved even harder. This wild tribe had once repelled a Persian force said to number 120,000 men, none of whom returned. The Ten Thousand were pelted with stones and arrows for days before reaching a defile where the main Carduchian host waited. Xenophon had 8,000 men stage a feint while he led the other 2,000 through a pass revealed by a prisoner, advancing under the cover of a rainstorm.

  Winter overtook the army in Armenia, where the Greeks marched, as Xenophon recorded, absolutely unprovided with clothing suitable for such weather. They stormed a wooden castle on a forested hill by sending small parties to draw the defenders' fire, allowing one soldier at a time to leap into the trees for cover until the garrison had largely exhausted its ammunition. At the Centrites River, Persian forces blocked every ford, and Xenophon neutralised them by feigning an attack on a second crossing, drawing off the main Persian force so his troops could overwhelm the depleted guard at his preferred ford.

  The column finally reached Trapezus on the Black Sea coast, an event Xenophon notes in the Anabasis at chapter 4.8.22. Before leaving, the Greeks fought a last engagement against the Colchians, Persian vassals, by thinning their own line so far that it outflanked the enemy. The Colchians split their army to counter both wings, opening a gap in their centre through which Xenophon poured his reserves.

• 4. Exile and a New Home

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  After the Anabasis ended in 399 BC at Pergamon, Xenophon's military career continued under Spartan commanders. He joined the campaign of Agesilaus, the newly appointed Spartan king, for Ionian Greek independence, which ran from 396 to 394 BC. When Agesilaus' army marched back to Greece in 394 BC - deliberately retracing the route of the Persian invasion eighty years before - Xenophon fought alongside them at the Battle of Coronea.

  Athens responded by banishing him. Xenophon followed Agesilaus toward Sparta and received an estate at Scillus, where he lived for the next twenty-three years. Diogenes Laertius later noted that Pausanias recorded a tomb for Xenophon at Scillus. In 371 BC, Sparta's defeat at the Battle of Leuctra changed everything again. The Elians confiscated his estate. Xenophon moved to Corinth, where, according to Diogenes, he lived until his death in 354 BC at around age 74 or 75.

  The Hellenica, which Xenophon wrote to cover events from 411 to 362 BC, begins with the phrase "Following these events" - a deliberate continuation of the final sentence of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. That single phrase signals an ambition that went well beyond memoir-writing: Xenophon intended his history to sit alongside the greatest historical work of his age.

• 5. The Philosopher's Mirror

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  Xenophon wrote the Cyropaedia as an extended portrait of Cyrus the Great, founder of the first Persian Empire. He used Cyrus as a vehicle for his own ideas about the ideal ruler: lofty, temperate, not subject to ordinary human weakness. Cyrus the Great conquered the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BC, and Xenophon's account of how he did it carried a pointed message about political stability.

  Scholar David Johnson, following Leo Strauss, has argued that the Cyropaedia contains a subtle critique beneath its praise. In section 4.3, Cyrus expresses his wish that no Persian nobleman ever be seen on foot but always on horseback - so much so, he writes, that the Persians may actually seem to be centaurs. Johnson reads the centaur image as deliberate. The centaur's unstable fusion of man and animal mirrors, in his view, the inherently unstable alliance between Persian and Mede that Cyrus alone was holding together.

  Xenophon also used the Cyropaedia to criticise meritocracy. The homotimoi, a class of highly educated heavy infantrymen who originally numbered 1,000 when Cyrus fought the Assyrians, had always shared equally in war's spoils. When Cyrus armed ordinary soldiers with the same weapons and then enforced merit-based distribution of rewards, the homotimoi found themselves competing on unfamiliar ground. Hand-to-hand combat favoured strength and bravery over education. The class renamed itself in the process: no longer homotimoi, those of equal honour, but entimoi - those who had to be "in" with the emperor to gain any honour at all.

• 6. Socrates in Writing

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  Diogenes Laertius preserved a story of how Xenophon and Socrates first met. Socrates placed his walking stick across a narrow lane and blocked Xenophon's path, asking him where necessary things were sold. When Xenophon answered, Socrates asked a second question: where men were made good and virtuous. Xenophon did not know. "Follow me, then, and learn," Socrates said. Diogenes also relates that at the Battle of Delium, Xenophon fell from his horse and Socrates stepped in to save his life.

  Xenophon's surviving Socratic writings include the Apology, the Memorabilia, the Symposium, and the Oeconomicus. Except for Plato's dialogues and a small number of pseudepigraphic texts, they are the only Socratic dialogues that survive from antiquity. Xenophon was not present at the trial of Socrates - he was on campaign in Anatolia and Mesopotamia - and scholars note that he was only a young child during the events he describes in his own Symposium.

  Both Xenophon and Plato wrote accounts of Socrates' defence at trial. Xenophon argued that Socrates conducted his defence in an exceedingly arrogant manner. Plato worked to soften that impression. Xenophon framed Socrates' lack of preparation not as a failure to argue, but as a deliberate choice to seek death. Scholar Danzig interprets this as Xenophon suggesting a rhetorical challenge worthy of a great persuader: to convince a jury to condemn a man even on unconvincing charges. Quintilian, in The Orator's Education, ultimately placed Xenophon alongside Plato as a philosopher rather than grouping him with historians.

• 7. A Writer of Many Faces

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  Xenophon's entire corpus has survived, which is itself remarkable for a writer of his era. His works span military history, biography, political philosophy, household management, and practical treatises on horsemanship, cavalry command, and hunting with dogs. Diogenes Laertius recorded that he was known in antiquity as the Attic Muse because of the sweetness of his diction. His prose was written in plain Attic Greek, which is why students of ancient Greek have used his texts as translation exercises for centuries.

  The short treatises, including On Horsemanship, Hipparchikos, and Hunting with Dogs, were probably composed during his twenty-three years at Scillus, where his days were spent in relative leisure. The Constitution of the Spartans remains a primary source for Spartan society, partly because the Spartans themselves wrote nothing about their institutions that survives. Xenophon wrote in that work: "It occurred to me one day that Sparta, though among the most thinly populated of states, was evidently the most powerful and most celebrated city in Greece; and I fell to wondering how this could have happened. But when I considered the institutions of the Spartans, I wondered no longer."

  The Anabasis served Alexander the Great as a field guide during the early phases of his own campaign into the Achaemenid Empire. The Cyropaedia is sometimes identified as the archetype of the European "mirror of princes" genre. The Hellenica, partial to Sparta as it is, remains a major primary source for Greek events from 411 to 362 BC - a period that would be far darker without it. The Hiero, a dialogue on happiness between the tyrant of Syracuse and the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos, shows yet another angle: Xenophon's interest in the inner life of power, not just its exercise.