Xenophon (c. 430 BCE - c. 354 BCE) was an Athenian soldier, historian and philosophical writer, and one of the two contemporaries whose accounts of Socrates survive. [1] As a young man he joined a Greek mercenary force fighting for the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, and after its commanders were killed he helped lead the survivors on a long retreat to the Black Sea, an episode he recounted in the Anabasis. [2] His other works include the Hellenica, a continuation of Thucydides, the Cyropaedia, and the Socratic writings Memorabilia and Symposium.
Life and the march of the Ten Thousand
Xenophon was born around 430 BCE in the Athenian deme of Erchia into a family of some wealth, and grew up during the Peloponnesian War. [1] He associated in his youth with Socrates, whose conversation he later reported at length.
In 401 BCE, on the advice of a friend, he joined an expedition of some ten thousand Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to seize the Persian throne from his brother Artaxerxes II. [2] Cyrus was killed at the battle of Cunaxa near Babylon, and the Greek generals were seized and executed under a truce. Left leaderless deep inside hostile territory, the soldiers elected new commanders, Xenophon among them, and fought their way north through Armenia to the Black Sea.
Exile and later life
He afterwards served under the Spartan king Agesilaus II in Asia Minor and returned with him to Greece, apparently fighting on the Spartan side against a coalition that included Athens. [3] At some point he was exiled from Athens, either for his service with Cyrus or for his Spartan sympathies.
Sparta granted him an estate at Scillus near Olympia, where he lived for some twenty years as a country landowner, hunting and writing. [1] Displaced by political change after the Spartan defeat at Leuctra in 371 BCE, he moved to Corinth. His exile from Athens was later revoked, and he died about 354 BCE.
Writings
The Anabasis, written in the third person, is Xenophon's best-known work and has been read for centuries as both a historical source and an introductory Greek text. [2] The moment when the retreating soldiers catch sight of the sea and cry out thalatta, thalatta is among the most famous passages in Greek literature.
The Hellenica takes up Greek history where Thucydides breaks off in 411 BCE and carries it to 362 BCE, providing the main continuous narrative for the period, though modern historians note its omissions and its sympathy for Sparta. [3] The Cyropaedia, a partly fictional account of the education of Cyrus the Great, is closer to a treatise on leadership than to history.
His Socratic works, the Memorabilia, Apology, Symposium and Oeconomicus, present a more practical and conventionally pious Socrates than Plato's dialogues do, and the differences between the two portraits are central to the scholarly problem of recovering the historical Socrates. [4] Xenophon also wrote short technical works on horsemanship, hunting, cavalry command and the revenues of Athens.
Reputation
Ancient readers admired Xenophon for the clarity and plainness of his Attic prose, and the Anabasis and Cyropaedia were widely studied in antiquity and in early modern Europe as manuals of generalship and rule. [1] Nineteenth-century scholarship, comparing him unfavourably with Thucydides and Plato, treated him as a lesser figure in both history and philosophy; more recent work has reassessed him as a deliberate and versatile writer whose apparent simplicity conceals considerable craft. [4]
