Classical Greece

Xenophon

The soldier-historian

Lifespan · c. 430 – c. 354 BCE

A brief orientation

Xenophon was an Athenian of the generation after Plato — close in age, both students of Socrates, but with a strikingly different life. As a young man he joined the expedition of the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger against Artaxerxes II in 401 BCE; when Cyrus was killed in battle and the Greek commanders murdered shortly after, Xenophon was among those elected to lead the army of Greek mercenaries — the Ten Thousand — back from the interior of the Persian Empire to the Black Sea. He told the story himself in the Anabasis.

He was later banished from Athens, possibly for fighting on the Spartan side; he settled for many years on an estate at Scillus near Olympia under Spartan patronage and returned to Athens only late in life, after the banishment was lifted.

What he wrote

The Xenophontic corpus is broad: historical works (the Anabasis, the Hellenica, which continues the narrative of Thucydides), the Socratic works (the Memorabilia, the Symposium, the Apology, the Oeconomicus), the political and pedagogical writings (the Cyropaedia, the Hiero, the Agesilaus, the Lacedaemonian Constitution), and the practical treatises on cavalry, horsemanship and hunting. The standard edition in Greek is E. C. Marchant's Oxford Classical Texts, which our Sources page catalogues.

Why he matters for Virtue & Power

Xenophon gives the platform two things that Plato does not. He gives us a second portrait of Socrates — more practical, more concerned with the management of life and household — that we read alongside Plato's in our entry on the two Socratic witnesses. And he gives us, in the Cyropaedia, what is often regarded as the first sustained ancient treatment of leadership as a subject in its own right: a study of how a ruler is formed, how he wins the willing obedience of others, and how the well-ordered command of oneself relates to the well-ordered command of a polity.

Related reading

philosopher
Socrates
Athenian philosopher of the fifth century BCE — teacher of Plato and Xenophon, examined life on trial, and the central figure of the Socratic dialogues he himself never wrote.
philosopher
Plato
Athenian philosopher, founder of the Academy, and author of the dialogues that organise the philosophical tradition around the question of the well-ordered soul and the well-ordered city.
book
Cyropaedia
Xenophon's "Education of Cyrus" — a long pseudo-biographical study of the founder of the Persian Empire, often regarded as the first sustained ancient treatment of how a leader is formed.
book
Memorabilia
Xenophon's "Recollections of Socrates" — a four-book portrait and defence of his teacher that, together with Plato's dialogues, is our principal source for Socrates.
theme
Leadership
The classical and historical inquiry into rule, command and stewardship — and into what kind of person is fit to hold authority.
theme
Self-Control
The classical inquiry into sōphrosynē — the well-ordered command of one's own desires and the steady governance of the self.
comparison
Plato and Xenophon
Two students of Socrates, two very different portraits of their teacher — and the standard scholarly check on reading any one of them alone.
philosopher
Cyrus the Great
Founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire and the first ancient figure the Greek tradition treated as the type of the well-ordered ruler over a vast and diverse domain.
philosopher
Lycurgus
The traditional Spartan lawgiver — historical or legendary — credited with the institutions that made Sparta the most disciplined polity of the classical Greek world.
theme
Discipline
The ordering of habit, body and life that the classical tradition treated as the precondition for any sustained excellence — civic, military or philosophical.
theme
Education
The classical inquiry into paideia — the formation of the citizen through habit, example, exposure to texts and the right kind of company — and the polities that took it seriously.
theme
Empire
The political form in which authority is centralised in a single ruler over a large, diverse and conquered territory — and the long ancient and medieval inquiry into how to read it.
theme
Military Virtue
The classical inquiry into the virtues distinctive to a soldier and a commander — courage, discipline, endurance, judgement under fire — and into the polity that produces them.
theme
Statecraft
The classical inquiry into politikē — the architecture of political life, the cycle of regimes, and the question of which constitution suits which people.
essay
Cyrus and the education of rulers
An interpretive reading of Xenophon's Cyropaedia — its place in the classical tradition, its distance from the historical Cyrus, and the long European inheritance that read it as the most serious ancient treatment of the formation of a ruler.
essay
Lycurgus and Spartan discipline
An interpretive reading of the Spartan constitution attributed to Lycurgus — the agōgē, the public meals, the prohibition of conspicuous wealth — and of why the Greek philosophical tradition kept reading Sparta even though almost no Greek state imitated it.
essay
The Socratic method
An interpretive reading of the elenchus across Plato's early dialogues — what the questioning is doing, why aporia counts as progress, and how the Xenophontic Socrates uses the same method to different ends.
guide
How to read Xenophon
A short practical guide to Xenophon — where to start, what to expect, why the corpus is broader than the Socratic works, and why he is the standard scholarly counterweight to reading Plato alone.