Xenophon Studies – serie

While Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of virtue have received extensive scholarly attention, less work has been done on Xenophon’s portraits of virtue and on his attitude towards the theoretical issues connected with it. And yet, Xenophon offers one of the best sources we have for thinking about virtue in ancient Greece, because he combines the analytical interests of a Socratic with a historian’s interest in real life.　 Until recently, scholars of Xenophon tended to focus either on the historiographical writings or on the philosophical writings (chiefly Memorabilia, with some attention to the other Socratic writings and Hiero). Cyropaedia was treated as a separate entity, and Xenophon’s short and more technical treatises were generally studied only by those with particular interest in their specialized topics (such as horsemanship, hunting, and Athenian finances). But recent work by Vincent Azoulay and by Vivienne Gray have shown the essential unity of his writings. This volume continues this pan-Xenophontic trend by studying the virtues across Xenophon’s oeuvre and connecting them with a wide range of Greek literature, from Homer and the tragedians to Herodotus and Thucydides, the orators, Plato, and Aristotle.

Xenophon the historian was formed by the historiographical culture of his time and by his own history as pupil of Socrates, mercenary leader and political exile. These perspectives underpin a collection of essays that explores his sophisticated and occasionally idiosyncratic engagement with the past (both in historical narratives and elsewhere) and the strategies of later readers who harnessed his work to their own agendas. The wider world (Greek and non-Greek) also comes into view, both in the vivid and sometimes brutal experience of war among the Ten Thousand and in the political conflicts and socio-religious institutions and mores that framed his life-story. We discover a writer trying to make sense of that world, to evaluate what happens in it, to discern trends – and ultimately to inform the present with lessons from the past. The eighteen chapters illustrate the calibre and value of a writer at work when history was still a genre in development whose modes and expectations created opportunities more than constraints. The overarching aim of the volume is thus to illuminate what it meant to be a historian in such a period, and how and why Xenophon’s past-oriented thinking and writing mattered beyond his own lifetime.