Xenophon

Xenophon's claim on the historian of Persia is unique among the classical authors: he had been inside the empire, and had marched a good part of its length under arms. Where Herodotus gathered his Persia at second hand on the western fringe and Ctesias wrote from the closed world of the royal court, Xenophon crossed Anatolia and Mesopotamia, then the lands of the Carduchians and the Armenian highlands, on foot, as a soldier in a failed rebellion and then as a leader of its stranded survivors, and set down what he saw. He is, in the words of the Encyclopaedia Iranica, "a premier contemporary source" for the empire's history and institutions.^[1] But he is also a moralist, a disciple of Socrates, a partisan of Sparta, and a writer who used Persia as a mirror in which to show his Greek readers an ideal of leadership; and so the same corpus that gives us the truest eyewitness of the empire's interior also gives us its most elaborate Greek fiction about a Persian king. To read Xenophon on Persia is to hold those two things apart.

Little is known of Xenophon's early life beyond his Socratic connections and a presumed service in the Athenian cavalry. In 401 BCE, a young man, he joined the Greek mercenaries whom Cyrus the Younger, the younger son of Darius II and satrap of the western provinces, was gathering for a march up-country. Cyrus meant to seize the throne from his elder brother Artaxerxes II, who had come to it on their father's death; the enterprise ended at the battle of Cunaxa, near Babylon, where Cyrus was killed in the moment of what looked like victory. After the satrap Tissaphernes seized the Greek generals during negotiations and they were killed, Xenophon was chosen among their replacements. He played a leading part in the long march of the Ten Thousand along the Tigris, through Carduchian country and the Armenian highlands, to the Black Sea. After a winter in Thrace the mercenaries took service with Sparta against Persian rule in Asia; Xenophon came into close contact with the Spartan king Agesilaus, followed him home, and found himself fighting fellow-Athenians at Coronea in 394. Exiled from Athens, he lived for over twenty years at Scillus near Olympia, and after the collapse of Spartan power moved to Corinth; whether he ever returned permanently to Athens is unknown, though his son Gryllus died fighting as an Athenian cavalryman at Mantinea in 362. Out of these experiences, and out of his years of leisure, came a corpus of fourteen works, all of which survive, of very various kinds, of which four make no mention of Persia at all.^[1]

The Anabasis ("the march up-country") is Xenophon's account of Cyrus's revolt and the fate of his Greek soldiers, and it is his single most valuable gift to the historian of the empire, because in it Persia does not merely appear, it "dictates the story".^[1] It has been called "the world's first surviving soldier's memoir",^[2] and its reputation for accuracy is old and remarkable: it served later commanders as a practical guide to the interior, and its wealth of topographic and logistical detail has made it, for the modern historian, a document to be mined less for clean answers than for the puzzles a first-hand witness inevitably leaves.^[1] Much of what happened after Cunaxa carried the Greeks through regions whose relations with the court varied: satrapal forces remained active in Armenia, while Xenophon describes the Carduchians as outside direct royal subjection but in occasional treaty contact with a lowland satrap. The retreat therefore records an uneven and negotiated frontier, not a clean line beyond Persian power; but the framing books, and the final book's re-entry into Persian Anatolia with its sketch of the Caicus valley and its Iranian settlement, are alive with observed detail.^[1]

One curiosity of its transmission is that Xenophon seems first to have circulated it under the name of another, "Themistogenes of Syracuse", a pseudonym read since Plutarch as a bid to win greater credibility for the portrait of his own conduct on the retreat.^[3]

What makes the Anabasis irreplaceable is the plain fact that no other Greek writer travelled the route. Here is an Athenian gentleman marching the length of the imperial heartland and describing, as he goes, the villages with their headmen and their stores, the great estates of the royal family, the paradises and the palaces (basileia) of the satraps, the parasangs that measured the road (see the Royal Road), the satrapal households and their retinues, the mixed soldiery of the King, and the trial of a treacherous grandee, conducted in the royal tent before a court of Persian nobles.^[1]

The observation extends to the land itself. Crossing the north-Mesopotamian steppe on the way down the Euphrates, Xenophon pauses on its flora and its game:

In this region the ground was entirely a plain, level as the sea. It was covered with wormwood, and whatever other kinds of shrub or reed grew on it, were all odoriferous as perfumes. But there were no trees.

Xenophon, Anabasis 1.5, trans. Watson and Ainsworth^[4]

He goes on to the wild asses, the ostriches, the bustards and the antelopes that the cavalry coursed for sport, and to the villagers by the river who quarried millstones and sold them at Babylon for grain.^[4] Modern geography bears him out: the barrenness he describes is "a perfectly accurate description for the time of year" of the crossing, the late summer after the Mesopotamian harvest.^[5]

What he saw, however, is not the same as what he understood. Xenophon records the surface of the empire faithfully, the full villages, the staged supplies, the estates, the garrisons, but he explains none of the machinery behind them, and his categories are Greek throughout. The administrative order that fed a rebel army across months of marching is visible in his pages and legible only from elsewhere, from the Babylonian contracts and the Persepolis archive that document the land-for-service estates and the provisioning system he walked through without naming. The most famous scene of all is not of Persia but of leaving it. After the long agony of the march the vanguard crests a hill in the Armenian highlands and sees the water, and the whole exhausted host takes up the cry:

Presently they could hear the soldiers shouting and passing on the joyful word, "The sea! the sea!" … then indeed they fell to embracing one another, generals and officers and all, and the tears trickled down their cheeks.

Xenophon, Anabasis 4.7, trans. Dakyns^[6]

It is a soldier's memory of the sheer scale of the empire, measured in the suffering of crossing it.

At the centre of the Anabasis stands its portrait of Cyrus the Younger, the Persian prince Xenophon had served and admired, and it is here that Greek and Persian ideals meet most closely. What Xenophon most admires in him is not his generalship but his truthfulness:

He would tell no lies to any one. Thus doubtless it was that he won the confidence alike of individuals and of the communities entrusted to his care.

Xenophon, Anabasis 1.9, trans. Dakyns^[7]

That is the Greek observer's version of the very ideal the royal inscriptions carve as arta, the Truth set against the Lie: the prince is trusted because he does not lie, and his authority rests on it. Xenophon draws the good governor's province as an image of order, the guilty maimed on the highways and the innocent left safe: "Throughout the satrapy of Cyrus any one, Hellene or barbarian, provided he were innocent, might fearlessly travel wherever he pleased".^[7] He shows the instant obedience the prince commanded, the great lords casting off their purple cloaks to heave the baggage-wagons out of the mire "with as much eagerness as if it had been a charge for victory".^[7] And he catches the gift-economy of a Persian following in the prince's own saying, when Cyrus gave away the jewels sent for his person: "To my mind a man's chief ornament is the adornment of nobly-adorned friends".^[7] The proof of the portrait, for Xenophon, lay in the loyalty it bought:

And this also I deem a great testimony to a ruler's worth, that his followers follow him of their own free will, and when the moment of danger comes refuse to part from him.

Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4, trans. Dakyns^[8]

When Cyrus fell, the companions of his table died fighting over his body; and his Greek follower closes the life with the highest word he can give:

So died Cyrus; a man the kingliest and most worthy to rule of all the Persians who have lived since the elder Cyrus.

Xenophon, Anabasis 1.9, trans. Dakyns^[7]

The battle in which Cyrus died, fought in the late summer of 401 at a village on the Euphrates north of Babylon, gives the historian something possessed for no other engagement between the Persian Wars and Alexander: a full narrative, by an eyewitness in the ranks, of a royal Achaemenid army meeting its enemy in the field. Xenophon describes the King's array assembling out of the dust of the plain, the scythed chariots, the contingents in their national arms, and the ordered quiet of the advance; on his own wing the Greek hoplites swept their opponents away almost without loss. The battle was decided elsewhere. At the centre, Cyrus charged the King's own position with his six hundred horse, wounded his brother, and was killed; the rebellion died with him, whatever the Greeks had done on their wing.

The shape of the fight itself carries Persian meaning. Plutarch has Cyrus refuse his officers' pleas to keep out of the melee, lest he show himself "unworthy of empire"; Diodorus casts the brothers' clash as a single combat for the kingship, fought in full view of both hosts. Pierre Briant reads these traditions as more than Greek dramatics: court tales of the king proving himself in personal combat belong to the ideology of Persian kingship, in which warrior ability was central to the legitimation of royal authority, and at Cunaxa two claimants settled a disputed succession in exactly that register.^[9] The battle is also uniquely double-sourced: Xenophon watched it from the rebel side, while Ctesias, the Greek physician of Artaxerxes II, stood on the other and dressed the King's wound, and the two accounts, one intact and one surviving at second hand, still disagree.^[2]

No passage of Xenophon has done more work in later argument than the march itself. Fourth-century Athenian publicists made it a proof of Persian debility: Isocrates, urging the Greeks to combine against an empire he described as decaying, pointed to the mercenaries who had marched to Babylon and come home again, and the last chapter of Xenophon's own Cyropaedia taught the same lesson, contrasting the hardy Persians of the founder's day with the enfeebled men of the present. In Briant's summary of that tradition, the expedition was offered "as absolute proof of the Persians' inability to defend even the heart of their Empire".^[10]

Read whole, the Anabasis shows nearly the opposite. The rebellion failed: Cunaxa was "a resounding victory for Artaxerxes II", the pretender was dead by nightfall, and the King's authority stood.^[2] The Greeks survived not by defeating the empire but by leaving it, marching away from the royal centres into highland country the empire had never firmly administered, and their worst suffering came from mountain peoples and winter, not the King's troops.^[1] Nor is the recruitment itself evidence of softness: a western satrap able to hire above ten thousand Greek professionals out of his own treasury, and to feed them across his provinces for half a year, testifies to the empire's money and reach.^[10] The methodological point is Briant's: decoding the ideology of the Greek texts licenses no mirror-image reconstruction either, and "if the Persian situation did seem to worsen, additional sources are needed to prove it".^[10]

The wider demolition belongs to the historiography of "Persian decadence" (for the army's side of the question see Warfare and the army). Briant traces the idea from Isocrates and Plato onward: "the very idea of decadence pervades all of Western literature on 'Asiatic despotism'".^[10] Its keystone text is the closing chapter of the Cyropaedia, which ends the founder's fiction on the unravelling of his work:

But no sooner was he dead than his sons were at strife, cities and nations revolted, and all things began to decay.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.8, trans. Dakyns^[11]

and descends into the familiar catalogue of softness, luxury and corrupted education, in which "To be known to have wealth is more dangerous than guilt".^[11] Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg showed that this Persia, "apparently the Persia of his own time, is more a literary product than the fruit of unprejudiced observations", and that its influence upon modern research is unwarranted.^[12] Scholars now read the chapter as a Greek moral polemic cast as history, and some doubt it is Xenophon's work at all; its clichés of decadence and decline expose the gap between the book's fictitious past and the author's own century, and its modern use is as evidence for Greek ideology, not for the state of the empire.^[13][14]

The Cyropaedia ("the education of Cyrus") is a work of a wholly different order, and the one that has made Xenophon most controversial among Achaemenid specialists. Cast as the life of Cyrus II the Elder, the founder of the empire, it is "wholly focused on Persia" and yet is not, in any ordinary sense, history at all.^[1] It presents itself openly as a case study in a single question: what enables one man to hold authority over vast numbers of people. From that programme everything else follows. The pace is that of Socratic dialogue rather than narrative, thick with invented conversation; the number of real episodes drawn from Cyrus's long life is very small; and the story-line is "radically un-Herodotean", with Cyrus cooperating with a Median king Cyaxares, marrying his way to Media, and dying peacefully in old age in his bed, a version few scholars regard as a serious alternative to Herodotus.^[1] What the Cyropaedia offers is not the historical Cyrus but an idealised one, a "mirror for princes": a philosophical-didactic romance in which a Persian king is made to embody the Greek, and specifically the Xenophontic, art of command. Its Cyrus wins an empire by that art and is loved by what he has won:

His subjects he cared for and cherished as a father might care for his children, and they who came beneath his rule reverenced him like a father.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.8, trans. Dakyns^[11]

The ideal of the working king, set apart by labour and not by ease, runs through the whole:

The ruler should be marked out from other men, not by taking life easily, but by his forethought and his wisdom and his eagerness for work.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.6, trans. Dakyns^[15]

The genre question has a literature of its own. James Tatum calls it "the most influential of all mirrors for princes", and finds that modern readers have called it "a pedagogical novel, a historical novel, a romanticized biography, a mirror for princes, an ideal romance, a novel before the novel", none of the labels inaccurate and none sufficient alone.^[16] Pierre Briant's summary serves for the field: Xenophon "wrote a long historical romance", whose Cyrus "is certainly not the historical Cyrus" but "a sort of paradigmatic embodiment of royal virtues", so that the historian must "at each step" distinguish the kernel of Achaemenid fact from the Greek interpretation.^[17]

How much real Persia survives inside the fiction is the Cyropaedia problem proper, and it divides the field into a sceptical case, a set of counter-readings, and a cautious middle.

The sceptical case is anchored in the book's construction. Briant observes that everything is credited to Cyrus, the satrapies, the inspectors, the postal service, the court, the finances, so that the work "paints a timeless tableau of the Achaemenid Empire" with no diachronic value, the institutions of Xenophon's own century projected back onto the founder; the give-away is that the portrait of Cyrus the Elder in the Cyropaedia and that of Cyrus the Younger in the Anabasis are to all intents identical.^[18] Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg's essay on the death of Cyrus drew the conclusion of method: the Cyropaedia is a source for Xenophon and for Greek ideas of Persia far more than for the Persian past it claims to describe.^[19] The founder's death is the test case. Herodotus has Cyrus fall in war against the Massagetae beyond the Jaxartes, and Ctesias had him mortally wounded fighting the Derbices; only Xenophon gives him a peaceful deathbed at home, his sons and officials about him, discoursing on the soul and the arts of rule, a scene no one defends as history.^[1]

Yet the counter-readings will not go away, because the invented scenes keep touching things the Persian evidence shows to be real. Wolfgang Knauth proposed that a genuine Persian mirror-for-princes tradition lay behind the book; Arthur Christensen, A. M. Pizzagalli and Sancisi-Weerdenburg herself entertained the idea that the deathbed speech draws on Iranian traditions of the kind later visible in the Shahnameh and in the inscriptions of Darius; and the Assyriologist Simo Parpola has found parallels to the book's names and customs in Neo-Assyrian sources, in keeping with a scholarship that now reads the empire as Near Eastern rather than narrowly Iranian.^[14] Amélie Kuhrt's judgement on the Median court scenes speaks for the cautious middle: the biography is "more fiction than historical fact", yet for its picture of the court "Xenophon drew on contemporary Achaemenid institutions".^[20] And the deathbed counsels themselves, fiction though the scene is, distil the bond the documents show holding every Persian following together, loyalty earned by benefaction:

Every leader must win his own followers for himself, and the way to win them is not by violence but by loving-kindness.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.7, trans. Dakyns^[15]

Where the balance lies is best put as the question the field still uses: whether the Near Eastern matter in the Cyropaedia is central substance or mere "decor" pasted over political and military lessons for a Greek readership.^[14] No consensus answers it; the working rule remains Tuplin's, that where a reader draws the line between selective truth and agenda-driven invention will differ from reader to reader, and that the narrative frame, at least, is invention throughout.^[1] What would settle the larger question, an Iranian mirror-for-princes tradition attested earlier than the medieval Persian texts, does not exist.

What the historian may cautiously use are the passages of hard institutional detail, many of them expressly marked as practices that "obtain even now" in Xenophon's own day, and it is these, not the invented narrative, that carry weight.^[1] The account of Persian education is the classic case, because the Cyropaedia's set-piece and the Anabasis's eyewitness note attest the same institution twice over. The fictional Persia schools its boys in justice itself:

The boys go to school and give their time to learning justice and righteousness: they will tell you they come for that purpose, and the phrase is as natural with them as it is for us to speak of lads learning their letters.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.2, trans. Dakyns^[21]

and the memoir reports, of the sons of the great houses reared at the King's gates, that "From earliest boyhood they learn how to rule and to be ruled".^[7] The hunt is drawn as the school of war:

It accustoms a man to early rising; it hardens him to endure heat and cold; it teaches him to march and to run at the top of his speed; … indeed, it would be hard to find a case in war that has not its parallel in the chase.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.2, trans. Dakyns^[21]

The court's economy of favour, the open hand as statecraft, is given to Cyrus in an exchange with Croesus on hoarding:

If I make my friends rich they will be my treasures themselves, and far better guards too, for me and all we have, than if I set hired watchmen over my wealth.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.2, trans. Dakyns^[22]

The most celebrated of these passages is the account of the empire's surveillance, offered as the origin of a proverb:

Hence the saying that the king has a thousand eyes and a thousand ears; and hence the fear of uttering anything against his interest since "he is sure to hear," or doing anything that might injure him "since he may be there to see."

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.2, trans. Dakyns^[11]

Xenophon's two treatments of that theme anchor the modern analysis of the office (see the King's Eye). The long description in Book 8 of Cyrus's founding of a court and its military and administrative institutions is the richest such passage and the hardest to weigh: that satraps reproduce the King's court in their provinces is widely accepted (see the satrapy system), and the annual review of garrisons answers to documented practice, while the armed eunuch guards, the strict meritocracy of the ruling class and the King as living law are exactly where a modern reader most suspects the didactic purpose of deforming what the author knew.^[1] Even the set-piece narrative can carry tradition at one remove: the book's account of the taking of Babylon, by the diversion of the river on a night of festival, runs close to Herodotus and stands apart from the Babylonian record (see the Fall of Babylon).

Around the two great Persian books stand others that touch the empire more glancingly but sometimes very valuably. The Oeconomicus, a Socratic dialogue on the management of a household and estate set in Athens, turns aside to Persia to prove, by the example of the King, that the cultivation of land is a fit and noble care for a great man: "That monarch, it is said, regards amongst the noblest and most necessary pursuits two in particular, which are the arts of husbandry and war, and in these two he takes the strongest interest".^[8] Here Xenophon is our first Greek witness to the walled royal pleasure-grounds, the paradeisoi, from which the word "paradise" descends (see the paradise garden):

Nowhere among the various countries which he inhabits or visits does he fail to make it his first care that there shall be orchards and gardens, parks and "paradises," as they are called, full of all fair and noble products which the earth brings forth; and within these chiefly he spends his days, when the season of the year permits.

Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4, trans. Dakyns^[8]

And he tells the famous story of the Spartan Lysander's astonishment at Sardis, when Cyrus the Younger showed him the garden he had laid out and confessed that he had planted some of the trees himself: "It is I who measured and arranged it all; some of the trees I planted with my own hands".^[8] The passage is doubly important: it is grounded testimony to a real Iranian institution, the royal paradeisos and the ideology of the productive, cultivating king, and, because Xenophon "could have had no reason to adduce Persia save a belief that what he says was true and pertinent", it is the surest measure of his confidence in his own Persian knowledge.^[1] The same dialogue describes the King's review of his governors, honouring the satrap who keeps his province full and guarded and casting down the one who lets it slip or lines his own purse, a governor's whole accounting in a sentence.^[8]

The Hellenica, Xenophon's continuation of Thucydides, carries the Persian dimension of Greek affairs from 411 to 362: Persian money and Persian fleets in the last phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartan campaigns in Asia, and the King's Peace of 387/6, by which the King dictated the terms of a general settlement to the exhausted Greek states.^[13] Persia enters only as Greek politics require, but the incidental texture is precious: the satrapal courts of the north-west, the paradises and palaces of Dascylium, and the sharply drawn pair of rival satraps, Tissaphernes cast as the very type of the devious politician and Pharnabazus as a noble grandee loyal to his family's tradition and his king even where that loyalty cost him.^[13] It also preserves stray images of the court that the Greeks repeated for a century, among them the golden plane-tree of the King, mocked as too small to give shade to a cicada.^[1] The Agesilaus, an encomium of the Spartan king, uses the Great King as a foil, dwelling on his luxury, his seclusion and his arrogant delays, and turning on the striking fact that Agesilaus refused the King's offer of guest-friendship (xenia).^[1] Even the minor and technical works leave their trace: the treatises on horsemanship commend the Persian way of mounting, and the Ways and Means imagines satraps as a distinct order of powerful barbarians, a glimpse of how the fourth-century Greek world saw the empire's provincial lords.^[1]

Xenophon's worth divides by work and by kind of matter. For the Anabasis he is an eyewitness of a quality no other classical source on the empire can match; but an eyewitness is not a neutral one. Xenophon writes as a Greek aristocrat and a moralist; his sympathies are Spartan and Socratic; he served, and loved, a Persian prince who was the King's rebel; and his Panhellenism, the notion that Greeks might combine to attack and dismember the empire, colours the Anabasis, even if it is there heavily qualified by his own sense of Greek weakness.^[1] For the Cyropaedia the caution must be far sharper, and yet what redeems it for the historian is the same thing that makes it dangerous, that Xenophon built it on a real and informed sense of how the Persian world worked; the modern verdict, in Tuplin's words, is that any historian who trusts the Oeconomicus on Persia "should be prepared to give Cyropaedia the benefit of many doubts".^[1] The narrative frame remains invention, and the safe rule is Sancisi-Weerdenburg's, that the book witnesses Greek ideas of Persia first and the Persian past second.^[19]

Set against the contemporary Iranian record, Xenophon fares much as one would expect of so mixed a corpus. Where he describes institutions he knew, and marks them as current, he is often corroborated: the royal paradeisoi he was the first Greek to name are attested in the administrative record and the archaeology; the King's care for the productive land, the review of governors, the surveillance of the realm, the downward flow of court splendour as the cement of loyalty, all answer to structures the Near Eastern evidence independently shows. Where he narrates the deep past, above all the life of Cyrus the Great, he must simply be set aside in favour of the founder's own documents and the Babylonian record. And where he moralises, on Persian decline, on the King's luxury and seclusion, on the softness of the later Persians, he is giving a Greek judgement, not a Persian fact.

No Greek book about Persia was read longer or to greater effect. Cicero already held the Cyropaedia up as the model of a just empire (iustum imperium), and Plato's pointed critique in the Laws, that the well-educated ruler failed to secure a sound succession, shows the book provoking political argument within a generation of its writing.^[13] Translated into the European vernaculars in the sixteenth century, it became a manual for Renaissance princes, the pre-eminent book of its kind, in Tatum's judgement, until its fame was at last obscured by The Prince itself.^[16] Until the eighteenth century it remained among the most-read of ancient books in Europe, and its hero governed the European idea of the founder: "Perhaps no other book did more than Xenophon's Education of Cyrus to define our view of the good, wise, and tolerant Cyrus", with the decadence of its final chapter sharpening the contrast between the ideal founder and the fallen present.^[23]

Xenophon's entire corpus survives, and the Persian works were transmitted continuously through antiquity and the Middle Ages into the printed editions of the modern era; the standard Greek texts are those of the Oxford Classical Texts and the Loeb Classical Library, and the whole corpus is available in the Perseus Digital Library. The verbatim quotations are given from the public-domain English translation of Henry Graham Dakyns (published in the 1890s), identified at each point of quotation, with one passage from the Victorian version of Watson and Ainsworth as carried by the modern commentary quoted there; Dakyns is Victorian and occasionally free, and is not to be pressed for fine philological nuance, but for the substance and the voice of Xenophon it is serviceable and is freely usable. The chapter-and-section numbering follows the standard editions.