Xenophon

Xenophon of Athens (c. 430–353 BCE) is the one classical writer on the Achaemenid Empire who had actually been inside it, 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, Mesopotamia and the mountains of Kurdistan and Armenia 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 (Tuplin).^[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.

The man: soldier, exile, writer

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 the King's great-grandson Cyrus the Younger, 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 the death of their father Darius II; the enterprise ended at the battle of Cunaxa, near Babylon, where Cyrus was killed in the moment of what looked like victory. When the satrap Tissaphernes shortly afterwards arrested and killed the Greek generals by treachery, Xenophon was chosen among their replacements, and played a leading part in the long homeward march of the Ten Thousand through Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Armenia and northern Anatolia 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 (Tuplin).^[1]

The Anabasis: the March of the Ten Thousand

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" (Tuplin).^[1] Here is an Athenian gentleman marching the length of the imperial heartland and describing, as he goes, the villages and the great estates, the paradises and the palaces (basileia), the parasangs that measured the road, the satraps and their households, the mixed soldiery of the King, the trial of a treacherous grandee, and the one proper set-piece battle between a royal army and a Greek force that we possess for the whole stretch between the Persian Wars and Alexander. Much of what happened after Cunaxa carried the Greeks beyond the effective reach of Persian power, into the lands of the Carduchi and the highlands where the empire's writ ran thin; but the framing chapters, 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 (Tuplin).

Cyrus the Younger, and the ideal of truth

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, on Cyrus the Younger, trans. Dakyns)^[2]

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" (Anabasis 1.9). 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" (Anabasis 1.5). And when Cyrus falls at Cunaxa, 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, the epitaph of Cyrus the Younger, trans. Dakyns)^[2]

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, the Ten Thousand reach the sea, trans. Dakyns)^[3]

It is a soldier's memory of the sheer scale of the empire, measured in the suffering of crossing it. The reputation of the Anabasis 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 (Tuplin). One curiosity of its transmission is that Xenophon seems first to have circulated it under the name of another, "Themistogenes of Syracuse", a screen behind which his self-promoting account could be praised at one remove.

The Cyropaedia: the education of Cyrus

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 (Tuplin). 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 (Tuplin).^[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.

And yet it is far from worthless for the historian, precisely because Xenophon knew a good deal of the real Persia and could not help letting it into the picture. The dying founder's counsels to his heir read as a distilled theory of the very bind this compendium is built around, the loyalty that holds a house together:

"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, the dying Cyrus to his heir, trans. Dakyns)^[4]

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, the ideal of Cyrus, trans. Dakyns)^[4]

Beside such generalised ideals stand 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 the historian may cautiously use. The most celebrated is his account of the empire's system of surveillance, the King's watchers, which he offers 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, on the King's Eyes and Ears, trans. Dakyns)^[5]

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: some of its features (that satraps imitate the King in their provinces, for instance) are widely accepted, while others, the armed eunuch guards, the strict meritocracy of the ruling class, the King as living law, are exactly where a modern reader most suspects the didactic purpose of deforming what the author knew. Where a reader draws the line between selective truth and agenda-driven invention will differ from reader to reader (Tuplin). The work even supplies its own historical caution: its final chapter contrasts the enfeebled Persians of Xenophon's own century with their hardy ancestors, and closes on the swift unravelling of the founder's work: "But no sooner was he dead than his sons were at strife, cities and nations revolted, and all things began to decay" (Cyropaedia 8.8).^[5] It is a Greek's judgement on Persian decline, and a reminder that the ideal Cyrus was always meant as a rebuke to the present, not a report of the past.

The Oeconomicus, the Agesilaus, and the paradise garden

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. Here Xenophon is our first Greek witness to the walled royal pleasure-grounds, the paradeisoi, from which our word "paradise" descends:

"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, the Great King's gardens, trans. Dakyns)^[6]

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." (Cyrus the Younger, of his paradise at Sardis; Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4, trans. Dakyns)^[6]

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 (Tuplin).^[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 (Oeconomicus 4), a governor's whole accounting in a sentence. 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); the Hellenica, Xenophon's continuation of Thucydides, carries the Persian dimension of Greek affairs incidentally, with vignettes of satraps such as Pharnabazus of Dascylium, of the paradises and palaces of the north-west, and of the golden plane-tree of the King too small to shade a cicada (Tuplin). 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.

An eyewitness, and a partisan

What, then, is Xenophon worth? The answer 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, first-hand on the roads and the reckoning of distance, on the satraps and their retinues, on the land and its peoples, on the King's mixed host and the one royal battle we can watch. 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 (Tuplin). For the Cyropaedia the caution must be far sharper: its narrative of Cyrus the Great is a philosophical fiction and cannot be used as history, and even its institutional passages are shaped by the lesson they are meant to teach. What redeems the Cyropaedia 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 the words of the reference article, is that any historian who trusts the Oeconomicus on Persia "should be prepared to give Cyropaedia the benefit of many doubts" (Tuplin).^[1] Yet the benefit is of doubts, not of certainties: the narrative frame remains invention, and the safe rule is Sancisi-Weerdenburg's, that the Cyropaedia is a source for Xenophon and for Greek ideas of Persia far more than for the Persian past it claims to describe.^[7]

Xenophon and the Iranian evidence

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. The modern discipline reads him, as it reads all the Greeks, through the corrective turn of the "Achaemenid History" school, which privileges the contemporary Iranian and Babylonian evidence and treats the classical authors as evidence for how Greeks saw Persia, to be used for Achaemenid fact only where the indigenous record confirms them. On that principle Xenophon is neither the naïve reporter of an older scholarship nor a mere fabulist, but a witness of unusual value who must be cross-examined work by work, and line by line.

Transmission and translation

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. For this compendium 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; 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.