Carol Atack on re-analysing Xenophon
‘So what you do is basically just re-analysis?’ The technology entrepreneur’s question opened a wider question about perceptions of the value of current research in Classics. Haven’t all the ancient texts and their authors been studied and interpreted in full already? Was there any value, intellectual or otherwise, in publishing further work on them? It’s tempting to agree with the supposition that classical antiquity offers us an unchanging, stable past, one to which we can turn for advice and even comfort. Yet the present from which we look backwards to the classical past continues to change, acknowledging more perspectives and generating new questions to ask of the past and new ways to answer them. Returning to familiar classical texts and analysing them through new theoretical frameworks can deliver insights into both text and framework.
I have found great value in doing just that with the example which I gave in response to my questioner, the fourth-century BCE Athenian writer and thinker Xenophon, who has benefitted from a substantial reassessment in recent years, from many perspectives. Xenophon’s work is unusual in surviving to the present in fairly complete form. Xenophon’s experience of different kinds of political regime and society, and the tensions between autocracy and democracy, make his work particularly apt for our twenty-first century context, where autocratic regimes are on the rise, and we worry again about how much we should care about the personal qualities and values of our political leaders. Our situation gives new relevance to the ancient Greek context in which political stability – and democracy itself – was fragile, and Xenophon is a fascinating and highly individual guide to the times in which he lived.
Xenophon had an unusual career; a near-contemporary of Plato, he was one of many elite Athenian youths who followed Socrates during the fraught final years of the Peloponnesian War. While initially enthusiastic about the regime of the Thirty, he became disillusioned by its excesses. Nonetheless, he seems to have been uncertain of his economic and political prospects under the restored democracy, and to have taken up an offer from a friend to join an expedition into the Achaemenid empire, a couple of years before Socrates’ trial and death. His Anabasis offers a fascinating—if occasionally self-serving—account of this adventure, which ended with him joining Spartan forces campaigning in Asia Minor. His exposure to both the Persian elite and Spartan military commanders remained an influence throughout his life. After fighting alongside the Spartans against Athens, Xenophon was unable to return home, and settled on an estate near Elis. This was not a permanent refuge; the collapse of Spartan regional hegemony forced a move, most likely to Corinth, and a reconciliation with Athens towards the end of his life, at which point he appears to have started to write. The context of this late-life burst of literary activity perhaps explains why Xenophon, who had spent much of his adult life living outside the framework of the polis, placed such great emphasis on the importance for the elite of political participation and taking on leadership roles. At this point, Xenophon was clearly in regular contact with currents in Athenian intellectual life and almost certainly a reader of Plato’s Socratic dialogues as well as works by other Socratics. His own writing in turn became an important testimony for the thought of Antisthenes and others, as well as some of the most direct literary testimony for Spartan life.
A hugely significant classical author in antiquity itself, the Renaissance and early modern period, Xenophon fell out of favour with the professional academics of the modern world and its universities, perhaps because the use of his elegant prose in Greek language teaching associated him with the early stages of education rather than higher-level study. The academic disciplines of ancient philosophy and ancient history which emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries almost defined themselves through rejecting his work – not as philosophically sophisticated as Plato, not as historically rigorous as Thucydides. A historian of science might identify this past re-evaluation of Xenophon as a paradigm shift, because this moment of re-analysis affects both method and content as a new discipline established itself. However, assessments of Xenophon have moved on further and new arguments made for his importance.
Xenophon was perhaps unlucky in his defenders during the late twentieth century, but whatever the flaws of American political philosopher Leo Strauss’s exegetical accounts of his Socratic works, they at least presented them as having intellectual significance, and not as a collection of unreliable anecdotes or passages valuable merely for translation practice. While positivist historians continued to be annoyed by Xenophon’s lack of concern for detail or chronological precision, and deviations from the accounts in other sources, Frances Pownall convincingly demonstrated that annalistic completeness was not what was at stake for him, but the production of compelling moral examples to instruct future leaders.
Since then, there has been a reaction. Xenophon scholarship now flourishes as never before; edited collections and monographs alike continue to appear and stake a claim for their author’s seriousness, and scholars around the world devote their energies to his work. New editions of his texts, such as the monumental Budé editions of the Memorabilia and Hieron, have provided a foundation for rethinking Xenophon; Louis-André Dorion’s magisterial commentaries have demonstrated how carefully Xenophon responds to the ideas of his fellow Socratics. Translations aimed at a broader readership, such as Robin Waterfield’s collection of Xenophon’s shorter works, demonstrate both the depth of Xenophon’s interests in elite pursuits such as hunting and horsemanship, and considerable humour. Sophisticated shorter analyses, such as Simon Goldhill’s reading of Socrates’ encounter with the elegant courtesan Theodote (Memorabilia 3.11) and Victoria Wohl’s scrutiny of the erotics of his Symposium, suggest that Xenophon is, after all, an interesting thinker, one not just imitating Plato but engaging in a critical dialogue with him. The tired view that Xenophon is an enthusiastic oligarch has been thoroughly rebutted by Matthew Christ, showing how deeply Xenophon’s engagement with Athenian democracy runs; perhaps the mischaracterisation stemmed from the past misattribution to him of the critique of Athenian democracy in a pamphlet known as The Constitution of the Athenians by somebody now traditionally called the ‘Old Oligarch.’
My own research has for the most part focused on Xenophon’s political thought; my doctorate brought both the political theoretical framework of Cornelius Castoriadis and the anthropological framework of Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber to bear on the ideas of Xenophon and other fourth-century theorists about kingship. I aimed to show how the figure of the king remained central to Greek political thinking even in the context of Athenian democracy, whether through the continuing presence of kings like Theseus and Erechtheus in the Athenian political imaginary, or through attempts to explain the special status of kings, whether their power was due to proximity to the divine, as Xenophon’s Croesus suggests to his Cyrus, through holding a specific kind of knowledge, as Plato suggested in his Republic, or simply by being the best by some criterion of excellence, as Herodotus’ Darius had argued, and Isocrates’ Nicocles claimed.
It might seem that with so much going on in the world of Xenophon studies, there is not much space for further re-analysis. But existing introductions and surveys of Xenophon tend to approach him work by work, or genre by genre. I wanted to show that across the whole body of work is a coherent worldview, drawing from the explicit claim about the nature of leadership which he gives to Socrates in the Memorabilia, in Martin Hammond’s translation:
‘What I’m saying’, Socrates replied, ‘is that in any management role the man who knows what is needed and can supply it will be a good manager – whether he’s managing a chorus, an estate, a city, or an army.’ (Mem. 3.4.6)
While the Socratic works give an account of good leadership in various contexts, the narrative works (Hellenica and Cyropaedia) provide case studies of leadership, good and bad, in action, with the extended account of Cyrus the Great’s rise to power the most detailed and extended. The same structure of leadership expressed at multiple levels of community is present in the Oeconomicus, but we so often constrain our reading of that work to exploring Xenophon’s fascinating account of the marital dynamics of Ischomachus and his young wife. From the cupboards of Ischomachus’ home to the empire of the Persian king, good order is vital. And although this might seem like a top-down ordering, which emphasises the superlunary cosmos of the gods as the prime instance of order, the account of the household in the Oeconomicus makes a good starting point for understanding Xenophon’s project – a point not lost on Leo Strauss.
Traditional readings of Xenophon have often focused on the masculine, military world of the Anabasis as his primary environment, but recent scholarship has shown even the Anabasis has proven to be a rich resource for Xenophon’s thought as well as a powerful narrative. Yet the home is a place of great significance to him, as his account of his home in the Peloponnese makes clear. Centring the household also gives an opportunity to hear the voices of Xenophon’s women characters, whom he represents as authoritative judges of actions and character, whether Ischomachus’ wife critiquing her husband’s actions or Cyrus the Great’s mother Mandane expressing her concern about her son’s exposure to her own family’s despotic regime. I have learned a lot from Emily Baragwanath’s long engagement with these depictions of women as intellectual and moral agents; Xenophon’s accounts of women as intellectual and moral agents are a significant contribution to ancient philosophy in their own right, recognised in the long tradition of texts on household and civic management looking back to his Oeconomicus.
In drawing together Xenophon’s unified model of good order for the forthcoming Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics volume on Xenophon, I started with the household and worked outwards, looking at how Xenophon identifies the correct behaviour for the good leader at each expansion, with Cyrus’ empire the largest scale achievement. In part this echoes Xenophon’s own careful architecture of the Memorabilia, long recognised as a systematic account of the application of Socratic ethics in the contexts of family and friends, politics and education – far from an unstructured assemblage of unreliable anecdotes. It also perhaps explains why a significant proportion of his political thought is concerned with imperial monarchies operating at a scale greater than the individual polis or household, interchangeable as those levels are.
Past readers have found Xenophon’s texts useful to underpin their own experiences of colonial and imperial expeditions, of negotiating with princes. Xenophon, with his experience of different cultures and different political regimes, and his unusual appreciation of the skills and contribution of women within both home and royal court, has much to offer when we re-read him now.
References
Atack, C. (2020), The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (London).
Atack, C. (2024), ‘“By Zeus,” said Theodote: women as interlocutors and performers in Xenophon’s philosophical writing’, in S. Brill and C. McKeen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy (New York), 118-34.
Christ, M.R. (2020), Xenophon and the Athenian Democracy: The Education of an Elite Citizenry (Cambridge).
Goldhill, S.D. (1998), ‘The seductions of the gaze: Socrates and his girlfriends’, in P. Cartledge, P. Millett, and S. Von Reden (eds.), Kosmos: Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge), 105-24.
Hammond, M. and Atack, C. (2023), Memories of Socrates: Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Apology (Oxford).
Pownall, F.S. (2004), Lessons from the Past: The Moral Use of History in Fourth-Century Prose (Ann Arbor).
Rood, T. and Tamiolaki, E.-M. (eds.) (2022), Xenophon’s Anabasis and its Reception (Berlin).
Strauss, L. (1970), Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse: an interpretation of the Oeconomicus. (Ithaca).
Verity, A. and Baragwanath, E. (2022), Xenophon: Estate Management and Symposium (Oxford).
Waterfield, R. and Cartledge, P. (1997), Xenophon: Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (London).
Wohl, V. (2004), ‘Dirty Dancing: Xenophon’s Symposium’, in P. Murray and P. Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City (Oxford), 337-64.
Carol Atack is Director of Studies in Classics (Prelims/IA) and Praelector and Fellow of Newnham College in the University of Cambridge. Her publications include The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (London, 2020) and the introduction and notes to Martin Hammond’s Xenophon: Memories of Socrates, (Oxford World’s Classics, 2023).
