ABSTRACT
FROM the time of Roscher's study of Thucydides, the date of the pseudo-Xenophontic treatise has been seriously in question. 1 But there has been little agreement: the work has been dated with equal fervor both during the Peloponnesian War and before it Much scholarly attention has been lavished upon this author in the present century, especially in Germany during the thirties and early forties (as the works of Kupferschmid, Instinsky, K. I. Gelzer, Rupprecht, Prestel, Volkening, and Nestle amply testify). 2 Instinsky's dissertation was perhaps the most original and important piece of scholarship devoted to pseudo-Xenophon after Kalinka's commentary of 1913, inasmuch as he was the first to argue at length that the treatise belonged before the outbreak of war. K. I. Gelzer, though preferring a date at the very beginning of the war, owed much to Instinsky's dissertation; and Rupprecht, in a review of Volkening in 1942, reversed his old opinion to range himself on Instinsky's side. 3 The Danish scholar and statesman, Hartvig Frisch, in his study of pseudo-Xenophon (1942), also advocated an early date. 4 And now, most recently, Jacqueline de Romilly has published an acute examination of those ideas in pseudo-Xenophon which are common to Thucydides; her comparison shows clearly that the views of the anonymous oligarch reflect a condition of peace, not war. 5
