ABSTRACT
In the Roman and Byzantine periods the Greeks looked back to Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon as the three great exemplars of classical historiography. Nowadays Xenophon has been demoted: in intellect and insight he seems to us inferior to his two predecessors. One reason the ancients admired him was his supple Attic Greek: distinguished style was highly valued and was an important factor in earning a writer a place in the school curriculum and in being held up as a model for imitation. Another reason for Xenophon’s popularity was the variety of his writings, among which his philosophical ones held a high place. In fact, for much of antiquity Xenophon seems to have enjoyed greater fame as a philosopher than as a historian. He was an admirer of Socrates and had known him personally. The easy accessibility of such works as the Memorabilia, or Recollections of Socrates, won the author a wide readership and made him the equal of Plato in many minds as an expounder of Socratic doctrine. In antiquity and the Renaissance the most famous and influential of his works was the lengthy Education of Cyrus, a romanticized historical novel in which the founder of the Persian Empire is depicted as an example of what the ideal ruler should be. The ethical principles according to which Cyrus is said to have been educated are based on those that Xenophon ascribes to Socrates. A number of other works have come down to us, including a laudatory biography of the Spartan king Agesilaus and treatises on estate management, hunting, horsemanship and the duties of a cavalry commander.
