Source criticism and previous research

Over the last couple of decades or so, there has been a considerable revival of interest in the Cyropaedia, which both simplifies and complicates the task of as-sessing its character.⁵¹ Fortunately, the text itself is, bar a few corruptions and interpolations, relatively reliable and based on a solid manuscript tradition, though one plagued with variants.⁵² The authorial perspective behind it is that of an ex-iled, wealthy Athenian ἱππεύς, whose point of view was tempered by a blend of discourses, including estrangement from Athens and Athenian radical democracy, an approving outsider’s views of legendary Persian and especially Spartan virtue and kingship, both of these aspects of a growing appreciative discourse on mon-archy, and finally Socratic thought.⁵³ As a result, Xenophon’s authorial interests

51 Some of the most pertinent studies include Tatum, James. Xenophon’s Imperial Fiction.

On the Education of Cyrus. Princeton, NJ 1989. Mueller-Goldingen, Christian. Unter-suchungen zu Xenophons Kyrupädie. Stuttgart 1995; Nadon, Christopher. Xenophon’s Prince:

Republic and Empire in the Cyropaedia. Berkeley 2001; Azoulay, Vincent. “The Medo-Persian Ceremonial: Xenophon, Cyrus and the King’s Body”, in: Christopher Tuplin (ed.). Xenophon and His World: Papers from a Conference held in Liverpool 1999. Stuttgart 2004, 147-174, as well as the contributions in Hobden, Fiona and Tuplin, Christopher J. (eds.) Xenophon: Ethical Principles and Historical Enquiry. Leiden 2012.

52 See the praefatio to Marchant, Edgar C. Xenophontis Opera Omnia. Vol. 4. Oxford 1910, v-xiii. The only substantial problem is the authenticity of the final passage, i.e. Xen.

Cyrop. 8.8; see Sage, Paula W. “Dying in Style: Xenophon’s Ideal Leader and the End of the ‘Cyropaedia’”, in: CJ 90:2 (1994), 161-174, here 161f. for discussion with bibliography). Since it is included in all manuscripts and is now generally regarded as authentic (e.g. Carlier 2010 [1978], 362; Due 1989, 16-22; Tatum 1989, 223-225; Gera 1993, 299f.; Tuplin, Christopher J. “Xenophon’s Cyropaedia: Fictive History, Political Analysis, and Thinking with Iranian Kings”, in: Mitchell and Melville (eds.) 2013, 67-90, here 71-73), it is here considered authentic, but see p. 203 below for discussion.

53 Diog. Laert. 2.48-59 provides a basic, though not particularly reliable biography of Xenophon. On Xenophon’s life see still Breitenbach, Hans R. S.v. “Xenophon [6]”, in: RE IX A,2 (1967), 1569-2052, here 1571-1578; for a more recent, critical assess-ment of the sources for Xenophon’s life see Badian, Ernst. “Xenophon the Athenian”, in: Christopher Tuplin (ed.). Xenophon and his world: papers from a conference held in Liverpool 1999. Stuttgart 2004, 33-54, esp. 41f. on his relationship with Athens. Aspects of the fourth-century discourse on monarchy are visible for instance in Isoc. 2, 3 and 5, and Tuplin 1994, 127-132 concludes that Xenophon “was at ease with what will have seemed to many Greeks the ethnic paradox of crying up the virtues of Achaemenid barbarians as a model for Greek kaloi kagathoi” (131), and was capable of considering both Sparta and Persia as models in many though not all things. On Xenophon’s attitude(s) to Persia see in depth Hirsch, Steven W. The Friendship of the Barbarians:

Xenophon and the Persian Empire. Hanover 1985, esp. 68f. on the Cyropaedia, who notes the complexity of Xenophon’s attitude and concludes that he was much more positive towards Persia than earlier commentators have assumed; he is thus forced, however,

are wide-ranging, though certain recognisable political attitudes run through the œuvre and he remained in some sense true to his Athenian roots.⁵⁴ Like the Characters, the Cyropaedia is thus the product of an intellectual outsider’s critical engagement with a form of socio-political structure he was not born into, though Xenophon gained first-hand experience of the younger Cyrus and of Agesilaos in the years after 402/1 BC.⁵⁵ As a result, he can be read as a figure not completely dissimilar to the Greek philoi of the early Hellenistic kings, an involved but re-flexive observer.

As far as the genre of the text is concerned, we are on much safer ground than in the case of the Characters, but are again faced with a degree of literary novelty.

The opening passages state that the Cyropaedia serves to investigate the secrets of establishing and maintaining an Empire, of rule and obedience, of inspiring fear and a desire to please in one’s subjects, the underlying assumption being that the ability to do this rests in the individual ruler and his ἐπιστήμη (“understanding, knowledge, know-how”).⁵⁶ As such, the text is a paradigmatic ‘mirror for princes’

and develops a specific conception of individual leadership – as well as a less explicit concept of kingship, i.e. monarchical politeia – in the form of a political

to consider the negative epilogue of the Cyropaedia spurious. I do not feel that this is necessary: Greek views of Persia were situationally complex, full of both admiration and hatred, with admiration often being projected into the past and hatred being reserved for the contemporary imbalance of power, always in keeping with the very same tendency visible in Athenian law-giving or constitutional policy – older is always better, but simultaneously open to more projection and adaptation, allowing for the contingency-reducing configuration of self in the context of and relation to the past.

On this cf. e.g. Gehrke, Hans-Joachim. “Greek Representations of the Past”, in: Lin Foxhall, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, and Nino Luraghi (eds.). Intentional History. Spinning Time in Ancient Greece. Stuttgart 2010, 15-34.

54 Azoulay 2004b, 15; Badian 2004, 49f.

55 Breitenbach 1967, 1574f.

56 Xen. Cyrop. 1.1.3, 5. In Xenophon’s version there is no foreshadowing of Cyrus’ great-ness in the form of auspices, as at Hdt. 1.107.1-108.1, nor is the Oedipus-story present (Hdt. 1.108.2-116.1). Individual agency is crucial; despite the importance of the gods throughout, they do not determine reality (Xen. Cyrop. 1.6.5f.). See also Due 1989, 16.

treatise.⁵⁷ No less important, however, is the claim that the privilege of rule ex-tends to all male individuals who exercise control over other human beings.⁵⁸ Its implied audience thus includes not only those interested in questions of con-stitution and in individual leadership qualities, but extends to every kyrios of a (prosperous) household.⁵⁹ That said, questions of genre and audience are com-plicated by the fact that Cyropaedia is not a straightforward treatise on kingship, but often reads like a mixture of novel, Thucydidean history, campaign report, and Socratic dialogue.⁶⁰ My own approach to the work thus takes it as a story, a theoretical work in narrative form, which shows its message to its readers rather than telling it and plays with conventions of genre, weaving different elements into a stylistically unified, compound tapestry.⁶¹

On this basis, any judgement of the text must take into account its variable narrative structure and elegant, unobtrusive style.⁶² The text features an anony-mous authorial narrator, who speaks of himself in the first person (plural or singular), but intrudes only very rarely, most prominently in the framing intro-duction and epilogue.⁶³ When he does so, it is to offer commentary or thematise the uncertainty of the facts, maintaining the fiction of critical enquiry that the text opens with (τοῦτοντὸνἄνδραἐσκεψάμεθα: “we have carefully examined this man”)

57 Hirsch 1985, 69f.; Due 1989, 25; Tuplin 2013, 70f. Based on Plat. Leg. 694c, the Cyro-paedia was considered part of a semi-hostile debate with Plato about the best con-stitution during the Roman Empire: Athen. 11.504f-505a; Gellius NA 14.3.3f.; cf.

Diog. Laert. 3.24 (see Tatum 1989, 1-35; Sandridge, Norman B. Loving Humanity, Lear-ning and Being Honoured. The Foundations of Leadership in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus.

Cambridge, MA and London 2012, 13; but note Gray 2011, 260f.). The Cyropaedia is interested not only in constitutional matters but also in practical political imple-mentation and the consequences for the individuals involved, especially the leader.

58 Xen. Cyrop. 1.1.1f.

59 Xen. Cyrop. 1.1.1-3. On the complex genre see Hirsch 1985, 67f.; Gera 1993, 1-12; on audience see generally Due 1989, esp. 234-240; Gera 1993, 24.

60 Due 1989, 10; Mueller-Goldingen 1995, 1f.; Tuplin 2013, 74. On the novelesque ele-ments see further Reichel, Michael. “Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and the Hellenistic No-vel”, in: Gray (ed.) 2010 [1995], 418-438.

61 Similarly Sandridge 2012, 120.

62 Reisert 2009, 298. On the Cyropaedia as fictive history: Tuplin, Christopher J. “Xeno-phon’s Cyropaedia: Education and Fiction”, in: Alan H. Sommerstein and Catherine Atherton (eds.). Education in Greek Fiction. Bari 1996, 65-162, here 108-154; Tuplin 2013, 70 n. 10. For a rehabilitation of Xenophon’s stylistic merits and narrative skill see Higgins 1977, 2-20.

63 Due 1989, 29f., understandably equates the extradiegetic narrator with Xenophon, but the varying arguments in favour of irony and narrative complexity in the text – which is explicitly intended to persuade its reader (Xen. Cyrop. 1.1.3) – should warn against considering the relationship a simple one.

by offering comments to a Greek audience.⁶⁴ Throughout, he marks his per-spective as being limited in ways designed to suggest a historical treatise, for instance by use of λέγεται (“it is said”) or φασίν (“they say”). While these are often read as source markers, it is telling that no source is ever cited explicitly; these words thus serve to mark information and direct speech as unverified, generating ambiguity or non-specificity by using the conventions that usually mark a his-torical text for whose veracity the author assumes responsibility, as far as he can.⁶⁵ Moreover, the narrator occasionally marks a temporal distance between the nar-rative time and the ‘present’ by drawing parallels and remarking on continuity or change.⁶⁶ The extent to which uncertainty is thematised should then make us suspicious of the text’s intermittent claims to historical veracity, a guise it only really adopts at the very end.⁶⁷

64 Quotation from Xen. Cyrop. 1.1.6. The narrator’s first-person voice appears, to give but a few examples, at 1.1.1, 4, 6; 3.3.59; 4.2.12-14; 8.3.1; 8.4.5. Comments that un-equivocally suggest a Greek audience are in fact rare, but the ‘hellenisation’ of the Persians, their customs, religion and gods, is a device well suited to making Cyrus and his origins palatable to a Greek audience; the differences from Herodotus’ account are marked. Due 1989, 234, accordingly asserts a Panhellenic readership and even spe-culates about female readers, based on the elements of romance.

65 Due 1989, 31 with n. 9. Λέγεται occurs 32 times in the text, mostly in extradiegesis (e.g.

1.1.4; 1.2.1; 1.3.4, 15; 1.4.25-27; 1.5.1; 1.6.1, 31; 2.1.11; 4.2.13 (direct speech), 15 (omen), 30; 4.5.9 and 4.6.11 (reputation reports); 5.2.20 (direct speech); 7.2.15 and 7.3.4 (intradiegesis, reported event); 7.5.22 (intradiegesis, generally known fact); 8.2.9 (report of the Persian king’s qualities); 8.2.13-19 (a long description of Cyrus’ qualities); 8.3.26;

8.6.19; 8.6.20)), as does ὥς φασιν, e.g. at 7.3.16. It is telling that these uncertainty mark-ers are far less common in Xenophon’s actual historical works, the Hellenica and the Anabasis. In some cases information would obviously have to have been acquired after the event if the fiction of historiography were to be maintained. Xen. Cyrop. 3.3.43-45, for example, has the authorial narrator report the Assyrian king’s speech to his soldiers and then describe Cyrus’ direct reaction, even though Cyrus cannot possibly know what was said at that point.

66 Due 1989, 32f., 35. Examples are Xen. Cyrop. 1.1.3-6 (prologue); 1.4.27 (kissing in greeting); 7.1.3f. (golden eagle ensign); 6.1.29f. (scythe-bearing chariots); 7.5.70 (the city guard of Babylon); 8.1.6-8 (the institutions of rule); 8.8 (decay of Persia in the narrator’s day). This distancing technique is significant for the intention of the work as an act of communication with a Greek audience.

67 Xen. Cyrop. 8.8.2 suddenly states that the objective of the inquiry is truth (ἀλήθεια) and embarks on providing proof in the form of diachronic comparison. On the Cyropaedia’s claims to truth in general see Tatum 1989, 63; Müller-Goldingen 1995, 1f., both rightly emphasising the work’s non-historiographical conception of truth and its novelistic elements. All the more striking is the claim expressed at the end of the work, which both seem to overlook. Accordingly, this has been harnessed by interpreters inclined towards ironical readings (e.g. Whidden 2008). A non-ironising explanation may lie in