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Works
General characteristics
Xenophon produced a large body of work, all of which survives to the present day. (Indeed, the manuscript tradition includes Constitution of the Athenians, which is not by Xenophon.) The great majority of his works were probably written during the last 15 to 20 years of his life, but their chronology has not been decisively established. His output was formally varied—the main categories were long historical or ostensibly historical narratives, Socratic texts, and short technical, biographical, or political treatises—but these had common features, as enumerated below.
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First, Xenophon’s work is characterized by novelty. His output includes the earliest or earliest surviving examples of the short nonmedical treatise and of autobiographical narrative (Anabasis). Other works, although not without precedent in genre, are unusual in various ways; this is true of the idiosyncratic contemporary history of Hellenica (“Greek History”) and the fictive history of Cyropaedia (“Education of Cyrus”); the second-order, philosophically nontechnical response to (or exploitation of) Socratic literature found in Memorabilia, Symposium (“Drinking Party”), Oeconomicus (“Household Management”), and Apology; and the novel form of encomiastic biography exemplified by Agesilaus.
Second, the subject matter reflects Xenophon’s personal experiences. Anabasis and Cyropaedia flowed from the adventure of 401–400; the Socratic writings stemmed from youthful association with a charismatic teacher; Hellenica arose from a personal take on the politico-military history of his times; treatises on military command, horsemanship, household management, and hunting derived from prolonged personal experience of each; Ways and Means was inspired by concern about Athens’s finances and political fortunes; and Hiero may have originated in a visit to Sicily.
Third, Xenophon’s agenda was essentially didactic (usually with direct or indirect reference to military or leadership skills), and it was often advanced through the use of history as a source of material. As a narrative historian Xenophon has a reputation for inaccuracy and incompleteness, but he clearly assumed that people and events from the past were tools for promoting political and ethical improvement. His ethical system contained little that jars in modern terms; but in today’s cynical world, the apparent ingenuousness of its expression strikes some as by turns bland and irritating. The system’s interconnection with the gods may challenge readers who either disavow the divine or are not reconciled to a pagan theological environment, simply because—in ethical contexts, though not in specific ritual ones (as illustrated in Anabasis, Book VII)—divine power in Xenophon is frequently anonymous and often singular or because he could apparently take a pragmatic attitude (e.g., posing a question to the Delphic oracle that was framed to produce the “right” answer). His contemporaries perhaps saw things differently: for them the gods were unproblematic (not that everyone thought the same way about them, but Xenophon’s terms of reference were readily understood), and his insistence on a moral component to practical and (broadly) political skills may have been distinctive.
Fourth, charges of ingenuousness have been partly fueled by Xenophon’s style. Judged in antiquity to be plain, sweet, persuasive, graceful, poetic, and a model of Attic purity, it now strikes some as jejune. A more charitable, and fairer, description would be that his style is understated—the range of stylistic figures is modest, and the finest effects are produced by his simplicity of expression. Rereading a famous passage in which the Ten Thousand first glimpse the sea, one is struck by the disproportion between its remembered impact and its brevity and indirect approach. Xenophon does not describe seeing the sea; instead he describes, first, his gradual realization that a commotion up ahead is caused by the shouts of those who have seen the sea and, second, the scenes of celebration as men embrace with tears and laughter, build a huge cairn of stones, and shower gifts upon their local guide.
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