Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (Penguin Classics) Read Free

nothing new in making political capital out of the Olympics…). The final action of Agesilaus’ older half-brother Agis II in the late 400s was a campaign to discipline Elis. A friendly presence at nearby Scillous would therefore suit Agesilaus and Sparta very well. The personal connection between Xenophon and Agesilaus was reportedly reinforced by Xenophon’s agreeing to send his two sons to be educated at Sparta. There they joined other sons of pro-Spartan foreigners who wished their children to experience the noble qualities of the famously rigorous Spartan educational regimen. 9
    In 371, however, Sparta’s foreign policy of supporting friendly oligarchies, with force if necessary, came apart at the seams on the battlefield of Leuctra in Boeotia. Agesilaus, by then a veteran in his mid-70s, was not actually in command of the Spartan and allied force that was routed by the larger and more up-to-date army trained, inspired and led by the Thebans Epameinondas and Pelopidas. But the responsibility for the disaster was squarely his. The knock-on effect of Sparta’s loss of the hegemony of the Peloponnese on Agesilaus’ clients including Xenophon was almost immediate and palpably material. With his Scillous base rendered unviable, Xenophon retired, it is usually thought, to Corinth, where he lived possibly until his death in the late 350s. Or possibly not: another school of thought maintains that after 371, perhaps sooner rather than later since Athens was now allied with the old enemy Sparta against the common threat of a newly surgent Thebes, Xenophon returned as an elder statesman to his native city. Hence, so it is argued, the specifically Athenian character of at least some of his putatively late works, including notably two of those included here,
Cavalry Commander
and
Ways and Means
.
    That raises, finally, the questions of when and where, rather than why (to which we shall return below), he wrote his various works. Certainty, be it stated straightaway, is impossible; even probability is usually well beyond our grasp. One extreme, ‘unitarian’ view would place all his works – or, to be more specific, the whole of all his works – in the post-Leuctra 360s and 350s. At the other extreme, there are those who argue that at least all
The Persian Expedition
and the relevantportions of
A History of My Times
and
Agesilaus
, and perhaps also the
Memoirs of Socrates
, were composed at Scillous and also published close to the time of the events and situations they describe or presuppose. Even an extreme ‘analyst’ view, however, would still have to assign a large proportion, if not the bulk, of the
œuvre
in its final, published form to the post-Leuctra period. My own impression is that Xenophon, like many another ex-politician compelled to fill a vacuum of unwanted and unwonted inactivity, devoted himself to the publication of written work in polished form only in his final decade or decade and a half. It would not surprise me, either, though I could not consider it anything remotely approaching a racing certainty, if their publication had been crucially stimulated by the author’s restoration to the vibrant intellectual atmosphere of Athens, to what Plato (
Protagoras
337d) once styled the ‘city hall’ (
prutaneion
) of
sophia
. 10

In the city hall of wisdom
    The conventional translation of
sophia
as ‘wisdom’ suits well a straight rendering of
philosophia
(literally, ‘love of
sophia
’) as ‘philosophy’. But ancient Greek
sophia
, although it included knowing-that as well as knowing-how, was more than the wisdom of the philosopher as we might understand it. It connoted also the idea of professionalism, the possession of a relevant skill, knack or technique in any particular area – be it medicine, or politics, or shipbuilding, or whatever. To meet the growing complexity of public life in the developing Athenian democracy, there was a correspondingly increased demand for professional instruction in