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

‘numbers of written books [
bibloi
, papyrus book-rolls] and a lot of other things of the sort that sea-captains carry in their wooden chests’; and in
Memoirs of Socrates
4.2.1 Socrates is said to have ‘discovered that the handsome Euthydemus had collected a great many writings (
grammata
) of the best-known poets and sages’. A little later in that same vignette (4.2.8), however, a characteristically Socratic note of doubt is sounded: ‘Is it true what I hear’, Socrates enquires of Euthydemus, ‘that you have collected a large number of books (
grammata
) by reputed experts (
sophoi
)?’ The key word here, of course, is ‘reputed’: the reference is to the writings of sophists. Socrates, born in about 470, apparently never wrote a word of his teaching, whereas the sophists, some of whom were older than he, more flexibly employed both oral and written means. Socrates, it seems, distrusted the medium as well as the message of these pseudo-experts. Xenophon, born over forty years after Socrates, fully shared his master’s distrust of sophistic doctrine but did not shun the use of the written word.
    Not that the traditional methods of education and instruction through face-to-face dialogue and practical demonstration were entirely superseded by any means. Apart from anything else, written texts, if they were to be made available in any numbers, had to be laboriously transcribed on valuable Egyptian papyrus by specially trained slaves, and so were in Xenophon’s day fairly rare and expensive commodities. Their target audiences, which included the intendedreaderships of these treatises, must therefore normally be sought among only the highest socio-economic echelons of Greek and Athenian society. 13

Xenophon the pedagogue
    Xenophon’s range of publications in terms of their genre and subject matter was quite exceptionally wide: from history, personal memoirs and biography, through philosophical dialogues and a philosophical novel, to technical treatises. In more than one field, moreover, he was a pioneer working at the intellectual and literary cutting edge. The quality of his intellect is a separate issue. It is perhaps doubtful, for example, whether Xenophon can be shown to be a penetrating or even consistent philosophical theorist. 14 On the other hand, there can be no doubting that all his
œuvre
, not only the more overtly philosophical works, was intended as a teaching of practical philosophy by examples. It was informed throughout by a high moral and especially religious purpose.
    Thus Xenophon’s account of the civil war at Athens in 404–403 has little or nothing in common with Thucydides’ famously pragmatic analysis of the civil war on Corcyra (modern Corfu), in 427 (3.82–3). Its essential theme is rather friendship, and its betrayal, and how breaches of friendship can and should be overcome by ritually negotiated reconciliation. Friendship recurs prominently at
Memoirs of Socrates
1.2.8, where Xenophon’s Socrates is credited with locating the main profit to be gained from his philosophy in the fact that it rendered his associates good friends to each other (compare 2.4–10). The theme that dominates all others, however, is religion or rather piety. Again and again, conventional piety is recommended and impiety condemned, usually in a simple or even simplistic way. Being pious is indeed represented by Xenophon uncomplicatedly (rather than critically defined, in the Platonic manner) as a matter of fulfilling the conventionally practised rituals, and conforming to the traditional articles of belief, regarding the gods (or ‘the god’, ‘the divine’). Religious nonconformity, in Xenophon’s unswerving view, deservedly brought disaster to both individuals and communities. ‘Many examples couldbe given from both Greek and foreign history to show that the gods are not indifferent to irreligion or to evil doing’ is how Xenophon, commenting on an admittedly egregious instance of sacrilege,