Xenophon Studies
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Edited by:
Gabriel Danzig
Recent years have seen a remarkable growth in serious engagement with the work of the fourth-century historian, biographer, philosopher and essayist Xenophon of Athens. The monographs and edited volumes that make up this series continue this trend by publishing methodologically diverse and fruitfully provocative studies on all aspects of his extensive and varied oeuvre and its reception in Antiquity and beyond. They are intended for a wide academic audience, including students of genre and hermeneutics, the theory and practice of politics and warfare, the Socratic philosophical tradition, classical historiography, the intellectual, literary and rhetorical culture of fourth-century Greece, and the long-term ethical and academic impact of Classical literature.
Topics
Is Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great the model leader he seems to be, or does his apparent success actually demonstrate the dangers of imperialism and one-man rule?
Debating Cyrus gathers contributions from many of the world’s leading scholars in Xenophontic Studies, and features scholars with a wide range of approaches to reading classical texts. Our essays discuss the surprisingly subtle techniques Xenophon employs, and study topics including ambition, the rule of law, hunting, tragedy, romance, and the use Cyrus makes of love and fear. A cluster of essays considers Cyrus’ one apparent failure — the failure to ensure his kingdom will prosper after him. Other essays show what we can learn about the Cyropaedia by comparing it to other works by Xenophon and his contemporaries.
Our aim is not to resolve the debate about Cyrus, a debate that will live on as long as readers care about Xenophon’s magisterial account of the founder of the greatest empire of his day and disagree about what sort of leadership to expect from a leader like Cyrus. Our goal is to prepare readers to engage in the debate themselves.
While Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of virtue have received extensive scholarly attention, less work has been done on Xenophon’s portraits of virtue and on his attitude towards the theoretical issues connected with it. And yet, Xenophon offers one of the best sources we have for thinking about virtue in ancient Greece, because he combines the analytical interests of a Socratic with a historian’s interest in real life.
Until recently, scholars of Xenophon tended to focus either on the historiographical writings or on the philosophical writings (chiefly Memorabilia, with some attention to the other Socratic writings and Hiero). Cyropaedia was treated as a separate entity, and Xenophon’s short and more technical treatises were generally studied only by those with particular interest in their specialized topics (such as horsemanship, hunting, and Athenian finances). But recent work by Vincent Azoulay and by Vivienne Gray have shown the essential unity of his writings. This volume continues this pan-Xenophontic trend by studying the virtues across Xenophon’s oeuvre and connecting them with a wide range of Greek literature, from Homer and the tragedians to Herodotus and Thucydides, the orators, Plato, and Aristotle.
