Xenophon

Xenophon of Athens (born around 430 BCE, died about 354 BCE) was a soldier, historian, and follower of Socrates — and one of the few ancient writers who lived the adventures he recorded. Born into a wealthy, aristocratic family of the deme of Erchia, he was raised to the saddle in the Athenian cavalry, a young gentleman of the kind who gathered around Socrates in the last decades of the fifth century. Diogenes Laertius preserves the tradition that Socrates first stopped him in a narrow lane, barred his way with his stick, and asked where a man might learn to become good; when Xenophon could not answer, Socrates said, “Then follow me, and learn.”

In 401 BCE his life turned on an invitation. His Boeotian friend Proxenus wrote urging him to join the army that the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger was raising — ostensibly against hill tribes, in truth to seize the throne of his brother, the Great King Artaxerxes II. Uneasy, Xenophon took the question to Socrates, who advised him to consult the oracle at Delphi. Xenophon instead asked Apollo only which gods he should sacrifice to for a safe return — and Socrates gently chided him for asking how to go rather than whether to go at all. He went. Mustering at Sardis, the Greek mercenaries marched up-country through Cilicia and across the Euphrates to the plain of Cunaxa near Babylon, where in 401 BCE Cyrus was killed in the moment of victory. The Greeks had won their part of the field but lost their cause, stranded a thousand miles from home in the heart of the Persian empire.

What followed is the story of the Anabasis, which Xenophon himself would write. The Persian satrap Tissaphernes lured the Greek generals — Proxenus among them — to a parley and had them treacherously seized and executed. Leaderless and despairing, the army turned to new commanders, and the men elected Xenophon, still young and holding no formal rank, as one of their generals. Over the following months he helped lead the Ten Thousand on a fighting retreat north: up the Tigris past the deserted ruins of Nineveh, through seven brutal days in the mountains of the Carduchi (the Kurds), and across the snows of Armenia. The climax of the march — and of the book — came when the vanguard reached the summit of Mount Theches and raised a cry that swelled down the whole column: “Θάλαττα! Θάλαττα!” (“The Sea! The Sea!”). They had reached the Black Sea at the Greek colony of Trapezus, then made their way west along the coast — through Cerasus, Cotyora, Sinope, and Heraclea — to Chrysopolis and Byzantium, on the threshold of Europe at last.

Xenophon never returned to live in Athens. He took service with Sparta, first under the commander Thibron and then, lastingly, under the Spartan king Agesilaus, whom he came to admire deeply and later honoured in a short biography. In 394 BCE he is generally held to have fought at the Battle of Coronea on the Spartan side — against his own city. Athens responded by decreeing his exile, though the exact date and grounds are disputed by historians; his closeness to Sparta and to the discredited memory of Cyrus had made him unwelcome at home.

The Spartans gave him an estate at Scillus, in the countryside near Olympia, and there he spent more than twenty of his most settled years — farming, hunting, raising hounds and horses, building a small temple to Artemis modelled on the great one at Ephesus, and writing the books that made his name. He married a woman named Philesia; their two sons, Gryllus (named for Xenophon's own father) and Diodorus, were sent to be educated in Sparta. When Sparta was shattered at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE, the Eleans reclaimed Scillus, and Xenophon withdrew to Corinth. As Athens and Sparta drew together against the rising power of Thebes, his banishment appears to have been repealed, and his sons served in the Athenian cavalry. Gryllus fell at the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BCE; tradition records that when the news reached his father during a sacrifice he took the garland from his head, and then, told the boy had died bravely, put it back on. Xenophon himself died around 355–354 BCE, probably at Corinth, aged about seventy-five.

His writings, in a clear and graceful Attic prose, range more widely than almost any other ancient author's. The Anabasis is his eyewitness account of the march of the Ten Thousand; the Hellenica continues Thucydides' unfinished history of Greece down to 362 BCE; and the Cyropaedia is a long, semi-fictional portrait of the ideal ruler in the figure of Cyrus the Great. To defend and remember his teacher he wrote a set of Socratic works — the Memorabilia, the Symposium, the Apology, and the Oeconomicus — that, beside Plato's dialogues, are our other great window onto Socrates. He also left practical treatises on horsemanship, the cavalry command, and hunting, and essays on tyranny (the Hiero) and on Athens' finances (the Poroi). Soldier, exile, country gentleman, and witness to the long unravelling of the Greek city-states, Xenophon wrote history that still reads like a story told around a campfire.