In Our Time - Xenophon

Episode Date: May 26, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Xenophon.Xenophon, an aristocratic Athenian, was one of the most celebrated writers of the ancient world. Born in around 430 BC, he was a friend and pupil of the great philosopher Socrates. In his twenties he took part in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Persian king Artaxerxes II, and played a key role in guiding the surviving Greek troops - known as the Ten Thousand - back to safety. It was a dangerous journey from deep inside hostile territory, and lasted more than a year. Xenophon's gripping account of this military campaign, the Anabasis, is one of the masterpieces of Greek literature.Xenophon went on to write a history of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath. But he was not just a historian, and his other works include books about household management, hunting and his mentor Socrates. His advice on the education and behaviour of princes had a significant influence in Renaissance Italy, and his treatise on horsemanship is still widely read today.With:Paul CartledgeA.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge UniversityEdith HallProfessor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of LondonSimon GoldhillProfessor in Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 401 BC, an army of Greek mercenaries found themselves stranded in more than 1,000 miles from home, deep in hostile territory and with their generals dead. This band of soldiers has become known as the 10,000

and a two-year journey to safety is on the most celebrated tales of ancient history. Among the 10,000 was an Athenian called Xenophon, who later wrote a book about his experiences. His lively account of this disastrous military campaign, the Anabasys, was soon acknowledged as a masterpiece. Today, Xenophon is remembered for an output which included not only a personal memoir, but history, politics and even practical subject. And his book on horsemanship is still in print, 2,500 years after it was written. With me to discuss the life and work of Xenophon R. Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis, Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University. Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and English at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge,

and Fellow of King's College. Paul Cartley, Zennephan was born about 430 BC. Could you give us a sketch of what the situation was in Greece at that time? Right. He's born at the beginning of what we typically call the Peloponnesian War. That's to say, seen from the Athenian side, it was a war against Sparta and the Peloponnesians. Zennephan was an Athenian, he was an upper-class man, He was brought up with horses, and this comes out later on in his career.

He is a very conservative fellow, but one thing hit him like a sort of ton of bricks in his teens, and he wasn't the only one. He met Socrates. And one of his claims to fame is that he was a kind of pupil of Socrates. And can you fill us a bit more, I mean, by, and we use the word aristocrat. What did that mean? I have in the notes, I've read that in the notes that all of you have written in the bits of Bob's that I've read that. What did that mean in Athens at the time? Because we think Athens' democracy. Yeah, absolutely right.

Athens was a democracy. 430, by the way, is the year in which Pericles gave famous funeral speech, which is preserved in our main source, which is Cicidides. But aristocrat had two meanings, really. One was terrifically rich and a landowner from way back. And Xenophon doesn't seem to be the other kind of aristocrat, which was somebody you could trace your descent back to, let's say, the founder of Athens, to Codros.

For example, Plato could do that. So he was upper class, I think, would probably be a bit more accurate. Did his wealth give him an independence that he exploited or used or rode on the back off for the rest of his life? Well, it enabled him not to have to work. I mean, the whole key thing about being rich in ancient Greece was that you didn't actually have to work for a living. Secondly, his father could afford to let him go and study with Socrates, rather than make him work on the farm. most Greek boys were from a peasant background.

This is true of Athens as every other of the 1,000 Greek cities at the time. And Jonathan was extremely privileged in that sense. So what do we know about his education with Socrates? Well, the answer is very little other than what he chooses to tell us himself, and that's not very much. He wrote about it. He wrote a bit about it. And there is a later tradition of stories about him, as we'll talk about later,

He's a terribly famous guy in ancient Greece. But what being a pupil of Socrates meant was sort of following him around because Socrates was the proverbial urban philosopher. He hardly ever left the city of Athens. He did go and fight a couple of times a long way away. But he liked the city. He wasn't much keen on the country. Whereas Xenophon's actually the other way around.

He is a country lover so that his estates would be outside Athens. What did he most absolve from Socrates? because he seems to present a rather different Socrates from the man we get in Plato. Well, this is the big, it's not an issue really for us historians. It's an issue for historians of philosophy. And this comes out in the work which he devoted to Socrates, to defending Socrates from the two charges on which he was in fact convicted.

First of all, being religiously unorthodox, if I can put it that way, not worshipping the gods, the city of Athens, recognised in the right way. And secondly, misleasing. somehow corrupting, somehow being bad influence on important young people. And the memorabilia, we call it in Latin, the memoirs of Socrates. They're not Socrates's memoirs, they're memoirs about Socrates, is a series of conversations involving Socrates in which he's made to come across

as very orthodox and ordinary and boring. And this is why Plato's Socrates is so much more interesting. If I would ask, well, I'm going to ask, what if, did, as anyone point, pick up, a defining notion of the way he's going to live his life from. I would say so. I mean, in terms of virtue, and Plato's notion of virtue was very different from Xenophon's notion of virtue. We don't know what Socrates this was. For Xenophon, Socrates embodied perfect goodness,

that he was somebody who did the right thing in the right way to the right people in the right situation. And really terrifically traditional, you could almost take Xenophon back to the time of, if there was a time of Homer. there's not a great deal of development. You wouldn't get a sense that there'd been an horrendous intellectual revolution

in the middle of the fifth century, which Sennephan doesn't give any sense of. Edith Hall, can we talk a bit more about the politics of this man being, let's keep calling him an aristocrat just for the sake of a wealthy man, anyway, in a democracy which was defining itself and very proud of being a democracy, although a slave-holding democracy, and it didn't apply to women. Put that aside if we can, a democracy.

he's more complicated politically than he seems and almost all his works are about attention between his view that you had excellent people who should be generals and commanders and run cities and ideal monarchs he definitely believed in extremely able people running the show and ordering less able people around however because he's brought up in Athens where there is a very great deal of talking

and a very great deal of dialogue he has a curiously egalistic egalitarian side, which makes him absolutely adamant that generals have to be nice to their soldiers, they have to feed their soldiers, they actually have to fight in the front ranks with their soldiers, it's a sort of comradely approach, which I don't think he would necessarily have got at Sparta. He's got a very macy, humorous, loquacious, sociable streak. Can I just add one thing to what Paul said, though?

I know we're not going to do the history of philosophy, but I think there is quite a simple way of looking at it. Socrates did three branches of philosophy, which are how do we know things, epistemology, who are we, what is existence, which is ontology, and how should we live, which is ethics and politics. And the only one, Xenophon, had any interested in at all, was the last. So that is how he's different from the Potonic Socrates. He cannot do big questions about knowledge and existence.

He's only interested in how should we live. There is this relationship mainly antagonistic and aggressive between Athens and Sparta, and Xenophon seems to transfer his allegiance intellectually as well as materially throughout his adult life. It's quite a fascinating synthesis and there is no other author in whom we get this sort of rather international or interstate Greek aristocratic sensibility. Here we get someone who is not tied to a particular city who is able to talk about and compare not only different Greek cities like Athens and Sparta and see the good even in Athens at times. but also with foreign cultures in Asia. He's a real cosmopolitan. He talks to satraps in the Persian Empire

and chieftains in the Balkans as much as he can talk to Greek people. So that's one of the reasons why talking to him, as opposed to talking to Thucydides, it's very, very centred on Athens. It's so interesting. Can we just talk about what he found in Sparta that he didn't find in Athens?

Can you give us the contrast there? It's the enemy, aren't they? Very much so. They'd been a great war, and he'd been caught having it, but still he was beguiled by them. They had an old-fashioned, conservative, traditional view of manly virtue, and the four cardinal Greek virtues of Socrates, which are manliness, self-control,

intelligent reasoning, and moral rectitude. Those are the four cardinal virtues of Socrates, and he thought that the Spartan system of bringing up young men, which was not to be merchants, not to have, have any money, not to do any of the sort of marketplace democratic things that went on in Athens, but to train at hunting and fishing and hop-like warfare and all the rest of it. He admired deeply the education of the

hop-like class in Sparta. Can we just go back to his view of democracy? Because we have to, as Paul said at the beginning, Pericles has made his great speech about the time that Sennephon was born and we look back in Athens as the first and so on democracy. He was very distrustful of it. He was deeply distrustful. He thought democracy, always went out of control and always turned into oclocracy or disorderly rabble, rule of the rabble. He is very, very clear with this when he talks later, he expresses this through his discussions of ideal armies, that the absolute most essential thing of all is order and absolute discipline in an army.

Top down. The top down all the time. and that that is actually how you will get the greatest happiness, the greatest number, you know, that the junior officers and the common infantry on the ground will do far better if they're obedient to a wise man. And he transferred that across into society. So as it was his military experience, his military ideas and experience,

because he was a frontline soldier, as you said, led from the front, as it were, informed everything about his political life as well. Well, I would actually say that his two great works, the Anabasus and the Education of Cyrus that we'll talk about later, which are both of them ostensibly about armies and about military affairs are actually both answers to Plato's Republic. They're marching republics, both of them in their own way.

They're about how you have an ideal civic, political organism. It's a description of a political ideal but it takes place within an army. Simon Goldhill, let's go back to these intriguing notion of what Socrates was standing for. given that we've got the Plato-Socrates

and we've got the Xenophon-Socrates and the ideas of the time and we look back on it as very much an ideas-driven society. Now, are we right in that? And if so, where is Xenophon? And what's going on? Let's call it a triangle, Socrates, Plato and Xenophon.

Yeah. The first thing to say is that it's absolutely true that in 5th century Athens, we call it the Enlightenment of Athens because it was an extraordinary ferment of ideas. And in particular, loads of meta ideas. They didn't just do medicine,

and they did the theory of medicine. They didn't just do politics, the theory of politics. And in that, Xenophon holds a particularly interesting place. Paul described him, and he is described him as conservative, and there are many ways in which is correct to call him conservative. But one shouldn't forget, he's the person who writes an extraordinary range of material.

He writes the first erotic novel, in some senses, in the education of Cyrus. He writes works on hunting. He writes works of adventure. He writes works of political theory. He is intellectually, not a conservative. He's an absolute radical in the way that he writes, and there's

no other figure like him in the 5th century for that range of material. Now, it's true that I don't think anybody thinks he's as smart as Plato. Plato is, Mr. philosophy, we're all doing footnotes to Plato still, and Xenophon's version of

philosophy, even as an ethicist, is not as profound as Plato. But when either says quite correctly that the education of Cyrus and the analysis could be seen, as an answer to the Republic, you can see them as two responses to Socrates. We think of Socrates as a very liberal man

who asks all sorts of probing questions. But if you think his two most profound pupils that we know about, Plato and Xenophon, are both producing works of totalitarian theory, top-down political ideas, that should make us think a little harder about Socrates. It's intriguing, isn't it,

This idea of men who studied or learned from someone thought to be one of the greatest philosopher there has been, and in Xenophon's case, Plato, let's take to Zemann, warriors in the first line of war fought in battle, and did all. That combination is very beguiling and has vanished. It's vanished from modern philosophy. Well, there aren't many philosophers leading troops in wars that we read about today, are there? No. No, well, it's another side.

I think it is very important also to look at Xenophon's career as a really quite extraordinary thing. I mean, he goes off to fight as a mercenary, but before he goes to fight, he goes to ask Delphic Oracle whether he should fight. Oh, he doesn't ask that. He asked to which God should I sacrifice. He goes there. He says, to which gods should I sacrifice before I go? And so Delphic Oracle, of course, answers the question is given it.

should go and sacrifice that God. So then he comes back and he says to Socrates, and Socrates is, well, you're idiot. You ask the wrong question. But because you've got the answer, you must follow it through. So we have someone who actually asks Socrates before he goes off to fight as a mercenary

against Persia, the great enemy of Greece at one level. And still the great power. He's then going to come back and move away from Athens to live in Olympia or live near Olympia on a state, associated with Sparta. He is writing all this different material. It's a bit like imagining in the Cold War,

an American who writes all these sorts of different things and goes and fights in the Far East and then lives in Moscow. I mean, this is, of course he's conservative, but in one level, he's really quite a shockingly interesting cultural icon of how you can cross boundaries. Why didn't he seek a career in politics? Why did he?

Why did he not seek out a career in politics? I don't think he was suited for the democracy where he was living in the sense that it was extremely hard for someone of his class education and views to get into a democratic position of power. The people who did it had to really work quite hard to conceal their, not to conceal their background, but to work very carefully with the people. And I think his particular intellectual mindset of top-down discipline was very unsuitable for the democracy in which he lived.

So there's a Coriolanus element, though. Yeah. I don't think it was just that. I mean, I think it was partly just the generation. The fact was that if he's born around 4.30, there are two violent overthrowings of the democracy in his 20s, which then got corrected. And anybody associated with anti-democratic views was given an incredibly hard time.

I actually think even if he had talked with democratic talk, people would have been extremely suspicious of him. It's a bit worse than that because he actually was fighting for the oligarchs. No, no, not yet for the Spans. Later he does fight for the Spans. He commits all the heinous crimes, actually. If you're an Athenian Democrat, his personal political career is an absolute disaster. He's a cavalryman because he's very rich.

And they fought for one of those revolutions you mentioned, a very small group imposed on Athens by Sparta, so they're a junta imposed from the outside, and Xenophon fights for them against a democratic resistance. So that's the background to his feeling extremely uncomfortable, being in Athens. But it's described as a mercenary, poor. Oh, yeah. Well, then the opportunity comes, and he claims misled.

He didn't know why he was joining up. A mate of his... What was he joining up for? He thought he was joining up to fight for a Spartan commander, who was the lieutenant of a Persian prince, who was going to take on a troublesome group of people called the Pisidians in what's now northwest Turkey. And actually he was joining up to support a rebel,

that is the younger brother, of the great king of Persia, who wanted to overthrow his older brother. And he joined that campaign. He joined up, and they were terrifically successful. They have to march, as you pointed out, a very long way, about 1,500 miles, to get from the Mediterranean down into southern Iraq. They win, and then this is where the trouble begins from your introduction.

Well, let's... Some introduction. Edithal, can you tell us why that battle is important? Canaxa, is it? Yeah. Canaxa, it's what happened? Well, it's two Persian brothers battling it out for who rules the world, basically. And Xenophon's on the wrong side.

He backs the younger brother who gets killed. It ends up in single combat, he says. And the older brother not only kills his younger brother in single combat, but sticks his head on a pole and disgraces it and shames it, and then turns around and says, how dare you, Greeks over here? What hell do you think you were doing? Supporting my younger brother's mutiny, right, exactly.

So they are stranded in the heart of Iraq in the middle of Persian territory, having thoroughly offended the top guy. I mean, it's the classic escape story. And there are not only 10,000 soldiers, but they were probably about double that because they had all got servants and women folk. They got all these camp followers,

and he keeps talking about this, and they often marched in a square grid with all the donkeys, women and servants and slaves, and captives and booty. I mean, it really was a marching republic. This incredible body of 20,000 people marches up the Tigris, you know, encounters 19 days of harassment by the Persians before it gets free of the Persians.

Then it marched up the Tigris through, basically, Armenia, I suppose. and Kurdistan, then Armenia, yeah. To the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea, where they famously yell that we see the sea, because now as Greeks, they've got to hope they could hold some boats they could get out of there. But this is, it takes, was he one years or two years?

I'm confused. Some of you said one, some have said two. Either way, it's a long time. The total length of that campaign, about a year, about a year. So by the summer of 400, they're back on the... We have 20,000... Now, he, in his book, Simon Goldhill, says that he led them. How much do we believe of that?

And he also says, sorry, to me, that he was elected to him because he's, after all, the Greeks, and it was a democracy, and they democratically chose their military leaders, and he was the one who was chosen. There were generals, and he was clearly not one of those generals when the expedition started. The generals were invited to a meeting

after the battle by the Persians, whereupon they were promptly slaughtered. Thus, you've got 10,000 soldiers without apparent leadership. This is the perfect setup for a story of how do we think about leadership and how do we think about it? So that's the first point, that narratively it works brilliantly for Xenophon's interests. The second point is he does describe it as he was appointed because of his virtue, because of his ability to speak, because he always got to do the perfect speech at the perfect time. But of course, since he's writing the story, we have to be a little bit suspicious.

Is there any way of corroborating or undermining this? Yes, well, there are little bits of there, no, you think there are. I think there's no external check on the details of his role within the 10th. But somebody else, one of the other generals had written. There are other stories being going around. He's, and so we do think that there must be some polemic involved. Absolutely. And you can see little gaps in the story.

Occasionally people have tried to, where they think perhaps he was maybe one of the people who helped lead. But it's undoubtedly it's a first-person narrative in which he is the hero. Whichever way you look at it and the encounters adventures, adventures along the way, they meet strange people, it's anthropological, it's a travel book. What was novel about it poor Paul Cartilage? And also it's just, I think

Edith has set it very graphically and this is a massive amount of man, 20,000 people and the donkeys, moving right through these deserts and across the rivers. Well, what's novel is the area? In other words, the odyssey is set typically in the western part of the Greek world, and this is

set in the eastern part, and it is a prose odyssey, and Xenophon, as Simon rightly said, is terrifically innovative in that he covers many different genres, and indeed invents one of them, namely biography, but, rather like, I always think of him rather like erotostony

of Sireni, who was in the library at Alexandria, a century later, he was called beta, because he was absolutely brilliant across the whole range, in other words, both arts and sciences, but he was never the number one in any one of those disciplines. He's beta, very unfair. Anyway,

what was interesting... Is this thing from Alpha? Yeah, yes. What was interesting... Although there might be more than one or two who don't know the Greek Alpha, but... At least he wasn't gamma. Perhaps Beta Plus, anyway. But two Greeks reading

it, and of course there are very few Greeks who could read Papyrus text. Remember, this is a pretty elite sort of genre of communication. Anyway, he would be particularly interesting for precisely what you said, the anthropologic thing, what is it to be Greek?

and that comes out all the way Gosh, he's a guy who doesn't eat bread. You know, that's just beyond the pale. So there's lots of that. And I would stress again religion which I think we've not yet said enough about Xenophon is a terrifically pious person. So he's

very interested in religious customs. I think it's interesting to compare back to Herodotus, the great history of the Persian Wars, who as it were, founds our sense of the Orient, of the East as this mysterious and difficult place. Zennephanophon gives us a very different image

and a very important and instructive image of how he actually engages with these people. He actually talks to them. They have to buy food. They have to go through. So it's a very particular, it's the first example of, as it were, participant observation in the East. In an event. And in an event.

And so in that sense, it really founds a whole series of imperial narratives. Very important. Edith, do you believe he did what he said he did? I think he did a version of it. Yes, I do. Because really the climate. of the narratives, after they've got to the Black Sea, to the coast, moved along the Turkish, basically he wants to be a Black Sea despot.

He wants to found a city and rule it. And he's been trying to prove all the time that he's up to ruling it. He wants to be philosopher king and the boys won't play. And on the way, he's gathered a lot of booty. So out to his wealth, he's got more loot. A phenomenal amount of booty. But he's got an awful lot of social capital as well out of his men. I mean, this is a man who hunted ostriches on the banks of the Euphrates

and tells us all about it. I mean, he saw fish that were gods in the Tigris. That's it. You know, he's a man who's at, so whether he actually did that or not, what he has absolutely got is the imagination to think of an up-to-date hero who, like Odysseus, had seen miracles and wonders.

He set his eyes on, he loves women. There are just all these wonderful women in Sennephone. I think it really time is right to bring him back into fashion because he writes with great appreciation about beautiful and brave women. And they're all in Asia. There's Mania who's in the histories, who's extraordinary queen,

who really should be running her own country. She's the Budica of ancient Greece. Panthea, who is so beautiful that all the men in the army simply can't fight when she's around, who ends up throwing herself on her husband's grave. He's very, very gentlemanly. He talks about how when Cyrus actually dies

on the battlefield killed by his brother, He has not one but two mistresses, one of whom was taken by the Persians and the other whom, half-naked, ran to the Greeks for help. I mean, this is the sort of stuff that I think your ordinary Greek soldier would very much like to have heard.

Can we dwell on the blacks and his ambition to be... So they get to the sea, and I'd love for you to pronounce it in a proper Greek way. The famous words, when they saw the sea, they say... Salasa, Al-Lasa. There we are, you see? A mess. That's it.

But this business of being a black... sea despot and being stopped by his troops from doing that. That's fascinating. How did he say about trying it? How did they stop it? Again, we've only got his word. We've got to give up that. We've said that. You have to take it all you do. There is a tradition of being a founder of their colony. And in the 4th century, there are

a number of new colonies founded. And there is a thought that Plato, one of the aims of his school, was to, as it were, teach, train up, people who would go out and found cities or take over cities that already existed and make them, as Edith said, sort of philosophical cities.

But actually Zendifan doesn't specify what sort of a city it would be once he'd founded it. He simply says, I'm thinking of, I thought of settling and establishing a community, but whether he would put himself forward as tyrant of it. I mean, it's not impossible, but he doesn't say that. We should go back to Plato on this. I mean, Plato did want, he has a republic.

He says, this is how you should found a state. We know that other intellectuals were practically involved in laying out the street plans for cities in South Italy. So he gets to the point where he says, I might do it. But then his men said, we want to go home. We just want to go home. We've had enough of this adventuring. But it's probably best to read it,

not just as a little moment of history, but also as a key to think about what this text is doing for us. He's saying, think about foundations, think about the politics here. This isn't just an adventure story. Actually, I think what you've introduced is a notion of the ordinary, which is quite refreshing. Instead of, they're not voting democratically, shall we support him or not,

they're saying, I want to get back home. Yeah, absolutely right. They just made a sort of different level of argument, isn't it? Yeah, quite. No, there's no question of what sort of a policy it's going to be. He wasn't clear what sort of reception he was going to get back in Greece. He didn't have any vested interest in going back. That's the point.

So what was it, what did he, as it were, get out of it? How was this campaign received? When he went back, was he the glorious hero? No, not at all. He managed to sequester some money in the Temple of Artemis, at Ephesus. And, you know, they took a very many, they had an awful lot of booty and raiding parties

and got a lot of people to sell a slave. So they divvied up the spoils the generals at the end of it, and once they paid the men off as far as they could. And with his money, he went and basically threw himself at the feet of the spot, And said, I can't go back to Athens because of my political past and because I was associated with Socrates who's being put to death, etc. And they allow him to buy, apparently he says buy an estate near Olympia in the north of the Peloponnese, which they basically ran the Peloponnese, where he settled down to write for 40 years. But I can't help feeling that he felt what had been made for greater things. That's what I think he's doing in these books.

And the other great text, the Education Osiris, which is about an earlier Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, is one incredibly long defence of monarchy. I come like really, I know you're anxious to get onto that, but I'm anxious to take one more step on this after this campaign. Paul, so there's been this campaign. And he, now, is he actually exiled from Athens?

Does he choose to go from Athens? No, no, no, there's absolutely a question. The issue is for what was he exiled? Just to add to Edith, after he gets back to the Black Sea, he goes, first of all, to what's today Istanbul, Byzantium. And that is controlled by Sparta. And quite extraordinary, he discovers the Spartans have changed their mind about Persia. Persia had supported them through the Peloponnesian War and enabled them to beat Athens.

It's Persian money. So you subsidized their freedom. Exactly. And then what's happened now for various reasons. Sparta is the leader of the Greeks. It's taken over Athens' position. Athens' position as leader of the Greeks was against the Persian. So there's a sort of logic, a sort of compulsion.

They must take on the Persians. So Xenophon arrives to his astonishment. His Spartan mates and employers, actually, are fighting the Persians now. And so he, first of all, joins up actually with a troop that fights for a local, as he said, Balkan king, in fact, in what's now Bulgaria. Then he's at a loose end. And he joins up with the Spartan force that is his come over to fight the Western parts of the Persian Empire.

This is when he meets Agiselaus, who becomes his mentor. And he actually serves under Agiselaus. For two years, the Spartan king of Giselaus in Asia, Sparta arouses extreme annoyance amongst its former allies, and there is a rebellion against them back in Greece. Agiselaus is summoned back home. Xenophon goes with him,

and this is when he fights for Sparta against Athens. So he is therefore a traitor. But was the initial sin, namely signing up for a Persian prince, what really caused his exile, or was it fighting for Sparta against Athens that caused it? One of the two, after 394, I'll put in a date here, he was exiled. And he lived the next 23 years on this estate that Edith mentions in, it's actually called Skilus, near Olympia. Writing and Edis, one of the books heroes. This is our moment,

Syropedia. The Education of Cyrus, the upbringing of Cyrus, which is a stonking eight books. Well, you've played Cyrus. He's 150 years before Zonaphon. Is Cyrus the Great, the Great Persian Empire?

Boom, right, that's him. And I don't think there's a fact in the education of Cyrus. It purports to be some sort of biography part one, my life so far, young man how he got to manhood. In fact what it is is a series of moralising episodes and

speeches on how to rule and that is exactly what it is and this is why it was such a big renaissance hit because it's the Machiavelli loved it and Francis Bacon loved it because it's how to run how to govern your city. As I understood it it has got a lot

of a good leader should do this and that can you give us one of two instances of the way saying a good leader should be heard him. Okay, we have a very long dialogue. At one point, we deal with the Persian Empire is expanding under the young Cyrus. He's going around.

There is a rebel king in Armenia. And the rebel king in Armenia decides he doesn't want to pay revenue to the Persians anymore. And there's a battle, and he's taken. And then Cyrus interviews him about whether or not in a sort of set up Socratic debate, what would you do in my place?

don't you think you'd have to execute me? Yeah? Don't you think that the only thing you can do with rebels who have pledged allegiance and broken their word is killed? And he leads the man into admitting that that is what he would have to do, that he would have to execute. And so we have this terrible, tragic moment

where we all think, and his wives and daughters are all weeping. But in fact, we then have a discussion how this is precisely the moment that you can get the best gratitude and affection out of someone. That is precisely the moment to make them a vassal when they're most vulnerable. and you can give them the biggest gift. And so he actually lets him off.

So that is a practical lesson in how to extort loyalty. Yeah, I was just going to say that's the point. How do you make him loyal after you've treated to you? It has a very simple overall message as well about when you get power, about how you shouldn't give into luxury, how you shouldn't give into the misuse of power. And so it founds the genre of the education of princes,

which goes on for so long. but it also has this very strong moralistic streak about what you should do in general terms of your own pleasures. He really believed very strongly that self-control in the rule of us absolutely central and he bashes that point out again and again in this. What does he mean by self-control?

What self-control is he talking about? Which part of himself? Sex and food drink and money. You shouldn't look for the luxuries of lying down on the soft carpets, you shouldn't look to abuse your power over women, you shouldn't eat or drink. And of course, what he's setting this is very important

that this is the king of Persia. Because if there's any image of Persia in the Greek mind, it's precisely luxury, abusing women, abusing men. So he's saying, no, you Greeks, and remember it's written in Greek, can learn from the Persian king.

We shouldn't underestimate the radical nature of what he's offering there. Except it was a long time ago. It's a long time ago. And it's part of it. No, no, no, no. Well, unless. Well, A, he wasn't praising the current Persian League.

No, that's for sure. And B, as Edith said, there's a very strong Spartanising streak. So, in other words, some of the social customs, the court, looked much more Spartan than they do genuinely Persian. He was also a substantial historian. He took up, as it were, literally, as it seems. He took up the work of Cucydides, where his great history stopped, as it were, in mid-sentence.

And Xenophon starts almost to come. Yes, he says after this, though actually there is a gap in reality, but anyway. But going back to what we were saying earlier about Herodotus being his mentor, as opposed to any other writer in prose, well, he specifically rejected a Thucydidean style of history. And there are a couple of episodes. But it continued the history. He continued it chronologically. He continued it down to what is recognised by historians university as a turning point.

There was a major battle. And he ends the work by saying there was greater disturbance, greater confusion. fusion in Greece than even before. So in other words, he ends on a down note. But the way in which he did history, what he took to be important, is directly anti-thucididine in the way that some of his philosophy is anti-Platonic.

He says, now, of course, most historians would go on about great expenditure, loss of life, huge victory. But I, what I think is important is, and then he takes as an example, a leader who happens to be the half-brother of Eiji Salé. and says, look how wonderfully he behaved, look how loyal his troops were, that is what history is about.

And, of course, it isn't. Most Greeks didn't think that's what history was about. So his historiography is actually rather downbeat, and it is moralising rather than event analyzing. But just to talk, is it reliable? Do people read that and say? Very difficult to tell. No is the answer where we can check him, because we actually have one or two other sources. No, in what sense, badly wrong, exaggerating.

He gives totally different factual description of a major battle, for example, in 395 BC. We have another alternative account, and most historians think that the alternative account, which goes back to a contemporary of Xenophants, who doesn't survive as such, but is the source, is a more plausible reconstruction. All battle descriptions are more or less false, because nobody actually knows what really happened in any. But it seems that the way the battle evolved was better described, more logically described, in this other source. It seems to me that what you're saying is what one of you, I think it might have been needed to say earlier in the programme,

that in this exile on Olympia... Near Olympia, yeah. Writing these books, he was actually carving out for himself the place that he hadn't arrived up through his actions. It's an interesting point, yeah. That's how you see it. And so this is history as it would have been and should have been if I'd been in charge.

It's also a strong moralising streak that comes through this history. And back to Socrates, right? Directly into the Renaissance and directly, and that's why he was so. pop there in the later periods because there were a lot of people who wanted to write moralising history of a similar sort and he provided

a model for that. But also a very beautiful sort. He has a very great, very powerful way of talking about how the good life in the correct moral sense should be lived and it involves a very great deal of hunting with dogs, riding horses in

beautiful countryside, appreciating nature and actually being nice to your wife. I mean there is a very, very strong prescription for how to live well. And I think that this is made in very, very popular. There's an extraordinary amount of food. Discussion of what is a good meal but proportionate to your needs and healthy.

All these history works and the education of Cyrus, there is a meal every three paragraphs with how to eat, what to eat, when to eat, how not to get fat. He talks about people who get fat and how self-controlled that is. So it is heavily moralising. But I think actually this is exactly what a lot of people in antiquity wanted. They wanted guides to how to live. That hasn't changed much. And some of his, you know, this didactic and moral streak,

he could let rip with when he actually wrote didactic works. One of the reasons perhaps of his survival and for so long still today and massively important in the rest of it. And again in Victorian England, in public schools, the Greek, he was supposed to have the purest Greek, so they did that Greek through him and learnt that Greek history. but the number of works he did, Simon, can you briefly give us,

Ediths mentioned it, Penny Take On, we've got horsemanship, we've got hunting. Horsemanage hunting, we've got a manual on how to relate to your wife, educate your wife, we've got the history works. What does you mean by educate your wife? Well, it's how to be a housekeeper. What sort of education she should have into that and remembering that most Greek men would be marrying between 30 and 40

a woman who's likely to be 16. You can see why the educational model comes in a rather strong way. It's a very difficult text to read, actually, in terms of how ironic it is and how serious. It's a Socratic dialogue in some form. And, of course, an ironic version of how you're meant to educate your wife is an especially difficult thing to read, particularly from a historical point of view. So you've got horsemanship, hunting, and how do you educate your wife? He also did a symposium, which is a version of the same idea as Plato's symposium.

Much more fun. It ends up with a Syracusan dancemaster putting on a show that was so erotic. that everybody wanted to go home and have sex with their wives immediately. And the ones who weren't married to get married. Now, given that they were in the Piraeus, I don't know. Believe that you'll believe anything. They were in the Piraeus, this party, Calliass's house. There were more prostitutes available than anywhere else in Greece.

I'm absolutely. The notice at the end Socrates walks off with a boy, a young man, so it's all right. But that is actually a great source for ancient entertainment. It has all these circus acts and performers come in, which we wouldn't know about otherwise at all. And mythic representation. It's quite interesting. And there's a good way to compare Plato and Xenophon.

I mean, Plato's symposium being one of the great texts of Neoplattec philosophy turning into this ideal nature of beauty, wherein Xenophon, we get the dancers of the king. I wonder which is more accurate. Can you give us some notion, Paul, can all three of it, as we come to the end of this, of his influence, where it spread most... Well, I think you've really mentioned all the main things.

In antiquity... Well, can't stop. You've got two minutes to go. Well, right. In antiquity, he was... copied regularly, which is absolutely crucial. If you're not copied, you die in terms of... You mean literally? Yeah, literally. So people found the range of his work, as well as the intrinsic interests

of different ones. But one we've not mentioned is a political treatise which is called the Hiero. And it's based on a nasty Sicilian tyrant who's asking a Greek, actually a Greek praise singer who actually did sing his praise. Simonides, how

should I live? And it's what Simon was talking about about not being excessive, not being self-indulgence. Elizabeth I first translated that one. There's a copy in Cambridge Library. Thank you very much. I'm going to say that's the sort of work that came through, but then hit the buffers, really, in the 19th century

with the rise of criticism, German in origin, of antiquity. So Xenophon was shunted well, no, in terms of... I think Xenophon was absolutely central to the 19th century in England because of the analysis where we started. No, more quite. Because it was read again and again. by the Imperial schoolboy who was being encouraged to go out to the east.

But you would say that was a denaturing of him. You presented a very sophisticated xenophon and the 19th century in England took a very unsophisticated. In the 21st century, American military academies are yet again making people read it before they went out to Iraq. No, on the nervousness.

Well, I'm going to have to leave you to talk among yourselves. I wish I'll listen it on. Thank you very much, Egypt. Paul Cartlidge and Simon Goldhill. Next week we'll be talking about the great battle in 1066, the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.