Xenophon

Xenophon was born around 430 BCE in Erchia, a rural deme of Attica lying east of Athens, to a family of comfortable means headed by his father Gryllus ^[1]. The property-owning class of Erchia raised horses, and Xenophon's later expertise in cavalry matters and his lifelong attachment to hunting suggest a boyhood spent among the pursuits of the Athenian gentry ^[2].

His childhood coincided almost exactly with the Peloponnesian War, the long struggle between Athens and Sparta that began in 431 BCE. Anyone asking who was Xenophon must begin with this fact: he grew up in a city under strain, swept by plague in his infancy and by political upheaval in his youth. As a young man of the cavalry class he probably served Athens on horseback in the war's final years, and he may have remained in the city during the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, the Spartan-backed oligarchy of 404 to 403 BCE ^[1].

The decisive influence of his youth was Socrates. Xenophon joined the circle around the philosopher, and later tradition, preserved by the biographer Diogenes Laertius, tells that Socrates stopped the young man in a narrow lane, asked him where men were made good and virtuous, and told him to follow and learn ^[3]. Whatever the truth of the anecdote, the association was real and lasting, and it marked everything Xenophon later wrote.

In 401 BCE a friend named Proxenus of Boeotia invited Xenophon to join an expedition being raised by Cyrus the Younger, a Persian prince and satrap in Asia Minor. Xenophon consulted Socrates, who advised him to ask the oracle at Delphi; Xenophon instead asked the god to which deities he should sacrifice for a safe journey, a question that assumed the decision was already made ^[4]. He sailed east as a gentleman volunteer, neither general nor common soldier.

Cyrus had concealed his true purpose. The roughly ten thousand Greek mercenaries he hired discovered only deep inside the Persian Empire that they were marching against the Great King himself, Cyrus's brother Artaxerxes II. At the battle of Cunaxa near Babylon in the autumn of 401 BCE the Greeks won their part of the field, but Cyrus was killed in the fighting, leaving his hired army stranded more than a thousand miles from home ^[4].

Matters worsened when the Persian satrap Tissaphernes lured the senior Greek generals to a parley and had them seized and executed. In the crisis that followed, the army elected new officers, and Xenophon, though barely thirty and without formal command experience, emerged as one of its leading generals ^[1]. Through the winter of 401 to 400 BCE he helped guide the survivors north through Mesopotamia, across the mountains of Kurdistan, and through the snows of Armenia, fighting hostile tribes and hunger at every stage. When the vanguard finally sighted the Black Sea from a mountain called Theches, the soldiers' cry of "the sea, the sea" became, through Xenophon's telling, one of the most famous moments in Greek literature ^[4].

The retreat did not end Xenophon's soldiering. After the Ten Thousand reached Greek cities on the Black Sea coast, he led remnants of the army into service first under a Thracian prince, then under Spartan commanders campaigning against Persia in Asia Minor ^[1]. There he attached himself to the Spartan king Agesilaus II, a ruler he came to admire without reservation and later honored in a laudatory biography.

The attachment carried a price. When Agesilaus marched home in 394 BCE to face a coalition that included Athens, Xenophon accompanied him and was present at the battle of Coronea, where Spartans fought Athenians. Around this period the Athenians formally exiled him, whether for his earlier service with Cyrus, an enemy ally of Persia's Greek foes, or for his open association with Sparta; the exact charge and date remain debated by scholars ^[2].

Sparta rewarded its Athenian friend. Xenophon received an estate at Scillus, near Olympia in the western Peloponnese, where he settled with his wife Philesia and their two sons, Gryllus and Diodorus ^[3]. Out of the tithe of spoils from the Asian campaign he built a small sanctuary to Artemis on the property, modeled on the goddess's great temple at Ephesus, and endowed an annual festival with feasting and a hunt. His own description of the place, set down in the Anabasis, is one of the earliest surviving accounts of a Greek country estate written by its owner ^[4].

The quiet decades at Scillus made Xenophon an author, and his range explains why any list of Xenophon achievements runs so long. The Anabasis, his third-person account of the march of the Ten Thousand, combined military memoir, travel narrative, and self-defense; it later served Alexander the Great's generation as proof that Greek soldiers could beat Persian armies deep in the king's own territory, and it has served students of ancient Greek as a first reading text for centuries ^[2].

His Hellenica picked up Greek history at the point where Thucydides' unfinished work broke off in 411 BCE and carried it down to the battle of Mantinea in 362 BCE. It is the only continuous contemporary narrative of those decades to survive, though modern historians fault its Spartan sympathies and its silences, including scant attention to the rise of Thebes ^[5].

The Socratic works form a third pillar. The Memorabilia collected conversations and recollections defending Socrates against the charges of impiety and corrupting the young that led to his execution in 399 BCE. Alongside it stand the Apology, the Symposium, and the Oeconomicus, a dialogue on household and estate management that doubles as the fullest classical account of a Greek marriage and of farm administration ^[6]. Xenophon also produced the Cyropaedia, a long, partly fictional portrait of the education of Cyrus the Great designed to explore ideal leadership, plus practical treatises on horsemanship, the duties of a cavalry commander, hunting with dogs, and the revenues of Athens ^[1]. His manual On Horsemanship is the oldest surviving complete work on the subject in the Western tradition ^[6].

Sparta's defeat at Leuctra in 371 BCE shattered the order that had sheltered Xenophon. When Elis reclaimed the territory around Scillus, he lost the estate and moved his household to Corinth, the city where ancient sources place his final years and his death ^[3].

Athens and Sparta, enemies for most of his life, became allies against Thebes in the 360s BCE, and the Athenians revoked Xenophon's exile. Whether the old man ever returned to his native city is uncertain, but he sent his sons to fight in the Athenian cavalry. At Mantinea in 362 BCE his elder son Gryllus was killed after fighting with distinction, and the flood of tributes composed in the young man's honor, mentioned by later writers, suggests how widely the father was by then esteemed ^[3].

Xenophon continued writing nearly to the end. The Poroi, his pamphlet on improving Athenian public revenues through peaceful trade and silver mining rather than empire, dates from the late 350s BCE and shows him still engaging with his city's problems ^[1]. He died at Corinth around 354 BCE, in his mid seventies, having outlived almost every actor of the world he chronicled.

Among the durable Xenophon facts is the sheer luck of his survival: every work he is known to have written has come down to us intact, a distinction almost no other classical Greek author shares ^[2]. Antiquity ranked him with Herodotus and Thucydides as one of the three great Greek historians, and Roman readers, including Cicero, prized the Cyropaedia as a mirror for statesmen. The elder Scipio was said to keep the book constantly at hand ^[5].

His reputation has moved with the centuries. Renaissance and early modern educators treasured the clarity of his Attic prose; Machiavelli engaged closely with the Cyropaedia; and generations of schoolchildren met ancient Greek through the Anabasis. Nineteenth and twentieth century scholars often demoted him, judging his history less rigorous than Thucydides and his philosophy less profound than Plato. More recent scholarship has pushed back, reading him as a subtle writer on leadership, political psychology, and practical ethics whose works reward closer attention than the old caricature allowed ^[6].

Every serious Xenophon biography now treats him as a figure of several distinct legacies at once: the eyewitness soldier whose retreat narrative influenced military memoirs down to the modern era, the indispensable second witness to Socrates, the pioneer of biography and the leadership treatise, and the countryman whose manuals on horses, hounds, and household preserved the texture of everyday Greek life that grander authors ignored ^[5].