|
XENOPHON was a pupil and friend of Socrates, who saved his life at the rout of Delium, by carrying him on his back from the field more than a mile. His account of the life and teaching of his revered master is the most valuable and trustworthy that we possess (Memorabilia). He was the editor and continuator of Thucydides; and his miscellaneous writings, of which many remain to us, throw great light on the history and manners of his time. They show that he was not a man of first-rate intellectual or even literary power; but their style is simple and pleasing, and they leave a very favourable impression of his character. We are concerned with him here not as a writer but as a man of action. Three years after the taking of Athens by the Lacedæmonians, Cyrus the Younger, a prince of remarkable capacity, who had formed the design of employing Greek soldiers and functionaries, and to some extent Greek methods, in the government of Asia, marched up from his satrapy on the sea-coast to dethrone his brother Artaxerxes, taking with him 10,000 Greek adventurers, among them Xenophon. When Cyrus fell at the battle of Cunaxa, near Babylon, Xenophon had a principal share in conducting the famous Retreat of the Ten Thousand through regions never before traversed by Greeks to the coast of the Euxine (B.C. 400). His narrative of this wonderful march first revealed to Greece the internal rottenness of the Persian Empire, and led to other attacks upon it, culminating seventy years later in the decisive expedition of Alexander. Xenophon was a conservative and a disciplinarian. The democratic constitution of Athens was distasteful to him, and he probably could not forgive his fellow citizens for the execution of Socrates (B.C. 399). Spartan institutions and manners he warmly admired; and having taken service under Agesilaus for a new expedition to Asia, he fought under him on his homeward march against his own countrymen at Coroneia (B.C. 394). For this they naturally passed a decree of exile against him, and the rest of his life was passed in Peloponnesus. How such conduct would have been judged by Romans we see by the legend of Coriolanus. But it was common in Greece, and was generally actuated by motives much less respectable than those of Xenophon.
Find more articles on Xenophon
Purchase books on ancient war
| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
|
