Legacy of Xenophon

In post-Renaissance Europe Xenophon continued to be highly valued as long as the valuation by antiquity retained its authority. His works were widely edited and translated, and the environment was one in which, for example, the esteem in which Cyropaedia had been held by Romans such as Scipio Aemilianus found an echo. More generally, Xenophon’s moral posture and his conviction that proper instruction, both practical and moral, could achieve human improvement had an appeal even in a world of secular enlightenment.

By the 19th century the onset of the critical study of historical sources, a growing preference for epistemology over ethics, and the general professionalization of research on the Classical world did Xenophon no favours. It became harder to find much relevance in his practical treatises, and a political philosophy that appeared monarchic rather than republican was out of tune with the times. He remained an author commonly read by those learning Greek, but he ceased to be intellectually fashionable both among academics and the wider educated public.

In the late 20th century his reputation began to rise again. Scholars became more interested in early 4th-century history and increasingly concerned with socioeconomic structures, social institutions, and gender issues. They also became more sensitive to the pitfalls of biographical or quasi-biographical discourse in antiquity. There was a considerable increase in the quantity and sophistication of historical work on Persia and Sparta, and war studies regained its status as a respectable branch of sociocultural history. All these trends made Xenophon an author of crucial importance and encouraged more-discriminating reading of his works.

Xenophon was long characterized as a second-rate practitioner of other people’s literary trades, but more-sympathetic study suggests that the artfully simple style masks a writer of some sophistication. Xenophon was in the early 21st century starting to be taken seriously as a distinctive voice on the history, society, and intellectual attitudes of the later Classical era.