Xenophon the Historian

Historiography, Historical Experience and the Uses of History

Christopher J. Tuplin, Fiona Hobden, Alexei V. Zadorojnyi

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9783119142250
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783112222751
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Xenophon the historian was formed by the historiographical culture of his time and by his own history as pupil of Socrates, mercenary leader and political exile. These perspectives underpin a collection of essays that explores his sophisticated and occasionally idiosyncratic engagement with the past (both in historical narratives and elsewhere) and the strategies of later readers who harnessed his work to their own agendas. The wider world (Greek and non-Greek) also comes into view, both in the vivid and sometimes brutal experience of war among the Ten Thousand and in the political conflicts and socio-religious institutions and mores that framed his life-story. We discover a writer trying to make sense of that world, to evaluate what happens in it, to discern trends – and ultimately to inform the present with lessons from the past. The eighteen chapters illustrate the calibre and value of a writer at work when history was still a genre in development whose modes and expectations created opportunities more than constraints. The overarching aim of the volume is thus to illuminate what it meant to be a historian in such a period, and how and why Xenophon's past-oriented thinking and writing mattered beyond his own lifetime.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Introduction
• Immersion and trauma in Xenophon’s Anabasis
• The impacts and ethics of invasion in Xenophon’s Anabasis
• The march record in Xenophon’s Anabasis: Sources, reliability, function(s)
• Xenophon and the peace treaty of 387/6 BC
• Xenophon, Plutarch and the King’s letter (Agesilaus 8.3–5)
• Epigraphic citations in Xenophon
• Xenophon and military change in the fourth century BC
• Who was Cephisodotus? Xenophon Hellenica 7.1.12–14 in the context of Athens’ wider external relations, 387–359 BC
• Xenophon and the speech of Cleocritus (Hellenica 2.4.20–22): The significance of the appeal to paternal and maternal gods
• The historian’s choice: Xenophon and the closing point of the Hellenica
• Xenophon and the spectacle of Sparta
• Peace in Xenophon
• The memoirist syndrome. Historicist biases in the debate on the origins of Xenophon’s Hellenica
• Sophistic variation on Procles’ first speech (Hellenica 6.5.38–48)
• Grote, Xenophon and the Ten Thousand
• African Americans and Xenophon, ca. 1800–1910
• Afterword: Xenophon the historian revisited
• Index of names
• Thematic index