Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Agesilaus by Xenophon Xenophon , Hiero. Agesilaus. Constitution of the Lacedaemonians. Ways and Means. Cavalry Commander. Art of Horsemanship. On Hunting. Constitution of the Athenians. Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BCE ) was a wealthy Athenian and friend of Socrates. He left Athens in 401 and joined an expedition including ten thousand Greeks led by the Persian governor Cyrus against the Persian king. After the defeat of Cyrus, it fell to Xenophon to lead the Greeks from the gates of Babylon back to the coast through inhospitable lands. Later he wrote the famous vivid account of this 'March Up-Country' ( Anabasis ); but meanwhile he entered service under the Spartans against the Persian king, married happily, and joined the staff of the Spartan king, Agesilaus. But Athens was at war with Sparta in 394 and so exiled Xenophon. The Spartans gave him an estate near Elis where he lived for years writing and hunting and educating his sons. Reconciled to Sparta, Athens restored Xenophon to honour but he preferred to retire to Corinth. Xenophon's Anabasis is a true story of remarkable adventures. Hellenica, a history of Greek affairs from 411 to 362, begins as a continuation of Thucydides' account. There are four works on Socrates (collected in Volume IV of the Loeb Xenophon edition). In Memorabilia Xenophon adds to Plato's picture of Socrates from a different viewpoint. The Apology is an interesting complement to Plato's account of Socrates' defense at his trial. Xenophon's Symposium portrays a dinner party at which Socrates speaks of love; and Oeconomicus has him giving advice on household management and married life. Cyropaedia, a historical romance on the education of Cyrus (the Elder), reflects Xenophon's ideas about rulers and government; the Loeb edition is in two volumes. We also have his Hiero, a dialogue on government; Agesilaus, in praise of that king; Constitution of Lacedaemon (on the Spartan system); Ways and Means (on the finances of Athens); Manual for a Cavalry Commander; a good manual of Horsemanship; and a lively Hunting with Hounds. The Constitution of the Athenians, though clearly not by Xenophon, is an interesting document on politics at Athens. These eight books are collected in the last of the seven volumes of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Xenophon. Xenophon, Agesilaus E. C. Marchant, G. W. Bowersock, tr. Constitution of the Athenians., Ed. Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position: This text is part of: Search the Perseus Catalog for: View text chunked by: text : chapter : section. Table of Contents: I know how difficult it is to write an appreciation of Agesilaus that shall be worthy of his virtue and glory. Nevertheless the attempt must be made. For it would not be seemly that so good a man, just because of his perfection, should receive no tributes of praise, however inadequate. The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text. Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com. An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system. Xenophon. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Xenophon , (born c. 430 bce , Attica, Greece—died shortly before 350, Attica), Greek historian and philosopher whose numerous surviving works are valuable for their depiction of late Classical Greece. His Anabasis (“Upcountry March”) in particular was highly regarded in antiquity and had a strong influence on Latin literature. Xenophon’s life history before 401 is scantily recorded; at that time, prompted by a Boeotian friend, he left postwar Athens, joined the Greek mercenary army of the Achaemenian prince Cyrus the Younger, and became involved in Cyrus’s rebellion against his brother, the Persian king Artaxerxes II. After Cyrus’s defeat at Cunaxa (about 50 miles [80 km] from Babylon in what is now Iraq), the Greeks (later known as the Ten Thousand) returned to Byzantium via Mesopotamia, Armenia, and northern Anatolia. Xenophon was one of the men selected to replace five generals seized and executed by the Persians. The persistence and skill of the Greek soldiers were used by proponents of Panhellenism as proof that the Persians were vulnerable. Initially viewed with hostility by Sparta (the current Greek hegemonic power), the mercenaries found employment in the winter of 400–399 with the Thracian prince Seuthes but then entered Spartan service for a war to liberate Anatolian Greeks from Persian rule. Unpersuaded by Seuthes’s offers of land and marriage to his daughter and evidently disinclined (despite protestations to the contrary) to return home, Xenophon remained with his comrades. Although the Anabasis narrative stops at this point and further details are lacking, he clearly became closely involved with senior Spartans, notably (after 396) King Agesilaus II. When a Greek coalition, including Athens, rebelled against Spartan hegemony in mainland Greece, Xenophon fought (at Coronea in 394) for Sparta. Whether his service to Sparta caused or reflected his formal exile from Athens remains a matter of some dispute, but exiled he certainly was. The Spartans gave him somewhere to live at Scillus (across the Alpheus River from Olympia), a small city in the Triphylian state created after Sparta’s defeat of Elis in 400. During his years there, Xenophon served as Sparta’s representative at Olympia, and he sent his sons to Sparta for their education. Some historians believe that he also made a trip to Sicily during this period. He certainly used his mercenary booty to buy land and erect a small-scale copy of Artemis’s famous temple at Ephesus. (In Anabasis , Book V, there is a well-known description of this sacred estate and of the annual quasi-civic festival celebrated there.) Too prominent to be unscathed by Sparta’s loss of authority after the Battle of Leuctra (371), Xenophon was expelled from Scillus and is said to have settled in Corinth—though here, as elsewhere, the biographical tradition is of debatable authority, since the episode does not appear in Xenophon’s own writings. The claim that his exile was formally repealed is another case in point, but his Hipparchicus ( Cavalry Commander ) and Vectigalia ( Ways and Means ) suggest that Xenophon had a sympathetic interest in Athens’s fortunes, and rapprochement is reflected in his sons’ service in the Athenian cavalry at the second Battle of Mantinea (362). The death of Xenophon’s son Gryllus there unleashed such a profusion of eulogies that Aristotle later gave the subtitle Gryllus to a dialogue that criticized Isocrates’ views of rhetoric. At the time of his own death, Xenophon’s standing—as author of a considerable oeuvre and hero of an adventure nearly five decades old but ideologically vivid in a Greek world defined by its relationship to Persia—had never been higher. Posthumously his place in the canon of ancient authors was secure; he was a historian, philosopher, and man of action, a perfect model for the young (a view expressed, for example, by Dion Chrysostom [Dio Cocceianus]) and an object of systematic literary imitation by Arrian. Works. General characteristics. Xenophon produced a large body of work, all of which survives to the present day. (Indeed, the manuscript tradition includes Constitution of the Athenians , which is not by Xenophon.) The great majority of his works were probably written during the last 15 to 20 years of his life, but their chronology has not been decisively established. His output was formally varied—the main categories were long historical or ostensibly historical narratives, Socratic texts, and short technical, biographical, or political treatises—but these had common features, as enumerated below. First, Xenophon’s work is characterized by novelty. His output includes the earliest or earliest surviving examples of the short nonmedical treatise and of autobiographical narrative ( Anabasis ). Other works, although not without precedent in genre, are unusual in various ways; this is true of the idiosyncratic contemporary history of Hellenica (“Greek History”) and the fictive history of Cyropaedia (“Education of Cyrus”); the second-order, philosophically nontechnical response to (or exploitation of) Socratic literature found in Memorabilia , Symposium (“Drinking Party”), Oeconomicus (“Household Management”), and Apology ; and the novel form of encomiastic biography exemplified by Agesilaus . Second, the subject matter reflects Xenophon’s personal experiences. Anabasis and Cyropaedia flowed from the adventure of 401–400; the Socratic writings stemmed from youthful association with a charismatic teacher; Hellenica arose from a personal take on the politico-military history of his times; treatises on military command, horsemanship, household management, and hunting derived from prolonged personal experience of each; Ways and Means was inspired by concern about Athens’s finances and political fortunes; and Hiero may have originated in a visit to Sicily. Third, Xenophon’s agenda was essentially didactic (usually with direct or indirect reference to military or leadership skills), and it was often advanced through the use of history as a source of material. As a narrative historian Xenophon has a reputation for inaccuracy and incompleteness, but he clearly assumed that people and events from the past were tools for promoting political and ethical improvement. His ethical system contained little that jars in modern terms; but in today’s cynical world, the apparent ingenuousness of its expression strikes some as by turns bland and irritating. The system’s interconnection with the gods may challenge readers who either disavow the divine or are not reconciled to a pagan theological environment, simply because—in ethical contexts, though not in specific ritual ones (as illustrated in Anabasis , Book VII)—divine power in Xenophon is frequently anonymous and often singular or because he could apparently take a pragmatic attitude (e.g., posing a question to the Delphic oracle that was framed to produce the “right” answer). His contemporaries perhaps saw things differently: for them the gods were unproblematic (not that everyone thought the same way about them, but Xenophon’s terms of reference were readily understood), and his insistence on a moral component to practical and (broadly) political skills may have been distinctive. Fourth, charges of ingenuousness have been partly fueled by Xenophon’s style. Judged in antiquity to be plain, sweet, persuasive, graceful, poetic, and a model of Attic purity, it now strikes some as jejune. A more charitable, and fairer, description would be that his style is understated—the range of stylistic figures is modest, and the finest effects are produced by his simplicity of expression. Rereading a famous passage in which the Ten Thousand first glimpse the sea, one is struck by the disproportion between its remembered impact and its brevity and indirect approach. Xenophon does not describe seeing the sea; instead he describes, first, his gradual realization that a commotion up ahead is caused by the shouts of those who have seen the sea and, second, the scenes of celebration as men embrace with tears and laughter, build a huge cairn of stones, and shower gifts upon their local guide. Ta tou Xenophontos Hellenika : kai ho Agesilaos = Xenophontis Graecorum res gestae : et Agesilaus. Title page from Ta tou Xenophontos Hellenika, volume two, George Wythe Collection, Wolf Law Library, College of William & Mary. Xenophon (c.428-c.354 BCE) was an Athenian historian and disciple of Socrates who had a somewhat turbulent relationship with his home city. He was born into a wealthy family and supported the short-lived oligarchic government of Athens established in 411 BCE, which likely made it difficult for him when the democratic government was reinstated. [1] In 401, Xenophon joined a mercenary army and went on an expedition with the newly deceased Persian king’s son and commander Cyrus the Younger who attempted to take the throne from his older brother. [2] After the failure of that attempted coup and Cyrus’s death, Xenophon returned to Greece with the rest of Cyrus’s army, for whose "lawless behavior" Xenophon was made responsible [3] until he impressed and joined the service of Spartan king Agesilaus in 396 BCE and fought on the Spartan side against Athens and Boeotia in 394. Either for this treachery or earlier incidents, Xenophon was exiled from Athens and his property confiscated. The Spartans gave him an estate near Olympia and the position of entertaining visiting Spartans. For the next twenty years he did just that, while also writing his many books. Xenophon was forced from Olympia and moved to Corinth in 371 BCE, then back to Athens in 366 BCE after all Athenians were banished from Corinth. (His exile from Athens was likely revoked around 368 BCE). [4] All known parts of the vast number of works that Xenophon produced have survived to the modern day. Most are in the three categories of "long (quasi-) historical narratives, Socratic texts, and technical treatises." [5] This particular edition of Xenophon’s works contains his Hellenica and Agesilaus . The former is a chronological account of key military events from 411 BCE to 362 BCE contained in seven books. In these events, Xenophon combines historical narratives with starkly honest expositions of the shortcomings of different states, including Sparta. The latter work included in this volume is a posthumous biography of the Spartan king Agesilaus with whom Xenophon had a long and close relationship. Though the chronology is uneven and adds nothing about the king not already included in Hellenica , the work was crucial to the development of biography. Additionally, the list of principal virtues of “a perfectly good man” reveals Greek expectations and standards of the time. [6] Evidence for Inclusion in Wythe's Library. Listed in the Jefferson Inventory of Wythe's Library as Xenophontis historia. 4.v. 8vo. Foulis and given by Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes. According to Philip Gaskell's bibliography, the Foulis Press published Xenophon's Hellenica and Agesilaus once, in 1762. [7] Both Brown's Bibliography [8] and George Wythe's Library [9] on LibraryThing include this title as the one intended by Jefferson's notation. The Wolf Law Library purchased the 1762. Description of the Wolf Law Library's copy. Bound in full brown calf with red calf labels to spine. Purchased from Schooner Books Ltd. Images of the library's copy of this book are available on Flickr. View the record for this book in William & Mary's online catalog. chronolit. 4000 years of classic literature …….. one book at a time. 99. Agesilaus by Xenophon (c.365 BC) Plot : Xenophon delivers a written eulogy on King Agesilaus II of Sparta. My version is taken from Xenophon’s Minor works , translated by the Reverend J S Watson and published in 1888 by George Bell and Sons, London. My thoughts: Fulsome praise is heaped on the memory of Agesilaus, a warrior king whose word was iron-clad, his needs simple and his successes as general and king apparently limitless. Able to trace his lineage back to Heracles (!), yet modest and ever helpful to his friends, but a clever strategist in the field who nevertheless kept treaties and respected enemies seeking protection in sanctuaries. Xenophon was apparently banished from Athens for his support of this Spartan ruler, although one of Agesilaus’ virtues was his loyalty to the broader Greek cause even when fighting other Greek cities. “But when the Corinthian exiles said that the city would be surrendered to them, and showed him the machines with which they all expected to take the walls, he refused to make an attack upon it, saying that it was proper to reduce the cities of Greece, not to slavery, but to their senses.” (page 33) Apparently Plutarch wrote of Agesilaus II as well in his Lives, so we will see him again. Favourite lines/passages: An affecting piece of war description ; a strongly written piece which depicts the horrors of the battlefield at day’s end: “But when the fight was over, a spectator might have seen, where they engaged with one another, the ground crimsoned with blood, the dead bodies of friends and enemies lying close to one another, shields broken to pieces, spears snapped asunder, daggers without their sheaths, some on the ground, others sticking in bodies, and others still in the hands of the dead.” (page 19) Personal rating: The heaped praise becomes a little excessive although it would be nice to think at least some of it was deserved as ardently as Xenophon imagined. 4. Next : One of the biggies : Plato’s Republic.