Aspects of Leadership in Xenophon
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ASPECTS OF LEADERSHIP IN XENOPHON HISTOS The Online Journal of Ancient Historiography Edited by Christopher Krebs and †John Moles Histos Supplements Supervisory Editor: John Marincola '. Antony Erich Raubitschek, Autobiography of Antony Erich Raubitschek . Edited with Introduction and Notes by Donald Lateiner (-.'/). -. A. J. Woodman, Lost Histories: Selected Fragments of Roman Historical Writers (-.'3). 4. Felix Jacoby, On the Development of Greek Historiography and the Plan for a New Collection of the Fragments of the Greek Historians . Translated by Mortimer Chambers and Stefan Schorn (-.'3). /. Anthony Ellis, ed., God in History: Reading and Re- writing Herodotean Theology from Plutarch to the Renaissance (-.'3). 3. Richard Fernando Buxton, ed., Aspects of Leadership in Xenophon (-.'8) ASPECTS OF LEADERSHIP IN XENOPHON EDITED BY RICHARD FERNANDO BUXTON HISTOS SUPPLEMENT 3 NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE - . ' 8 Published by H I S T O S School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE' <RU, United Kingdom ISSN (Online): -./8-3>84 (Print): -./8-3>33 © -.'8 THE INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ............................................................................... i About the Contributors ................................................... iii '. Athenian Leaders in Xenophon’s Memorabilia Melina Tamiolaki ............................................................ ' -. Tyrants as Impious Leaders in Xenophon’s Hellenica Frances Pownall ............................................................. 3' 4. Piety in Xenophon’s Theory of Leadership Michael Flower .............................................................. B3 /. Honour and the Art of Xenophontic Leadership Benjamin D. Keim ......................................................... '-' 3. Novel Leaders for Novel Armies: Xenophon’s Focus on Willing Obedience in Context Richard Fernando Buxton ............................................... '84 8. Subordinate Officers in Xenophon’s Anabasis Luuk Huitink and Tim Rood .......................................... '>> <. Response and Further Thoughts John Dillery ................................................................. -/4 PREFACE Although Xenophon of Athens wrote in a dizzying array of genres, recent scholarship has done much to highlight model leadership as a recurrent object of enquiry that unifies the author’s various philosophical, historiographic and didactic explorations. Much of this work, culminating in Vivienne Gray’s recent monograph, Xenophon’s Mirror of Princes (Oxford ,-..), has sought to abstract Xenophon’s unique portrait of the ideal leader, isolating the particular set of virtues that he associates with this figure. What has emerged is a consistent image of the model leader as one who wins the willing obedience of his followers through displaying a selfless devotion to cultivating their material and ethical prosperity. Gray and others have shown how Xenophon advocates such leadership throughout the many contexts that his works inhabit, from the expected political- military realm to such unlikely venues as the Greek wife managing domestic slaves or a groom tending his master’s horse. The purpose of the present volume, which grew out of a panel on the same theme at the ,-.4 meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago, is to build on Gray’s foundation and advance research on Xenophontic leadership beyond her definitional project. The six papers here represent a cross-section of approaches grounded in the close reading of di5erent areas of Xenophon’s corpus. Topics addressed include how the author understood ‘bad’ historical leaders (Pownall) and the degree of nuance that he allowed in their depiction (Tamiolaki); neglected dimensions of Xenophon’s leadership model, in particular piety (Flower) and practices of honouring (Keim); and historical questions pertaining to the exercise of leadership over the Cyreans, whether seeking clarity about the army’s more shadowy sub-commanders (Huitink and Rood) or the ii Richard Fernando Buxton influence of its historical novelty as a mercenary force on Xenophon’s leadership theory (Buxton). In the spirit of Gray’s monograph, the collection’s papers range freely across Xenophon’s output, with several tackling his entire oeuvre (Flower, Keim) and others focusing on particular Socratic (Tamiolaki for the Memorabilia ) or historiographic works (Buxton, Huitink and Rood for the Anabasis ; Pownall for the Hellenica ). Readers will note that multiple authors often treat the same figures and passages, for example the polyvalent Jason of Pherae (Buxton, Flower, Keim, Pownall) or the performative role of sacrifice in the leader’s establishment of his authority (Flower, Keim, Pownall). The complementary and conflicting readings on o5er suggest the richness of Xenophon’s treatment of leadership and historical leaders: the same scene can impart multiple and mutually reinforcing lessons about successful management, or serve to add nuance to the author’s presentation of his theory’s most prestigious exemplars. John Dillery, author of Xenophon and the History of His Times (London and New York .CCD), a fundamental contribution to the study of Xenophon’s political-didactic aims and methods, concludes the collection with a response to the six papers. Dillery is ideally suited both to evaluate the merits and shortcomings of new work on leadership in Xenophon, and to synthesise and expand the most important themes suggested by the authors. It is the editor’s hope that these papers, taken both individually and as counterpoints to one another, will stimulate further rewarding work on an area of Xenophon’s enquiry that the author himself famously deemed ἀξιολογώτατον (HG D...4). R.F.B. Colorado College September, ,-.E ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS RICHARD FERNANDO BUXTON received his PhD from the University of Washington and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colorado College. He is particularly interested in the depiction of stasis in Classical Greek historians. He has published on Xenophon, Herodotus , and Athenian coinage. JOHN DILLERY is a Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. He has written widely on Greek historiography, especially Xenophon, Herodotus, and Hellenistic histori- ography. He is the author most recently of Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho, with an Afterword on Demetrius the Chronographer (Ann Arbor 2345). MICHAEL A. FLOWER is Professor of Classics at Princeton University. His research interests are in Greek history, historiography, and religion. He is the author of Theopompus of Chios: History and Rhetoric in the Fourth Century BC (Oxford 499:), Herodotus: Histories, Book IX (with John Marincola, Cambridge 2332), The Seer in Ancient Greece (Berkeley 233;), Xenophon’s Anabasis or The Expedition of Cyrus (Oxford 2342), and co-editor (with Mark Toher) of Georgica: Greek Studies in Honour of George Cawkwell (London 4994). He has also written a series of articles on Spartan society. Most recently, he has edited the Cambridge Companion to Xenophon (Cambridge, forthcoming 234<). LUUK HUITINK studied in Amsterdam and Oxford, where he gained his PhD. Having worked as the Leventis Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, he is currently iv About the Contributors a post-doctoral research associate at the ERC Project ‘Ancient Narrative’ at the University of Heidelberg, where he is preparing a monograph on the ancient readerly imagination. He is the author of several articles on linguistic and narratological topics in Greek literature. He is a co- author of the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (Cambridge, forthcoming) and is preparing a commentary on Xenophon’s Anabasis III and IV together with Tim Rood (Cambridge, forthcoming). BENJAMIN KEIM received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently Assistant Professor of Classics at Pomona College. His research explores the nature of honour and its negotiation by individuals and their communities throughout the ancient Greek world. His current project, City of Honour: The Politics of Honour in Democratic Athens , examines the institutional and ideological evolution of τιµή within Classical Athenian democracy. FRANCES POWNALL (Professor, University of Alberta) is the author of Lessons From the Past: The Moral Use of History in Fourth-Century Prose (Ann Arbor 233:), and a number of translations and historical commentaries on important fragmentary Greek historians in Brill’s New Jacoby . She has published widely on Greek history and historiography of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. TIM ROOD is Professor of Greek Literature and Dorothea Gray Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (Oxford 499;); The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (London 233:); and American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America from the Mexican War to Iraq (London 2343). He has also written many articles on Greek historiography and its reception. About the Contributors v MELINA TAMIOLAKI (PhD Paris-Sorbonne 233B) is an Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Crete (Department of Philology). She specialises in Greek historiography. Her book, Liberté et esclavage chez les historiens grecs classiques (Paris 2343), a revised version of her disser- tation, won the Zappas Award of the Association des Etudes Grecques de Paris in 2344. She has published some thirty articles and has also edited two collections: Thucydides Between History