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Overview
To accomplish this aim, he uses reception study, philological and historical criticism, and an intertextual and structural analysis of the narrative. Engaging the fictional and the political in a single reading, he explains how the form of the work allowed Xenophon to transcend the limitations of historical writing, although in the end the historian's passion for truth forced him to subvert the work in a controversial epilogue.
Originally published in 1989.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691606668 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #970 |
| Pages: | 322 |
| Sales rank: | 693,097 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Xenophon's Imperial Fiction
On the Education of Cyrus
By James Tatum
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06757-5
CHAPTER 1
The Classic as Footnote
No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations, and of kings, sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them.
Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (Milton)
Our conception of what constitutes Greek or Latin literature may be no narrower than that held in any earlier time. It is surely as particular. Nothing reveals more clearly the arbitrary nature of our notions of classicism and the classic than books that are classics in an ironic sense: works of great age that have survived, only not to be read. At present the Cyropaedia is just such a book: a footnote to literary history, in a literal as well as a figurative sense. If it were not for footnotes, today's reader of Tristram Shandy might never smile at an account of Mr. Shandy's attempt to undertake his son's education. Tristram says that his father sat down to write a Tristra-paideia, an Education of Tristram. His aim was to save his son from being taught by his mother, by his nurse, and by women generally. By collecting his scattered thoughts and notions, he hoped to bind them together into a paternal institute for the government of his son's childhood and adolescence.
Mr. Shandy imitated Xenophon scrupulously. He worked with caution and diligence, scrutinizing every line he wrote. The result was that after three years of indefatigable labor he had completed scarcely half the project he had envisioned. And while this great work was in progress, so was young Tristram:
The misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was rendered entirely useless — every day a page or two became of no consequence. (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 5.16)
So much for Tristram's sad education. Sterne writes in a grand tradition of learned wit — Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Anatomy of Melancholy, the Satyricon. But the joke is more than a scholarly burlesque of the classics. By the time the fifth volume of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1761, the Cyropaedia was also becoming, page by page, a classic of no consequence. Sterne was inspired to write his chapter on the Tristra-paideia by what was actually happening to the Cyropaedia itself. During the second half of the eighteenth century the Cyropaedia ceased to be regarded as literature of any consequence. There were some exceptions to this general trend. David Hume admired the Cyropaedia for its elegance and was unconcerned that it was "altogether a romance." But Cyrus and his education offended the greatest historian of the century, and his judgment was influential: "The Cyropaedia is vague and languid: the Anabasis circumstantial and animated. Such is the eternal difference between fiction and truth." It is appropriate that Gibbon rendered his verdict in a footnote.
1
There are several ways to turn Gibbon's footnote back into something more substantial. The first course has already been charted by historians. They have never mistaken the Cyropaedia for history, but neither have they neglected the important role it once played in intellectual and political life. If Gibbon found it vague and languid, for example, this opinion did not prevent him from using The Education of Cyrus for all it was worth in an essay in French on the Medes. There he treats Xenophon respectfully, but as a philosophe rather than an historien. Gibbon had ample reason to be so liberal.
There is an anecdote in Plutarch about Demetrius of Phaleron, the librarian of Alexandria: he advised King Ptolemy to read as many books as he could about kingship and leadership, because they contained wisdom that the friends of a king would not dare give him face to face. If Ptolemy followed this advice, he would have been an early beneficiary of a development in Greek literature that was to have important consequences for the political and philosophical history of the west. The fourth-century Greek world saw a proliferation of Utopias, and an idealization of civilizations that actually existed: in Greece there was Sparta, and in the east there was Persia. And there were ideal monarchs: the nameless philosopher kings of Plato, and such great leaders of past or present history as Cyrus the Great, Philip of Macedon, and Alexander.
Xenophon's fellow Athenian Isocrates stands at the beginning of this literature, with his logos symbouleutikos, or advisory discourse for monarchs. His Nicocles legislates for monarchs, and his prose encomium Evagoras enumerates the virtues of an exemplary king of Crete, in chronological order. In intention, if not in literary form, the Cyropaedia is linked to such developments. The tradition can be traced through Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana to the end of classical antiquity, extending to Eusebius' Life of Oiigen and the Byzantine courtier Cecaumenos' Strategicon. The Cyropaedia was revived in the western Renaissance, as soon as classical texts were available to the tutors of princes. Plato's Republic is now the most familiar example of this new direction in fourth-century Greek literature, but Machiavelli and many others concerned with the education of their own princes thought just as highly of Xenophon and the Cyropaedia. Machiavelli in fact cites Xenophon more often than he does Plato. The first Latin translations by the humanists Poggio (1440) and Filelfo (1476) reflect the desire of many in the Renaissance to aim for much the same kind of government and education that Xenophon had described two millennia before. With a characteristic desire to link their present world with that past one, they saw Xenophon as they saw themselves. (Illustration i.) The acme of his influence was in the sixteenth century, which began with a whole generation of mirrors for princes provided by Machiavelli (1513), Erasmus and More (1516), Elyot (1531), and Budé (1540), and ended with the Cyropaedia's most vigorous apologist of all in the Renaissance, Sir Philip Sidney.
This preference for monarchy and for literature of advice about how it could best be achieved reflected developments in the actual political experience of classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Monarchy was not a theme new to Greek literature. Herodotus reports a speech by the Persian Otanes, who argues that democracy is much preferable to monarchy, because one man is not liable to give an account of his actions, even when they are irresponsible. Otanes does not prevail; Darius becomes king, as he had intended to be from the first. When Isocrates, Plato, and Xenophon turned away from democracy, they followed a general tendency in the culture of the fourth century and later to look for the single great ruler. They wanted to influence men of power, and frequently they did. Plato's seventh letter is the most famous account of the difficulty of finding an ideal ruler; not even he was able to reform Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, whom he tried to instruct in person. It is the classic story of the right teacher and the wrong prince.
However sharp a departure it might seem from the democratic ideals of fifth-century Greek literature, the discovery of the value of writing for princes, real or imagined, was not unique to the Greeks or their successors in the Renaissance. The wisdom literature of the Old and Middle Kingdoms of ancient Egypt anticipated this Hellenic development by one and a half millennia. King Amenemhet 1 (ca. 1990) instructed his son Sesostris 1 to "trust no brother, trust no friend," a lesson recorded by the misanthropic scribe Akhtoy. Ferdowsi's Book of Kings (Shahnameh), the Turkish Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadsu Bilig) by the central Asian poet Yusuf Khass Hajib (1069), and the Iranian mirror for princes (the Gabus Nama) by Kai K'us 'Bn Iskandar (1082), are each the beginning of a major literary tradition under Islam. Xenophon's own work could have been influenced by an ancient Iranian tradition of teaching on kingship, but any such sources he may have had are lost; their traces are accessible (if at all) only through intermediary works like the Shahnameh.
Western European writers in and after the Renaissance thought that their own work would have been impossible without the example of Xenophon and other ancient models. And it is true that Elyot and others go to some pains to point out how their advice to princes revives classical wisdom. The best of these courtiers do this not only by direct literary imitation and citation, but by an assimilation of classical learning that goes far beyond the means of any index or concordance to measure. Anyone who knows the Cyropaedia will be astonished to see how thoroughly Machiavelli has mastered Xenophon's text and expressed much of its essence in far briefer scope, with so much else besides.
Yet it is also worth realizing that a mirror for princes could be written without any reference at all to classical antiquity. During the Carolingian era, the princess Dhuoda wrote a Manual Addressed to Her Son William (841–843) without Xenophon or Plato, but with a great deal of St. Jerome and the Church fathers. The point is that we should not conceive of Xenophon's work too narrowly, as a project that could only have been invented by Greeks in a particular time and place. Mirrors for princes and other kinds of Utopian literature regularly appeared wherever there was a monarch to instruct, or to please.
In these ways the Cyropaedia figures as an important document in the history of western political theory and education. 17 The historian of Renaissance and modern Europe has as much claim to its Latin and vernacular translations as the ancient historian has to its Greek. Xenophon provided humanists with a crucial text for princes and their tutors, just as he already had instructed the dynasts of ancient Greece and Rome.
2
There is another way to recover The Education of Cyrus, and it does not avoid the problematic opposition of history and fiction that Gibbon discerned. On the contrary, to turn this footnote to the classics into a recognizable literary text, it should first be understood that the opposition of history and fiction that Gibbon speaks of is not original to him or his followers. This view was first articulated by Cicero, and the opposition was not invidious. Xenophon portrayed Cyrus, he says, not in accord with historical truth, but as a model of a just ruler. Because of the prestige of Cicero, this opinion has exerted great influence. Wrenched from its original context in a long letter to his brother Quintus, Cicero's testimony can also be most misleading. For Gibbon, in disparaging the fictions of the Cyropaedia, dismissed the very thing many readers before him had embraced. Cicero valued The Education of Cyrus precisely because it was fiction that served a highly political purpose.
For Cicero's often-quoted invocation of Cyrus is no passing allusion. The Cyropaedia inspired both the didacticism and the heavenly length of Ad Quintum Fratrem 1.1. His reading of Xenophon prompted him to turn a letter to his brother Quintus into a Quintopaedia, an education in the art of being a proconsul. Cicero spent much of his career near supreme power, gaining it for himself only once, as consul in 63; even then, he had the great good luck to have Catiline for an enemy. He was often tempted to offer advice to Romans far more illustrious than his brother, and ones far more powerful; among others whom he sought to cultivate were Pompey and Julius Caesar. Even for Cicero the present enterprise was bold. The office of proconsul was one Quintus had already held for two years, and one Cicero himself would not hold until ten years later. Then he would discover how difficult it could be to emulate the Cyropaedia when one must confront political realities. Nonetheless, he has a great deal of advice to offer, as he always does.
Quintus, his brother says, has the virtues of Cyrus. Cicero draws this flattering parallel so that he can advance his one criticism without offense. Quintus has a short temper and needs to learn how to control it. The way to do this is to realize that he is engaged in an office which is essentially a theatrical enterprise. He is a Roman proconsul playing before an audience of Greeks. They may be provincials in Cilicia, but they are Greeks all the same:
Since therefore you have been assigned a theater such as this, crowded with such multitudes, so ample in its grandeur, so subtle in its criticism, and by nature possessed of such an echo that its demonstrations of feeling and ejaculations reach Rome itself, for that reason I implore you, struggle and strive with all your might, not merely to prove yourself to have been worthy of the task allotted to you, but also to prove that by the excellence of your administration you have surpassed all that has ever been achieved in Asia. (42)
The metaphor of theater is a much-used characterization of Roman political life. The dying Augustus asked for a review of his performance in the mime of life (mimus vitae), and exited like an actor from the comic stage — in Greek.
Since you have been well pleased, give me your applause, And all depart in high spirits, well pleased. (Suetonius, Augustus, 94)
Quintus never played a role as complex as Octavian's metamorphosis into Augustus, but he was in the same profession. Accordingly, Cicero ends his letter by returning to this familiar metaphor for a successful political career:
I end my letter by imploring and urging you that — after the fashion of good poets and hard-working actors — you should take particular pains with the last phase and finale of your office and employment, so that this third year of your rule may, like the third act of a play, be recognized as having been the most highly finished and brilliantly staged of the three. You will do this most easily if you imagine that I, the one man whose approbation you have desired above that of the whole world, am always at your side, taking part in everything you say or do. (46)
The peroration is characteristically felicitous. In effect Cicero offers to serve as both director and critic of Quintus' performance on that provincial stage.
To conceive of a political office as a dramatic role was natural for Cicero, and not for him alone. Serving in a public office and playing a role in the theater are related professions, because neither is a spontaneous expression of a person's true self. Suetonius' anecdote about the exit of Augustus carries with it the implication that his success depended on an ability to subsume the private person within the public roles of Octavian and Augustus. Such role-playing is an instinctive part of political life. Since ambitious political leaders think they are making history rather than writing it, and since indeed they often are, they will ask of a book like the Cyropaedia not that it be true to history, but that it be useful for their future projects. Thus Cicero is not only happy to acknowledge Xenophon's fictions; his real aim is to encourage his brother to create his own fictions in turn. Political power is in some fundamental sense achieved by creating and living Active roles. Quintus' term in the office of proconsul was a role to be played, with the third year of office a final act in a drama before an audience. Cyrus in the Cyropaedia is a Active leader whose life is meant to be imitated and adapted to the needs of present political life, and not only in Rome.
So long as they were close enough to princes and their power to influence them, or so long as they thought they were, Xenophon's readers could use the Cyropaedia for just this kind of political education. They could learn the arts of his ideal ruler Cyrus and put them to their own use by attempting to imitate him. Like Cicero, they read the Cyropaedia for many of the same reasons that moved Xenophon to write it.
The precise way these monarchs learned from Cyrus's example is beyond my ability to measure. It has been suggested that Alexander's later career reflects as much familiarity with the Cyropaedia as with the Anabasis. That the tutors and courtiers of later princes had a high regard for Xenophon is beyond doubt. They taught his Greek, they translated him, and they hoped he would make the monarch they served the better for knowing him. Of course there were mixed results. Roger Ascham seems to have done very well by the young Elizabeth, but the Portuguese humanist Vasque de Lucene did not teach Charles the Bold of Burgundy to be less téméraire. James 1 of England knew the Greek Cyropaedia, though he was unmoved by the pathetic story of the castration of Prince Gadatas, ordinarily regarded as one of the book's more poignant episodes; he imitated the form of Xenophon's work in his own manual on kingship, the Basilikon Down.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Xenophon's Imperial Fiction by James Tatum. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. ix
- ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. xi
- PREFACE, pg. xiii
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xvii
- Chapter One. The Classic as Footnote, pg. 3
- Chapter Two. The Rise of a Novel, pg. 36
- Chapter Three. The Curious Return of Cambyses, pg. 75
- Chapter Four. The Grandson of Astyages, pg. 97
- Chapter Five. The Envy of Uncle Cyaxares, pg. 115
- Chapter Six. Dialectical Imperialism: Tigranes and the Sophist of Armenia, pg. 134
- Chapter Seven. In the Face of the Enemy: A Meeting with Croesus of Lydia, pg. 146
- Chapter Eight. The Uses of Eros and the Hero, pg. 163
- Chapter Nine. The Economy of Empire, pg. 189
- Chapter Ten. Revision, pg. 215
- NOTES, pg. 243
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 277
- INDEX, pg. 289
- INDEX LOCORUM, pg. 295