tively high intellect and culture, his transparent honour,
his religious simplicity, combined with great skill in
managing men and a genuine gift for improvising tactics
to meet an emergency, enabled him to perform an
exploit which many an abler soldier might have at-
tempted in vain. He was not ultimately successful as a
cofidottiere. His Ten Thousand, proud as he is of their
achievements afterwards, must have contained some of
the roughest dare-devils in Greece ; and Xenophon, like
Proxenus, treated them too much like gentlemen. Old
Clearchus, knout in hand and curse on lips, never lighten-
ing from his gloom except when there was killing about,
Was the real man to manage them permanently.
For Xenophon the ' Anabasis ' was a glory and a faux
pas. He found a halo of romance about his head, and
his occupation gone. He remembered that Socrates had
never liked the expedition ; that the god at Delphi had
not been fairly consulted ; and he consoled himself with
the reflection that if he had been more pushing he would
RESULTS OF THE ANABASIS 317
have been more prosperous. His family soothsayer had
told him so. The expedition had left in him some half-
confessed feeling that he was an dpxi'Ko^ dvijp, a man
born to command. He wrote a long romance, the
Cyropcsdciay or training of Cyrus, about this ideal dp")(iKo<i
dvT]p, in which a slight substratum of the history of Cyrus
the Great was joined with traits drawn from the younger
Cyrus and from Xenophon's own conception of what he
would like to be. That was later. At this time he more
than once had dreams of founding a colony in Asia, and
being a philosophic soldier-king. Failing that, he wanted
to have a castle or two near the Hellespont, and act as an
independent champion of Hellas against the barbarian.
But nobody else wished it, and Xenophon would not
push or intrigue. He drifted. He could not return to
Athens, which was then engaged in putting his master
to death, and would probably meet him with a charge
of high treason. Besides, there were no adventures for-
ward in Athens ; they were all in Asia. Meanwhile the
Knight-Errant of Hellas was in the position of a fili-
buster at the head of some eight thousand ruffians under
no particular allegiance. Some of them, he found, were
discussing the price of his assassination with the Harmost
Thibron, who naturally was disinclined to tolerate an
independent Athenian in possession of such great and
ambiguous powers. The born Ruler might have done
otherwise. Xenophon handed over his army and took
service under the Spartans, then allies of Athens, against
Persia.
It was weary work being bandied from ' harmost ' to
' harmost,' never trusted in any position of real power.
However, he married happily, had good friends in the
Chersonnese, and tried to be resigned. At length in
22
3i8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
396 came a general of a better sort, the Spartan king
Agesilaus, commissioned to wage a more decisive war
against Artaxerxes. Xenophon joined his staff, and the
two became warm friends. But fortune was capricious.
In 395 Athens made an alliance with Artaxerxes ; in 394
she declared war on Sparta, and condemned Xenophon
for * Laconism,' an offence like the old ' Medism/ involv-
ing banishment and confiscation of goods. If Xenophon
had drifted before, he had now no choice. He formally
entered the Spartan service, returned to Greece with
Agesilaus, and was actually with him, though perhaps as
a non-combatant, when he defeated the Thebo-Athenian
alliance at Coronea.
Xenophon was now barely forty-one, but his active
life was over. The Spartans gave him an estate at
Skillus, near Elis, and perhaps employed him as their
political agent. He spent the next twenty years in
retirement, a cultured country gentleman ; writing a
good deal, hunting zealously, and training his two
brilliant sons, Gryllus and Diodorus — the ' Dioscuri,' as
they were called — to be like their father, patterns of the
chivalry of the day. The main object of Xenophon's
later life was probably to get the sentence of banishment
removed, and save these sons from growing up without
a country. He was successful at last. When Athens re-
joined the Spartan alliaaice the ' Laconist ' ceased to be a
traitor, and his sons were admitted into his old regiment ;
and when Gryllus fell at Mantinea,all Greece poured poems
and epitaphs upon him. At that time Xenophon was no
longer in the Spartan service. He had been expelled from
Skillus by an Elean rising in 370, and fled to spend the
rest of his life in the safe neutrality of Corinth.
Of the literary fruits of his retirement, the most im-
RETIREMENT AND LITERARY WORK 319
portant and the best written is undoubtedly his record
of the Anabasis. It also seems to be one of the earliest,
though some passages — such as v, 3. 9, where he refers
to his past employments at Skillus — have been added
much later. Autobiographical writing was almost un-
known at the time; but the publication was partly forced
on Xenophon by the misrepresentations of his action
current in Athens, and perhaps especially by the record
of the expedition already published by Sophainetus of
Stymphalus. We read in Xenophon that Sophainetus
was the oldest of the officers ; that he had once almost
refused to obey Xenophon's command to cross a certain
dangerous gully ; that he was fined ten minae for some
failure in duty.^ That is Xenophon's account of him.
No doubt his account of Xenophon required answering.
But why did Xenophon publish his book under an as-
sumed name, and refer to it himself in the Hellenica as
the work of ' Themistogenes of Syracuse ' ? It is not a
serious attempt at disguise. The whole style of writing
shows that the ' Xenophon of Athens,' referred to in
the third person, is really the writer of the book. The
explanation suggests itself, that the ' pseudonymity ' was a
technical precaution against possible avKo^avTia dictated
by Xenophon's legal position. He was ariyio^ — an outr
lawed exile. He was forbidden \e<yetv koL ypd(f>eLv, 'to
speak or write,' in the legal sense of the words, in Attica.
He could hold no property. What was the position of a
book written by such a man ? Was it liable to be burnt
Hke those of Protagoras ? Or could the bookseller be
proceeded against ? It may well have been prudent,
for the sake of formal legality, to have the book passing
under some safer name.
^ Anad. v. 3. I, 8. I ; vi. 5. 13.
320 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
The style of the Anabasis is not very skilful, and the
narrative is sometimes languid where the actual events
are stirring. Still, on the whole, one feels with Gibbon
that " this pleasing work is original and authentic," and
that constitutes an inestimable charm. The details are
most vivid — the officer pulled over the cliff by catching
at the fine cloak of one of the flying Kurds ; the Mossyn-
dwellers exhibiting their fat babies fed on chestnut-meal
to the admiration of the Greeks ; the races at Trebizond
conducted on the principle that ''you could run any-
where " ; the Thynians waking the author up with the
invitation to come out and die like a man, rather than
be roasted in his bed — there are literally hundreds of
such things. Of course Xenophon is sometimes wrong
in his distances and details of fact, and the tendency
to romance which we find in the Cyropcedeia has a slight
but visible effect on the Anabasis. The ornamental
speeches are poor and unconvincing. Still, on the
whole, it is a fresh, frank work in which the writer at
least succeeds in not spoiling a most thrilling story.
To touch briefly on his other works. When Socrates
was attacked and misunderstood, when Plato and the
other Socratics defended him, Xenophon, too, felt called
upon to write his Memoirs of Socrates. His remarkable
memory stood him in good stead. He gives a Socrates
whom his average contemporary would have recognised
as true to life. Plato, fired by his own speculative ideas,
had inevitably altered Socrates. Xenophon's ideas were
a smaller and more docile body : he seldom misrepre-
sents except where he misunderstood. In the later
editions of the Memorabilia he inserts a detailed refuta-
tion of the charges made by ' the Accuser,' as he calls
Polycrates, against Socrates's memory ; and he seems
XENOPHON'S SOCRATIC WRITINGS 321
to allow his own imagination more play. When Plato
wrote the Apologv, Xenophon found some gaps which
it did not fill. He made inquiries, and published a
little note of his own On the Apology of Socrates>
When Plato wrote the Symposiuui, Xenophon was not
entirely satisfied with the imaginative impression left
by that stupendous masterpiece. He corrected it by
a Symposium of his own, equally imaginary — for he
was a child when the supposed banquet took place —
but far more matter-of-fact, an entertaining work of
high antiquarian value.
Another appendix to Xenophon's Socratic writings,
the Oikonomikos, where Socrates gives advice about the
management of a household and the duties of husband
and wife, makes a certain special appeal to modern sym-
pathies. The wife is charming — rather like Thackeray's
heroines, though more capable of education — and the
little dialogue, taken together with the corresponding
parts of the Memorabilia and Cyropcedeia, forms almost
the only instance in this period of Attic thought of the
modern ' bourgeois ' ideal of good ordinary women and
commonplace happy marriages. Antiphon the sophist,
who seems at first sight to write in the same spirit, is
really more consciously philosophical.
The Hiei'o is a non-Socratic dialogue on government
between the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides. The
Agesildus is an eulogy on Xenophon's royal friend, made
up largely of fragments of the Hellenica, and showing a
certain Isocratean tendency in language.
Xenophon's longest work, the He/lenica, falls into two
parts, separated by date and by style. Books I. and II.
are obviously a continuation of Thucydides to the end of
^ On its genuineness, see Schanz, Introduction to Plato's Apology.
322 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
the Peloponnesiaii War. Books III.-VII. contain the
annals of Greece to the battle of Mantinea, ending with
the sentence : " So far I have written ; what came after
will perhaps be another's study!' The first part, though
far below Thucydides in accuracy, in grasp, in unity of
view, and in style, is noticeably above the rest of the
work. The Hellenica, though often bright and clear in
detail, forms a weak history. Outside his personal ex-
perience, Xenophon is at sea. The chronology is faulty;
there is little understanding of the series of events as a
whole ; there is no appreciation of Epaminondas. The
fact that the history is the work of an able man with
large experience and exceptional opportunities for getting
information, helps us to appreciate the extraordinary
genius of Thucydides.
We possess a tract on the Constitution of LacedcBinon^
an essay on Athenian Finances, a Manual for a Cavalry
Commander, and another for a Cavalry Private, and a
tract on Hunting with Hounds, bearing the name of
Xenophon. The last is suspected on grounds of style,
but may be a youthful work. The genuineness of the
Finances depends partly upon chronological questions
not yet definitely settled : it is an interesting book, and
seems to be written in support of the peace policy
of Eubulus. The cavalry manuals do not raise one's
opinions of Greek military discipline, and are less
systematic than the Manual for Resisting a Siege by
Xenophon's Arcadian contemporary, ^neas Tacticus.
The Cyropcedeia is not a historical romance ; if it were,
Xenophon would be one of the great originators of
literary forms : it is a treatment of the Ideal Ruler and
the Best Form of Government, in the shape of a history
^ For The Constitution of Athens, see above, p. 167.
HELLENICA AND MINOR WORKS 323
of Cyrus the Great, in which truth is subordinated to
edification.^ The form is one followed by certain of the
Sophists. Xenophon perhaps took it from Prodicus
in preference to the usual Socratic expedient of an
imaginary dialogue. The work was greatly admired in
antiquity and in the last century. The style is more
finished than in any of Xenophon's other works. The
Oriental colour is well kept up. The incidents contain
masses of striking tragic material, which only fail to be
effective because modern taste insists on more working
up than Xenophon will consent to give. The political
ideal which forms the main object of the book, is happily
described by Croiset as " a Versailles of Louis XIV. revised
and corrected by Fenelon." It was actually intended —
if we may trust the authority of the Latin grammarian,
Aulus Gellius — as a counterblast to Plato's Republic !
Xenophon was an amateur in literature, as he was in
war, in history, in philosophy, in politics, in field-sports.
He was susceptible to every influence which did not
morally offend him. His style is simple, but unevenly
so. He sometimes indulges in a little fine writing ; the
eulogy on Agesilaus tries to avoid hiatus, and shows
the influence of Isocrates ; the speeches in his histories,
and the whole conception of the Hellenica, show the in-
fluence of Thucydides. The influence of Plato leads
Xenophon into a system of imitation and correction which
is almost absurd. His language has the same receptivity.
It shows that colloquial and democratic absence of
exclusiveness which excited the contempt of the Old
Oligarch ; ^ it is affected by old - fashioned country
1 Contrast, e.g., the historical account of Cyrus's death in Hdt. i. 214, and the
romantic one in Cyrop. viii. 7.
* Rep. Ath. 2, 8.
324 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
idioms, by the lingua franca of the soldiers in Asia,
perhaps by long residence in foreign countries — though
Doricisms are conspicuous by their absence. If, in spite
of this, Xenophon became in Roman times a model of
'Atticism,' it is due. to his ancient simplicity and ease, his
inaffectata jucmtditas. He is Attic in the sense that he
has no bombast, and does not strive after effect, and that
he can speak interestingly on many subjects * without
raising his voice.'
XVI
THE 'ORATORS' -
General Introduction
Most students of Greek literature, however sensitive to
the transcendent value of the poets and historians, find a
difficulty in admiring or reading Lysias, Isocrates, and
Isceus. The disappointment is partly justified ; Greek
orators are not so much to the world as Greek poets are.
But it is partly the result of a misunderstanding. We
expect to find what we call * oratory ' in them, to declaim
them as we would Burke and Grattan and Bossuet ; and we
discover that, with a few exceptions, the thing cannot be
done. Demosthenes indeed is overpoweringly eloquent,
and when he disappoints the average modern, it is merely
because the modern likes more flamboyance and gush,
and cannot take points quickly enough. But many a
man must rise in despair from the earlier orators, wonder-
ing what art or charm it can be that has preserved for two
thousand years Lysias Against the Corn-Dealers or Isaeus
On the Estate of Cleonymus.
The truth is that we look upon these writers as orators
because we are at the mercy of our tradition. Our tradi-
tion comes partly from the Romans, who based all their
culture on oratory ; partly from the style-worship of the
late Greek schools. The typical school critic is Diony-
sius of Halicarnassus ; he was a professional teacher of
32s
326 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
rhetoric in Cicero's time, a man of some genius and
much enthusiasm, but with no interest in anything but
rhetorical technique. He criticises Thucydides the his-
torian, Plato the philosopher, Isocrates the publicist,
Isaeus the acute lawyer, Lysias the work-a-day persuader
of juries, all from practically the same stand-point— that
of a man who had all his life studied style and taught
style, who had written twenty volumes of history with a
view to nothing but style. In his own province he is an
excellent critic. He sees things which we do not see,
and he feels more strongly than we feel. He speaks
with genuine hatred of the Asiatic or late and florid style,
the ' foreign harlot ' who has crept into the place of the
true and simple Attic. Our tradition has thus neglected
historians, playwrights, philosophers, men of science, and
clung to the men who wrote in speech-form ; and these
last, whatever the aim and substance of their writing, are
all judged as technical orators.
The importance to us of the 'orators' lies in three
things. First, they illustrate the gradual building up of a
normal and permanent prose style. The earliest artists
in prose had been over-ornate ; Gorgias too poetical,
Antiphon too formal and austere, Thucydides too difficult.
Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (p. 162) probably gave the
necessary correction to this set of errors so far as speak-
ing went. His style was ' medium ' between the pomp of
Gorgias and the colloquialness of ordinary speech. His
terse periods and prose rhythms pleased Aristotle. But
he was a pleader, not a writer. The next step appears in
Lysias. He had an enormous practice as a writer of
speeches under the Restored Democracy, and, without
much eloquence or profound knowledge of the law, a
reputation for almost always winning his cases. His
VALUE OF THE 'ORATORS' 327
style is that of the plain clear-headed man, who tells his
story and draws his deductions so honestly, that his
adversary's version is sure to seem artificial and knavish.
Within his limits Lysias is a perfect stylist ; but he is a
man of little imaginative range, and he addresses a jury.
He does not develop a normal literary prose. Is^US, a
lawyer of great knowledge and a powerful arguer, is still
further from this end. Isocrates achieves it. The essay-
writing of his school — men broadly trained in letters,
philosophy, and history, and accustomed to deal with
large questions in a liberal, pan-Hellenic spirit — forms in
one sense the final perfection of ancient prose, in another
the ruin of what was most characteristically Attic or
indeed Hellenic. It is smooth, self-restrained, correct,
euphonious, impersonal. It is the first Greek prose that
is capable of being tedious. It has lasted on from that
day to this, and is the basis of prose style in Latin and
in modern languages. It has sacrificed the characteristic
charms of Greek expression, the individuality, the close
relation between thought and language, the naturalness
of mind which sees every fact naked and states every
thought in its lowest terms. Isocrates's influence was
paramount in all belles lettres ; scientific work and oratory
proper went on their way little affected by him.
Secondly, the orators have great historical value.
They all come from Athens, and all lived in the century
between 420 and 320 B.C. Other periods and towns were
either lacking in the combination of culture and freedom
necessary to produce political oratory, or else, as hap-
pened with Syracuse, they have been neglected by our
tradition. The ^Attic orators are our chief ' source '
for Attic law, and they introduce us to the police-
court population of a great city — the lawyers, the
328 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
judges, the ne'er-do-weels, the swindlers, and the 'syko-
phantai/ or vexatious accusers trying to win blackmail
or political capital by discovering decent people's pecca-
dilloes. The Athenian records are less nauseous than
most, owing to the mildness of the law and the com-
parative absence of atrocious crime. The most painful
feature is the racking of slave-witnesses ; though even
here extreme cruelty was forbidden, and any injury
done to the slave, temporary or permanent, had to be
paid for. Attic torture would probably have seemed
child's play to the rack-masters of Rome and modern
Europe. Happily also the owners seem more often than
not to refuse to allow examination of this sort, even to
the prejudice of their causes. All kinds of argumentative
points are made in connection with the worth or worth-
lessness of such evidence, and the motives of the
master in allowing or refusing it. Perhaps the strangest
is where a litigant demands the torture of a female
slave in order to suggest that his opponent is in love
with her when he refuses.
But the orators have a much broader value than this.
The actual words of Demosthenes, and even of Isocrates,
on a political crisis, form a more definitely first-hand
document than the best literary history. They give us
in a palpable form the actual methods, ideals, political
and moral standards of the early fourth century — or,
rather, they will do so when fully worked over and
understood. There are side-lights on religion, as in
the case (Lysias, vii.) of the man accused of uprooting
a sacred olive stump from his field, and that of
Euxenippus (Hyperides, iii.) and his illegal dream. A
certain hill at Oropus was alleged by some religious
authority to belong to the god Asclepius, and one
HISTORY IN THE 'ORATORS' 329
Euxenippus was commissioned to sleep in a temple
and report his dream. His dream apparently was in
favour of the god. The politician Polyeuctus made a
motion in accordance with it ; but the Assembly over-
ruled the dream, decided that the motion was illegal,
and fined Polyeuctus twenty-live drachmas. In pardon-
able irritation he turned on the dreamer, and prose-
cuted him for reporting to the Assembly "things not
in the public interest."
There are innumerable side-lights on politics, espe-
cially in Lysias as to the attitude of parties after the
revolution of 404. To take one instance, his short
speech Against the Corn-Dealers throws a vivid light
on the economic condition of the time and the influence
of the great guild of wholesale importers. The demo-
cratic leader Anytus was corn-warden of the Piraeus in
the year of scarcity 388. In a praiseworthy attempt to
keep the price down, he had apparently authorised the
retail corn-dealers of the Piraeus to form a ' ring ' against
the importers, and buy the whole stock cheap. The
dealers did so; but 'rings' in corn were expressly
forbidden in Attic law, and the importers took action.
They were too powerful to be defied ; they could at
any time create an artificial famine. And we find the
great democratic advocate making the best of a bad
business by sacrificing the unhappy dealers and trying
to screen Anytus !
Thirdly, it would be affected to deny to Greek oratory
a permanent value on the grounds of beauty. The
PJiilippics^ the Olynthiacs^ and the De Corona have some-
thing of that air of eternal grandeur which only belongs
to the highest imaginative work. Hyperides, -/Eschines,
Andocides are striking writers in their different styles.
OJ'
LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
The average speech of Lysias has a real claim on the
world's attention as a model of what Dionysius calls the
'plain' style of prose — every word exact, every sentence
clear, no display, no exaggeration, no ornament except
the inherent charm and wit of natural Attic. It is not,
of course, a work of art in the same sense as a poem of
Sophocles. Speech-writing was a 'techne' in the sense
that it had rules and a purpose, but its purpose was to
convince a jury, not to be beautiful. We are apt to be
misled by Cicero and the late writers on rhetoric. They
talk in technical language; "This ditrochasus brought
down the house," says Cicero, when probably the house
in question hardly knew what a ditrochaeus was, or even
consciously noticed the rhythm of the sentence. They
tell us of the industry of great men, and how Isocrates
took ten years composing the Panegyricus. This is edify-
ing, but cannot be true ; for the Panegyricus contemplates
a particular political situation, which did not last ten
years.
The tone of the orators themselves is quite different
from that of the rhetoricians, whether late like Dionysius,
or early like Alkidamas and Gorgias. Except in Isocrates,
who, as he repeatedly insists, is a professor and not an
orator, we find the current convention about oratory to
be the same in ancient times as in modern — that a true
speech should be made extempore, and that prepared or
professional oratory is matter for sarcasm. If yEschines
likes to quote an absurd phrase from Demosthenes, it is
no more than a practical politician would do at the pre-
sent day. The points in ancient prose which seem most
artificial to a modern Englishman are connected with
euphony. Ancient literature was written to be read aloud,