The Relay Race of Virtue by William H. F. Altman;

Author:William H. F. Altman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In this light, we are Xenophon’s friends, and he wrote for our children. My father recommended “The Retreat of the Ten Thousand” to me as a boy; I imagined at the time I had something better to read.

Delebecque devotes three chapters to the years in Skillus, and this creates a tripartite division within the middle part of my own. His central chapter locates the composition of Hellenica II in the middle of this middle period (379–78); the two flanking chapters describe respectively an “early middle” (388–379) and a “late middle” period (377–71). What makes this tripartite division useful is that it can be better applied to Xenophon’s “early” period, with which this section will conclude, it being the most complex. Delebecque, by contrast, regards only two works as having been written pre-Skillus: Hellenica I before he left Athens, and Cynegeticus while he was, as it were, “on the road” (394–388); this notion will likewise prove useful. In general, Delebecque’s “early middle” period becomes very busy, and to it he assigns the composition of The Constitution of the Spartans, Anabasis as a unity (excepting only the Skillus passage), and the following among the Socratic writings: the redaction of the Apology of Socrates, Memorabilia I–II, and Oeconomicus I (up to the entrance of Ischomachus). He places the composition of On Horsemanship here as well. Guiding and vitiating his account is an ongoing reliance on the axiom of Literary Rivalry, and he notes without refuting the position of von Arnim with regard to the priority of Xenophon’s Apology.116 An examination of Delebecque’s text should in any case satisfy the reader that anyone who attempts to reconstruct Xenophon’s life on the basis of his writings—and that means anyone who tries to reconstruct his life—will necessarily incur a critic’s contempt, thanks to the curious mixture of informed insight and pure speculation that such a project inevitably entails.117

Despite a huge difference with regard to Symposium—Delebecque places it in Xenophon’s “late” period while I regard it as either “late early” or “early middle”—there is also considerable overlap. Xenophon very probably did compose Hellenica II in Skillus, and if not Anabasis I, it was at least Anabasis II that he did write here. Since I don’t divide Oeconomicus in two—locating the composition of its second part in Athens since it is so conspicuously set there—the whole of it can be assigned to this period on the basis of Xenophon’s contemporaneous agricultural activities. The fact that he was now raising children justifies dating the composition of Memorabilia II to this period, especially on the basis of the immortal 2.2. And the need to educate his sons (and entertain Philesia) connects at the very least the oral origins of Cyropaedia to this happy and tranquil interlude. It is easy to imagine Xenophon, finally possessed of ample leisure, now finally able to indulge his literary pursuits.

But such an image obscures some basic facts. To begin with, Greek warfare was largely a seasonal affair, leaving the writer-warrior ample time for reflection and

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