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Updated: May 3, 2025
The Spartan Agesilaus, who would not allow a portrait of himself to be painted or a statue made, deserves to be quoted as an example quite as much as those who have taken trouble about such representations: for a single pamphlet of Xenophon's in praise of that king has proved much more effective than all the portraits and statues of them all.
We give it as a specimen of the romantic narratives in which Xenophon's history abounds, and on account of the many illustrations of an ancient manners and customs which it contains, leaving it for each reader to decide for himself what weight he will attach to its claims to be regarded as veritable history.
Even his philanthropic labors were regarded as the fulfillment of a duty to the state; and in Xenophon's Memorabilia we see him using every opportunity of impressing able people for political services, of deterring the incompetent, of awakening officials to their sense of their duties, and of giving them help in the administration of their offices.
His chief translations, made in good Elizabethan English, are of Pliny's Natural History, Plutarch's Morals, Suetonius, Xenophon's Cyropædia, and Camden's Britannia. There are passages in the second of these which have hardly been excelled by any later prose translator of the classics. His later years were passed in poverty.
I have at stray hours read Longus's Romance and Xenophon's Ephesiaca; and I mean to go through Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius, in the same way. Longus is prodigiously absurd; but there is often an exquisite prettiness in the style. At the end of his work Macaulay has written: "A most stupid worthless performance, below the lowest trash of an English circulating library."
I ask you, too, in regard to the personal predilection, on which you wrote in a certain introductory chapter in the most gratifying and explicit terms and by which you shew that you were as incapable of being diverted as Xenophon's Hercules by Pleasure not to go against it, but to yield to your affection for me a little more than truth shall justify.
Subsequently he purchased "Xenophon's Memorabilia" because it would afford him assistance in acquiring the Socratic style. He committed to memory, wrote, practised doing the same thing over and over, persevering, overcoming, conquering. He acquired the method so thoroughly as to be expert therein, and practised it with great satisfaction to himself.
To this also is due the fact that when the value of a work has once been recognized and may no longer be concealed or denied, all men vie in praising and honoring it; simply because they are conscious of thereby doing themselves an honor. They act in the spirit of Xenophon's remark: he must be a wise man who knows what is wise.
We must eke out the scientific treatises of Aristotle and Pliny by help of the fragments which remain of the works of such naturalists as Speusippus or Alexander the Myndian; add to the familiar stories of Herodotus the Indian tales of Ctesias and Megasthenes; sit with Athenaeus and his friends at the supper table, gleaning from cook and epicure, listening to the merry idle troop of convivial gentlemen capping verses and spinning yarns; read Xenophon's treatise on Hunting, study the didactic poems, the Cynegetica and Halieutica, of Oppian and of Ovid.
During this interval the dispersed Karduchians had rallied, and reoccupied two or three high peaks, commanding the road from whence it was necessary to drive them. Xenophon's troops stormed successively these three positions, the Karduchians not daring to come to close combat, yet making destructive use of their missiles.
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