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Updated: June 26, 2025
Plato's "Timaeus," the first of the series, was written after the death of Socrates and the enslavement of the author's country. In this are described the institutions of the Island of Atlantis, the writer's ideal of a perfect commonwealth. Xenophon, in his "Cyropaedia," has also depicted an imaginary political society by overlaying with fiction historical traditions.
Yes, the "Cyropaedia" is a noble book, about a noble personage.
"Virtues and vices I will frame, and the rewards of them shall suite to both"; for it is on the moral example of poetic justice that Barclay depends. The models of virtue will be followed. Consequently he has a high opinion of the Cyropaedia of Xenophon, the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney, and other such poems, as "affording many exquisite Types of Perfection for both the Sexes."
Above all, his old friend Thomas of Sarzana had been made Pope, and had lent a mighty impulse to letters; had accumulated 5000 MSS. in the library of the Vatican, and had set Poggio to translate Diodorus Siculus and Xenophon's Cyropaedia, Laurentius Valla to translate Herodotus and Thucydides, Theodore Gaza, Theophrastus; George of Trebizond, Eusebius, and certain treatises of Plato, etc. etc.
The CYROPAEDIA, one of the most pleasing and popular of his works, professes to be a history of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian monarchy, but is in reality a kind of political romance, and possesses no authority whatever as an historical work.
The Cyropaedia of Xenophon, and the Theagines and Cariclea of Heliodorus are poems, although written in prose, because they feign notable images of virtues and vices, "although indeed the Senate of Poets hath chosen verse as their fittest rayment."
But his "Cyropaedia," in which the history of Cyrus is the subject, although still used as a classic in colleges for the beauty of its style, has no value as a history, since the author merely adopted the current stories of his hero without sufficient investigation. Xenophon wrote a variety of treatises and dialogues, but his "Memorabilia" of Socrates is the most valuable.
For by this stage the reason of the pupils would have been so far matured that they might pass from the Physical to the Moral Sciences. The Cyropaedia of XENOPHON had been twice translated into English, the second translation being by Philemon Holland; but Lowndes mentions no translation yet of the Memorabilia.
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