Xenophon/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
CONCLUSION.
Some one of the works of Xenophon is usually the first Greek prose book that is put into the hands of the schoolboy; but it is for the sake of his language rather than his matter that Xenophon is read in our schools and colleges, and thus he is read in a fragmentary way, and comparatively few people have anything like a complete knowledge of his writings. It has indeed been too much the fault of classical education in England to think exclusively of the language and style, and to disregard the study of the actual life and ideas of the ancients, as treasured up in their books. But in bringing, as in this little volume, an ancient classical author to the notice of English readers, there is no longer the temptation to rest contented with an admiration of the words; the matter must stand forth, as it were, en deshabille, and the question must be asked, What is this famous author worth for all time, when his sentences have been robbed of that perfection of form which undoubtedly entitled him to be appreciated as an artist of style?
This is the sort of question which we have now to answer about Xenophon. And in the first place, it must be remembered that in regarding an ancient author from a "real" point of view, there is a historical and antiquarian interest in the very imperfection of his ideas. Flint knives and arrow-heads are prized for our museums, not for their excellence, but for their comparative inadequacy to their respective purposes. So, too, the expression by an old writer of very limited and even erroneous thoughts on subjects with regard to which the world is now better instructed, may be interesting to us as a contribution to the history of the mind of man. From examples of this kind we see that
And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns;"
and we learn to know how unequal was the greatness of the ancients. While in the spheres of Art and the Beautiful and Abstract Thought the Greeks are the masters for all modern times, we find what an immense advantage over them has been given to us by the development of the separate sciences.
The study of Xenophon's writings is peculiarly fertile in reflections of this kind. He serves very well as the representative Greek of the fourth century before Christ. He stands forth as the product of Athens, of the teachings of Socrates, of the debates in the Agora, and, generally speaking, of the "Aryan principles of education." The circumstances of his life gave him a wide experience and a sort of cosmopolite point of view. He seems a typical instance of the "sound mind in a sound body." He was endowed with great activity, curiosity, and enlightened intelligence, and he wrote on war, contemporary history, politics, the lives of great men, education, finance, rural and domestic economy, the equestrian art, and the chase. He serves then to us as a measure of ancient Greece in many of the departments of life. And when we read a treatise like the 'Revenues of Athens,' written by a man of his eminence, we see how totally undeveloped in his time must have been the notions of political economy and of foreign politics, as implying a system of different powers in relation to each other. We see the want of the idea of science in his assuming that the silver mines of Laurion were inexhaustible, instead of referring to any mineralogical data on the subject. We see a great contrast to our own notions in his opinion, laid down in the 'Œconomicus,' that agriculture is the easiest of all arts, requiring only the application of common-sense. In the same work we find the indorsement of that degraded conception of the position of the wife in a household, which was one of the weakest points in ancient Greek civilisation. Throughout his histories and military disquisitions we see how comparatively petty and barbarous in their details the most important wars of his day were. No great general had as yet lived; the movement of large masses of troops had not become a science. There was no artillery more formidable than the bow and arrow, or the stone rolled down a hill. And the least consideration convinces us, that the ten thousand Greeks, with their spears and their pæan, would have had no more chance than so many South-sea islanders, and not half so much chance as the Abyssinians of King Theodore, against a single European regiment armed with the breech-loader.
It is difficult at first to realise the differences in external things between the ancient Greeks and ourselves. It is difficult not to forget that Greek society was based on slavery, and that every house in Athens was more or less filled with captives from Asia Minor or Thrace, or elsewhere, whose vernacular language probably the master of the house did not understand. It does not occur to one to remember that such a simple instrument as the stirrup had never been introduced to assist the riders of ancient Greece. But an author like Xenophon going into homely details, and giving us unfaded photographs of daily incidents, fresh as they occurred twenty-two centuries ago, is of the utmost value in enabling us to see these things, and to "restore" in imagination the life of ancient Greece. No more graphic and stirring narrative than that in which Xenophon traces the fortune of the Ten Thousand was ever written. And his practical treatises on the Horse and on Hunting are excellent in themselves, and are full of interest from an antiquarian point of view.
Apart then from his style, Xenophon's chief merit and his chief service to modern readers consist in the amount of information he has preserved. The 'Anabasis' is of course full of information, not only about Greek manners, but also about the state of the Persian Empire, the geography of many interesting countries, and the characteristics of several wild tribes. The 'Hellenica' is a contemporary record of the affairs of Greece for a period of fifty years, and we have only abstained from abridging it, because to do so would be to rewrite a portion of Greek history which has been often and well written in English before. To the 'Memorabilia' men look for a particular kind of information—information about the strange personality of Socrates. It is true that Xenophon has not done the work of recording the conversations of his master as well as might be wished. He had not the fine perception or dramatic faculty which would have been requisite for the task. But the collection of facts which he gives is, as far as it goes, valuable.
The ancients considered Xenophon a "philosopher," and Diogenes Laertius writes his life as such. But his only claim to be called so is, that he was a pupil of Socrates, and wrote anecdotes about him. Xenophon never uses a metaphysical word or utters a metaphysical thought in all his writings. He was a moralist, and apparently he could not understand that Socrates was anything more than a moralist. Xenophon's ethical philosophy was expressed in his 'Education of Cyrus,' though often repeated without variation in other books. It comes to something of this kind—that a man should train his body by hunting and similar exercises, and his mind by debate and discussion; that he should be very sober and temperate; very god-fearing, especially in the matter of seeking signs and omens; very just and truthful; that he should possess, or acquire, the art of influencing and ruling over other men, and that he should use that art for beneficent ends. Such was the whole duty of man according to Xenophon. It was a simple doctrine, and we can easily see that it was compounded of the Spartan ideas of education, with some of the intellectual and moral ideas of Socrates. We may conclude, then, that Xenophon was no philosopher in the proper sense of the term. Even as a moral essayist, as in the 'Cyropædeia,' the 'Hiero,' the 'Agesilaus,' &c., he is not strong, but only passable. His strength is not in deep thoughts or elevated sentiments, not as a master of the true and the beautiful, but as a manly, straightforward writer of information, and as having admirably told one deeply interesting story—the epic tale of the Ten Thousand Greeks.
At the same time, we must not refuse to allow to Xenophon a certain amount of originality. It is probable that he had no model before him, either for his 'Anabasis' or for his 'Memorabilia.' And it seems not unlikely that his ' Banquet' may have been the first imaginary dialogue introducing Socrates that was ever written. If so, it gave the idea to Plato, who, taking it up, wrote dialogues that are to the 'Banquet' of Xenophon as the plays of Shakespeare to those of Marlow. The various minor works of Xenophon are specimens of a kind of originality—not the originality of creative genius, but rather a sort of practical inventiveness which showed him what things might be done, though it did not lead him to do them in the very highest way. Genius, indeed, in the highest sense, we must absolutely deny to Xenophon, who had abundant versatile talent, but who lacked "the vision and the faculty divine." He is not great even as a historian: his 'Anabasis' is wanting in general reflections, and his 'Hellenica' is merely the work of an annalist, standing to Thucydides, whose history he undertook to continue, much in the same relation as Smollett occupies towards Hume. We must withdraw, in short, all claim for Xenophon to rank among the greatest writers of antiquity. He comes into a second class, and is admirable, as far as his thought and matter are concerned, only for those qualities which we have above attributed to him.
To this extent, and no further, we should agree with Colonel Mure, whose account of Xenophon (in his 'Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece') is from beginning to end a severe attack. Amongst other things, he impugns the good faith of Xenophon as a historian, and stigmatises him as exceedingly false in the colour which he gives to various transactions. Mr Grote, on the other hand, places unbounded reliance on all the statements of Xenophon. Probably an estimate between these two extremes may be the correct one. It is very likely that Xenophon's account of his own share in the 'Retreat of the Ten Thousand' should be taken cum grano salis. It was the practice of ancient historians to insert in their narratives, as having actually been spoken, speeches which they composed in cold blood as suitable to the occasion. Xenophon, no doubt, followed this plan in writing his 'Anabasis' and he may have allotted to himself a rather more prominent and favourable position on some occasions than others would have assigned him. Thus far his writing may have been a sort of Dichtung und Wahrheit; but there is every reason to believe that the truth greatly preponderated. Xenophon, of course, had his prejudices, and he was a versatile Greek of rather superficial character; but, on the whole, he was manly and well-intentioned, and to consider falsehood as being a prominent characteristic of his nature seems to us to be unjust and unfounded.
Before taking leave of him we must say a word about his style, which this volume has not been able to represent, except in so far as it has enabled the reader occasionally to notice the homely raciness of his expressions. Several instances of this occur in the exact translation given above (page 62) of a long passage from the 'Anabasis.' Colloquial vigour is the eloquence of Xenophon. For the rest he is pure, simple, and lucid. The Greek language had been perfected in Xenophon's youth by sophists and rhetoricians—by the Greek orators with Pericles at their head, and by the great historian Thucydides. Xenophon used the language, thus developed, as an instrument of which he was perfectly master. In his best works he writes as if he did not think about style at all, but simply aimed at saying, in a plain manner, what he had to say. His taste and cultivation gave an unstudied refinement to his diction; and his freedom from all eccentricity and from all excessive specialty of mind, allowed his writings to attain to a sort of national and universal standard, rather than an individual character. And so it has come about that the model of classical Greek prose is considered to be preserved, not in the laboured antithetical greatness of the style of Thucydides, nor in the lovely half-poetical diction of Plato, but in the everyday sentences which make up the page of Xenophon. Not only are these the study of the English schoolboy, but the newspaper writers of Athens at the present day, in hopes of reviving some of the classical purity of the ancients, are said to be diligently engaged in teaching the corrupt modern Greek language to copy Xenophon.
END OF XENOPHON.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
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