Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (Penguin Classics) (33 page)

1
. Custodians of the Peace: Xenophon is here responding to the widespread longing among fourth-century Greeks for a ‘new world order’; unfortunately, that yearning advanced no further than the concept of a general or Common
Peace, which in practice had to be imposed on the Greeks by an outside power (Persia) and was anyhow honoured more in the breach.

2
.
held to be
: Xenophon’s choice of words (
eudaimon
, literally ‘well-favoured by the gods’) leaves it ambiguous whether he has chiefly in mind the city’s moral or its economic welfare. Possibly the former, since, as noted in the Introduction, after chapter 4 Xenophon reverts to being a moral-political theorist rather than a fiscal reformer.

3
.
sacred or secular
. Strictly, the Greeks did not have our notion of the secular, only that of the more or less sacred; but although the Greek adjectives
hiera
and
hosia
can both mean ‘sacred’ in other contexts, here some such contrast as ‘sacred or secular’ is intended. Xenophon’s tolerance of sophists here is perhaps surprising, at any rate in contrast to the diatribe against them that we find in
On Hunting
13. On works of quality, see also
Hiero
1.11.

4
.
helping Greece
: On Xenophon’s supposed ‘panhellenism’, see
Agesilaus
chapter 1 notes 10
and
32
, and
On Hunting
chapter 1 note 16
; on his anti-imperialism, see
chapter 1 note 1
above. It is surprising to see him adopting here the Athenians’ fifth-century propaganda line in defence of their empire that their revolted allies and of course Sparta no less vigorously repudiated.

5
.
free will
: This is a reference to the foundation of the Second Sea-League; see also
chapter 1 note 1
.

6
.
well served by Athens
: Athens had been supportive of those Thebans who ejected the occupying Spartan garrison in 379/8 (see
Agesilaus
chapter 2 note 23
); soon after, in the summer of 378, Thebes, despite being virtually landlocked, became one of the six founder-members of the Athenians’ naval alliance.

7
.
well treated by us:
The defeat of Sparta by Thebes at Leuctra in 371 so disrupted the diplomatic concordat of 378 (see previous note) that in 369 Athens allied with Sparta against a newly hegemonic Thebes.

8
.
recovering our control:
Xenophon’s ‘current situation of chaos in Greece’ echoes the concluding sentence of his
A History of My Times
(7.5.27), the terminal date of which was summer 362. The Greek word translated as ‘recovering our control’,
anaktasthai
, means literally ‘regain possession of’ – which seems hardly innocent of imperialist overtones, or compatible with ‘a complete end to war’ (5.10).

9
.
the Phocians:
Some scholars have tried – misguidedly – to use this reference to date the treatise to 346, interpreting the ‘war’ of 4.40 and 5.12 as the so-called Third Sacred War of 356–346. The latter, in which the Athenians in fact allied with the Phocians against Philip of Macedon, was fought in part, but only in part, for the autonomy – or rather the control – of the sacred site of Delphi.

10
.
everyone’s prayers:
The official ritual formulae of prayers in the Athenian Assembly (which met four times a month) included prayers for the ‘safety’ (
soteria
) of Athens.

11
.
projects of their own choice:
Since Athens failed to keep the requisite records, it would in fact have been technically impossible for anyone to conduct the exercise Xenophon airily recommends with any mathematical precision. But this is anyhow mere rhetoric, dare one say mere sophistry, contradicted by the evidence of the eyes. True, ‘the war’ (that is, the Social War) had been financially devastating; but compare and contrast Athens’ situation in the previous century. The Acropolis building programme of the fifth century, which was publicly paid for, was indeed significantly carried out during peacetime in the 440s and 430s when the funds were temporarily not needed to make war; but had Athens not devoted itself to war making in the previous thirty years, on the whole very successfully and lucratively, those funds would not have been there to be used in the first place.

12
.
support their cause
: Cf.
Memoirs of Socrates
2.6.27 (Penguin
Conversations of Socrates
),
Cyropaedia
1.5.13 and Isocrates 8.138–9.

1
.
doing things:
Here speaks Xenophon the radical conservative, appealing to tradition (
ta patria
, literally ‘the things of the fathers’ or ‘the ancestral things’) under the banner of far-reaching innovation. In other words, trying to have his cake and eat it too.

2
.
the gods
: Xenophon adopts the regular formula for a state’s consultation of Zeus at his oracular shrine at Dodona, and of his son Apollo at his at Delphi. Consultation of Delphi was almost second nature, for all Greek states; Dodona, however, was to find increasing favour with Athens in the period 350–320, as Delphi fell under the control of Macedon (see
chapter 5 note 9
).

3
.
the state
: Xenophon typically ends, as he had begun (1.3), with the gods – but by comparison with some other treatises, for example the
Cavalry Commander
, the gods have been conspicuous here rather by their absence.