Cyropaedia

What It Is

Eight books, about two hundred and fifty pages, written around 370 BC. The title means the education of Cyrus, and the subject is Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, who had been dead for well over a century when Xenophon sat down to write about him.

Nobody, ancient or modern, has taken it for history. Xenophon knew the outline of the real Cyrus and departed from it whenever he chose. What he produced is something new: a long, coherent, invented life, built to show how a man acquires the ability to make other men want to obey him. It has a reasonable claim to be the first novel in Europe, and a stronger claim to be the first work of political theory disguised as a story.

The register is calm and practical throughout. How to feed an army. How to reward. How to be seen. How to make a subordinate's loyalty rational rather than sentimental. Xenophon had commanded men in the field, and it shows on every page.

Why It Matters

For two thousand years this was one of the most read books in the Western world, and its readers were the people who ran things. Cicero says Scipio Africanus was never without a copy. Machiavelli cites Xenophon's Cyrus more often than any other example in The Prince, and the whole mirror-for-princes tradition of the Renaissance descends from it. Thomas Jefferson owned two copies, one annotated in Greek.

What they all took from it is a technique, and the technique is the uncomfortable part. What Xenophon lays out, with total clarity and in order, is a method for making other men want to obey. It works. Read it as a manual and it will still work.

Whether Xenophon admires it is the question the book refuses to settle for you. He was Socrates's student, and he has left us an account of a man who never lies and never quite tells the truth. Readers have divided for two thousand years over whether this book is a tribute or a warning.

Before You Read

Eight to ten hours. Easy sentence by sentence. The difficulty is that it is long, quiet and undramatic by design.

Read it as a study rather than a story. The pacing is deliberate; Xenophon is showing you a process, and a process takes time. Readers who arrive expecting the Anabasis are usually restless for a hundred pages and then find they cannot stop.

Keep the question open the whole way: is this man good, or only extremely effective? The book is built so that you cannot avoid asking, and it declines to answer. Do not settle it early.

Which Translation to Read

• Wayne Ambler (Cornell University Press, Agora Editions, 2001), published as The Education of Cyrus — recommended. The first fresh English version since 1914 and by a wide margin the best. Ambler is exact where the argument is exact, readable throughout, and his glossary matches Xenophon's key Greek terms to their English range, which matters in a book that turns on words like ruling, obedience and benefit. The cost: the introduction comes from a particular school of political philosophy and reads the book its own way, and this is an academic press with academic pricing. View on Amazon →
• Walter Miller (Loeb Classical Library, two volumes, 1914). Greek and English on facing pages, complete, and the only way to check a sentence against the original without a lexicon. The cost: Edwardian English, stately and slightly starched, and two volumes to carry for one book.
• H. G. Dakyns (1897). Out of copyright, free everywhere, and perfectly serviceable if you want to read the Cyropaedia tonight and pay nothing. The cost: Victorian diction, no useful notes, and a translator working before a century of scholarship on what Xenophon was actually doing.

Take Ambler. It is not a close call: his is the only modern translation made by someone who takes the book seriously as thought rather than as a curiosity. One warning. Larry Hedrick's Xenophon's Cyrus the Great, marketed to executives, is a modernised paraphrase, not a translation. It is not the book.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read with a pen and mark every technique. Xenophon is specific: what Cyrus says, when he says it, who is watching. Treat those passages as case studies and you will find them turning up in your own week.

Then ask the harder question. Every method in this book can be used by a man who means well and by a man who does not, and Xenophon never tells you how to tell them apart from the outside. That silence is not a failure of the book. It is the book.

Read the introduction afterwards; the interesting ones give away the argument of the final chapter.