Cyropaedia The Education of Cyrus
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 544 passages
Cite this work
- APAXenophon. (n.d.). Cyropaedia The Education of Cyrus. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/xenophon/cyropaedia-the-education-of-cyrus
- MLAXenophon. "Cyropaedia The Education of Cyrus." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/xenophon/cyropaedia-the-education-of-cyrus.
- ChicagoXenophon. Cyropaedia The Education of Cyrus. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/xenophon/cyropaedia-the-education-of-cyrus.
What it is about
Xenophon's book on the education and government of Cyrus the Great: the first novel of the West, or the first manual of leadership, according to how one looks at it.
Context and history
It should be said at once that it is not history. Xenophon takes a real figure — the founder of the Persian empire — and invents his life in order to set out what a ruler ought to be: how command is taught, how loyalty is won rather than imposed, how an army is organised, how a beaten enemy is treated. Herodotus tells of an entirely different Cyrus. The book was much read in antiquity and in the Renaissance: Scipio and Caesar carried it, Machiavelli cites it, and Jefferson owned two copies. It repays reading in the knowledge that what is in it is Xenophon's idea of power well exercised, not what happened in Persia.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
This was typed from an Everyman's Library edition. It seems that Dakyns died before Cyropaedia could be included as the planned fourth and final volume of his series, "The Works of Xenophon," published in the 1890s by Macmillan and Co. The works in that series can all be found in Project Gutenberg under their individual titles. The complete list of Xenophon's works (though there is doubt about some of these) is: Work Number of books The Anabasis 7 The Hellenica 7 The Cyropaedia 8 The Memorabilia 4 The Symposium 1 The Economist 1 On Horsemanship 1 The Sportsman 1 The Cavalry General 1 The Apology 1 On Revenues 1 The Hiero 1 The Agesilaus 1 The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians 2 Text in brackets "{}" is my transliteration of Greek text into English using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table. The diacritical marks have been lost. INTRODUCTION A very few words may suffice by way of introduction to this translation of the _Cyropaedia_. Professor Jowett, whose Plato represents the high-water mark of classical translation, has given us the following reminders: "An English translation ought to be idiomatic and interesting, not only to the scholar, but also to the unlearned reader. It should read as an origin