problem of authenticity is doubly vexed in that the concluding chapter not only is explicitly autobiographical – ‘I am just a layman…’ – but also delivers a sustained and passionate profession of pedagogical faith – ‘… but I know that the best place to look for instruction in goodness is one’s own nature, and that the second best course is to go to people who really know something good rather than to professional deceivers’ (13.4), that is the sophists, whom the author affected to despise no less than did the professional anti-sophists Isocrates and Plato. At least – and at most – we may fairly claim that Xenophon would have endorsed wholeheartedly sentiments of this sort, if not necessarily the manner of their expression.
ON HUNTING
WAYS AND MEANS
(Poroi)
INTRODUCTION
Modern scholars have at least the benefit of hindsight. Using (or abusing) that advantage, some are pleased to claim that the Greek polis as a form of political community was an evolutionary dead end, doomed to extinction. That was emphatically not how either Xenophon or, yet more tellingly, Aristotle saw it. Xenophon did, once, allow the scope of his pedagogical vision to be enlarged to encompass the whole Persian Empire, but in
Cyropaedia
he was interested more in Persia’s moral than in its financial economy, and in how the lessons in leadership embodied in his idealized Cyrus the Great (reigned
c
. 559–530) might be applied to the governance of the Greek city. Elsewhere, like his fellow Socratics, Xenophon measured his ambition to the scale of the polis and its constituent households. And in
Ways and Means
much more obviously than in any other treatise, apart from
How to Be a Good Cavalry Commander,
the polis he had centrally in mind was his own native Athens. Internal references and external indications make it extremely probable that the work was composed around the mid-35os, in direct and immediate consequence of Athens’ defeat in a war against some of its major allies within what was left of its Second Sea-League. The temptation is therefore strong to associate the treatise’s composition with Xenophon’s actual or desired return to Athens towards the end of his life.
‘Cities, like households, but to an even greater extent, are often in want of financial resources and in need of more ways of gaining them’ (Aristotle,
Politics
1259a40). Whether or not Aristotle had read the present work, that observation provides the context in which
Ways and Means
should be read within Xenophon’s
œuvre.
For it is primarily valuable, not, as are several of the treatises, for Xenophon’s views onleadership qualities or any other facets of individual moral virtue, but for how he envisaged practical Athenian. ‘political economy’. It is in fact the most overtly pragmatic of Xenophon’s treatises, more so even than
Cavalry Commander.
As such, it is an oddity, not only within Xenophon’s œuvre but in Greek literature as a whole. Whereas
The Estate-manager
fits seamlessly into what the Germans call
Hausvaterliteratur,
that is homespun wisdom literature regarding domestic management,
Ways and Means
seeks to operate at the level of ‘national’ or state economy, that is, to be received as an exercise in political economy rather than domestic science. Whereas the central term of
The Estate-manager
is arguably
epimeleia
(care, concern), which has inescapably moral implications, the analysis and recommendations in
Ways and Means
are offered in a spirit of goal-oriented economic rationality.
In fact, so pragmatic in orientation is
Ways and Means
that it could be read – and perhaps was written – almost as a party-political pamphlet. Athens in the mid-350s was desperately short of public funds, so short indeed that certain forms of pay for public service which were normally distributed out of central funds had to be temporarily suspended. Desperate times demanded desperate measures. In advocating above all a large investment in
ON HUNTING
WAYS AND MEANS
(Poroi)
INTRODUCTION
Modern scholars have at least the benefit of hindsight. Using (or abusing) that advantage, some are pleased to claim that the Greek polis as a form of political community was an evolutionary dead end, doomed to extinction. That was emphatically not how either Xenophon or, yet more tellingly, Aristotle saw it. Xenophon did, once, allow the scope of his pedagogical vision to be enlarged to encompass the whole Persian Empire, but in
Cyropaedia
he was interested more in Persia’s moral than in its financial economy, and in how the lessons in leadership embodied in his idealized Cyrus the Great (reigned
c
. 559–530) might be applied to the governance of the Greek city. Elsewhere, like his fellow Socratics, Xenophon measured his ambition to the scale of the polis and its constituent households. And in
Ways and Means
much more obviously than in any other treatise, apart from
How to Be a Good Cavalry Commander,
the polis he had centrally in mind was his own native Athens. Internal references and external indications make it extremely probable that the work was composed around the mid-35os, in direct and immediate consequence of Athens’ defeat in a war against some of its major allies within what was left of its Second Sea-League. The temptation is therefore strong to associate the treatise’s composition with Xenophon’s actual or desired return to Athens towards the end of his life.
‘Cities, like households, but to an even greater extent, are often in want of financial resources and in need of more ways of gaining them’ (Aristotle,
Politics
1259a40). Whether or not Aristotle had read the present work, that observation provides the context in which
Ways and Means
should be read within Xenophon’s
œuvre.
For it is primarily valuable, not, as are several of the treatises, for Xenophon’s views onleadership qualities or any other facets of individual moral virtue, but for how he envisaged practical Athenian. ‘political economy’. It is in fact the most overtly pragmatic of Xenophon’s treatises, more so even than
Cavalry Commander.
As such, it is an oddity, not only within Xenophon’s œuvre but in Greek literature as a whole. Whereas
The Estate-manager
fits seamlessly into what the Germans call
Hausvaterliteratur,
that is homespun wisdom literature regarding domestic management,
Ways and Means
seeks to operate at the level of ‘national’ or state economy, that is, to be received as an exercise in political economy rather than domestic science. Whereas the central term of
The Estate-manager
is arguably
epimeleia
(care, concern), which has inescapably moral implications, the analysis and recommendations in
Ways and Means
are offered in a spirit of goal-oriented economic rationality.
In fact, so pragmatic in orientation is
Ways and Means
that it could be read – and perhaps was written – almost as a party-political pamphlet. Athens in the mid-350s was desperately short of public funds, so short indeed that certain forms of pay for public service which were normally distributed out of central funds had to be temporarily suspended. Desperate times demanded desperate measures. In advocating above all a large investment in
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