publicly owned slave labour in the state silver mines, Xenophon was arguing radically against alternative, more conservative and conventional schemes: such as, at one extreme, deep cuts in public expenditure associated with a mild increase in indirect taxation, or, at the other extreme, aggressive overseas imperialism financed initially by hugely increased direct taxation of the very rich.
Its pragmatic orientation, however, does not of course mean that the treatise is value-free. It is noticeable that immediately after the long chapter on slave investment (4) Xenophon ceases to be a narrowly fiscal reformer and puts on again his political theorist hat, aiming to show his readers how to lead the good life of military and other public political service. Moreover, the treatise simply assumes the validity of slave labour, whereas an important part of the first book of Aristotle’s
Politics
is given over to an attempted justification of a doctrine of natural slavery against the views of those philosophers or sophists who argued that all slavery, inasmuch as it was based on force rather thanrational persuasion, was morally indefensible. Aristotle’s unconvincing rejoinder amounted to little more than an endorsement of the standard Greek view according to which all non-Greek ‘barbarians’ were by their nature morally and intellectually barbaric, and therefore ‘naturally’ suited for slavery in the Greek world. Xenophon too was presumably looking to the non-Greek periphery (Thrace and Asia Minor were the chief actual sources of slave labour) for the supply of his mine-slaves.
Perhaps it is needless to say, but Xenophon’s scheme was not in practice adopted. In the real world of the mid fourth century Athens veered opportunistically between versions of the two extreme solutions to the problems of raising public revenues sketched above. Not that this was at all exceptional: other Greek cities habitually resorted to a variety of expedients that can rarely be dignified with a label other than ‘scams’; many such examples are listed, in sometimes hilarious detail, in the second book of the Pseudo-Aristotelian
Oeconomica
. In a historical context like that, Xenophon’s
Ways and Means
deserves more credit from us than his contemporaries were willing or able to accord it, as a bold and original intellectual construct.
WAYS AND MEANS
NOTES
HIERO THE TYRANT
CHAPTER 1
1 .
festivals… at once
: This applies especially to the four major ‘panhellenic’ festivals: the Olympics, the Pythian Games (held at Delphi), the Isthmian Games (at the Isthmus of Corinth) and the Nemean Games (at Nemea in the north-east Peloponnese). Despite what follows, Dionysius I (see Introduction) did make an enormous personal splash at the Olympics of either 388 or 384.
2 .
praise
…
criticism:
A tyrant might go to great lengths to secure a favourable ‘press’, as the real Hiero did by patronizing Pindar and Bacchylides as well as Simonides. See Pindar’s
Pythian
I and II, in C. M. Bowra’s Penguin
The Odes of Pindar
(1969); and Bacchylides
Ode
V. Simonides’ surviving work is most conveniently read in D. A. Campbell’s
Greek Lyric
III (Loeb Classical Library, 1991).
3 .
flattery:
An entire homiletic literature grew up around the topic of
kolakeia,
‘flattery’: see, e.g., Theophrastus’
Characters
II and Plutarch’s ‘How to distinguish a flatterer from a friend’, in I. Kidd and R. Waterfield’s Penguin
Plutarch Essays
(1992), pp. 61–112.
4 .
find particularly attractive:
A married Greek man, unlike a married Greek woman, could indulge his sexual appetites outside marriage without necessarily incurring even social disapproval. Two of the outlets available at least to wealthier men were slave girls (1.28) and – far more prestigious – free, adolescent boys (1.29–38); note that our term ‘pederasty’ comes from the Greek
paiderastia,
desire for boys: see Dover,
Greek Homosexuality.
A large part of the humour in the plot
Its pragmatic orientation, however, does not of course mean that the treatise is value-free. It is noticeable that immediately after the long chapter on slave investment (4) Xenophon ceases to be a narrowly fiscal reformer and puts on again his political theorist hat, aiming to show his readers how to lead the good life of military and other public political service. Moreover, the treatise simply assumes the validity of slave labour, whereas an important part of the first book of Aristotle’s
Politics
is given over to an attempted justification of a doctrine of natural slavery against the views of those philosophers or sophists who argued that all slavery, inasmuch as it was based on force rather thanrational persuasion, was morally indefensible. Aristotle’s unconvincing rejoinder amounted to little more than an endorsement of the standard Greek view according to which all non-Greek ‘barbarians’ were by their nature morally and intellectually barbaric, and therefore ‘naturally’ suited for slavery in the Greek world. Xenophon too was presumably looking to the non-Greek periphery (Thrace and Asia Minor were the chief actual sources of slave labour) for the supply of his mine-slaves.
Perhaps it is needless to say, but Xenophon’s scheme was not in practice adopted. In the real world of the mid fourth century Athens veered opportunistically between versions of the two extreme solutions to the problems of raising public revenues sketched above. Not that this was at all exceptional: other Greek cities habitually resorted to a variety of expedients that can rarely be dignified with a label other than ‘scams’; many such examples are listed, in sometimes hilarious detail, in the second book of the Pseudo-Aristotelian
Oeconomica
. In a historical context like that, Xenophon’s
Ways and Means
deserves more credit from us than his contemporaries were willing or able to accord it, as a bold and original intellectual construct.
WAYS AND MEANS
NOTES
HIERO THE TYRANT
CHAPTER 1
1 .
festivals… at once
: This applies especially to the four major ‘panhellenic’ festivals: the Olympics, the Pythian Games (held at Delphi), the Isthmian Games (at the Isthmus of Corinth) and the Nemean Games (at Nemea in the north-east Peloponnese). Despite what follows, Dionysius I (see Introduction) did make an enormous personal splash at the Olympics of either 388 or 384.
2 .
praise
…
criticism:
A tyrant might go to great lengths to secure a favourable ‘press’, as the real Hiero did by patronizing Pindar and Bacchylides as well as Simonides. See Pindar’s
Pythian
I and II, in C. M. Bowra’s Penguin
The Odes of Pindar
(1969); and Bacchylides
Ode
V. Simonides’ surviving work is most conveniently read in D. A. Campbell’s
Greek Lyric
III (Loeb Classical Library, 1991).
3 .
flattery:
An entire homiletic literature grew up around the topic of
kolakeia,
‘flattery’: see, e.g., Theophrastus’
Characters
II and Plutarch’s ‘How to distinguish a flatterer from a friend’, in I. Kidd and R. Waterfield’s Penguin
Plutarch Essays
(1992), pp. 61–112.
4 .
find particularly attractive:
A married Greek man, unlike a married Greek woman, could indulge his sexual appetites outside marriage without necessarily incurring even social disapproval. Two of the outlets available at least to wealthier men were slave girls (1.28) and – far more prestigious – free, adolescent boys (1.29–38); note that our term ‘pederasty’ comes from the Greek
paiderastia,
desire for boys: see Dover,
Greek Homosexuality.
A large part of the humour in the plot
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