In his previous books (The Litigious Athenian (Baltimore 1998), The Bad Citizen in Classical Athens (Cambridge 2006), The Limits of Altruism in Democratic Athens (Cambridge 2012)), Matthew Christ explored Athenian citizens at the boundaries of the social contract, pushing individual interests against structures of the Athenian democracy that they perceived as impinging upon those interests. In Xenophon and the Athenian Democracy, he reads several of Xenophon’s works as serving much more civically conscientious purposes: to encourage elite Athenians to dedicate themselves to leadership in Athens’ democracy and to be humble enough to develop the skills that would allow them to do so successfully.
In the first of six content chapters, ‘Athens in Crisis in the Hellenica’, Christ lays the groundwork for his further argument. While he notes Xenophon’s criticism of the dēmos for such matters as Arginusae, he finds the historian much gentler on democracy itself than is Thucydides. Moreover, he takes Xenophon’s ambivalent portrayals of certain members of the Thirty as revealing a sense that elite Athenians possess the ability to play positive roles in a broadly beneficial democracy, but some need to refine their moral sensibilities to do so.
In the next three chapters, Christ highlights the extent to which Xenophon’s Socrates focuses on skills and approaches that correspond directly to civic leadership. In ‘Politics and the Gentleman in the Memorabilia’, Christ emphasizes Socrates as an energetic recruiter of individual elites into democratic leadership, which he takes as implicit encouragement to elite readers of the dialogue to follow Socrates’ advice. In ‘Work, Money, and the Gentleman in the Oeconomicus’, he reads Socrates’ recommendation to elite landowners to be attentive to the operations of their holdings as holding democratic value in two main ways: one, it implies attention to civic governance, in that the oikos and polis are treated as having much in common, and two, it makes elites more informed leaders of the polis, in that attention to the land is an important way in which elites can identify with common citizens. And in ‘The Education of Callias in the Symposium’, he notes Socrates’ emphasis on the development of philia among elites as a valuable feature of efficient civic governance, which contrasts with the philosophical theory as the centre of Plato’s version of the Symposium.
In the last two chapters before the conclusion, ‘Xenophon as Expert, Advisor, and Reformer in the Hipparchicus and Poroi’ and ‘Xenophon the Democratic Orator: The Politics of Mass and Elite in the Anabasis’, Christ observes even more explicit stress on civic leadership. Xenophon is the main voice in all of the featured works, and in Hipparchicus and Poroi, he emphasizes skills that directly correspond to those of high-level Athenian leaders: cavalry leadership and public oratory. In the Anabasis, Xenophon not only puts those skills to direct use, he does so for a group that is specified as being much like the Athenian dēmos.
Christ makes a convincing case that, among any number of other motives that Xenophon may have had in his writings, one that is consistent across a considerable number of them is subtly to urge Athenian elites not just to attend to civic leadership, but to develop the skills to be effective in doing so. He thus reads six of Xenophon’s works as having a distinctly Athenocentric point of view, a perspective that is not universally accepted. To validate his claims, Christ engages responsibly with the mass of scholarship on Xenophon, including the striking preponderance of monographs and collected volumes on the author that have been released in the past couple of decades, such as V.J. Gray (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Xenophon (Oxford 2010); F. Hobden and C. Tuplin (eds), Xenophon: Ethical Principles and Historical Enquiry (Leiden 2012); and M.A. Flower (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Xenophon (Cambridge 2017). There are two volumes that would have been relevant that came out close enough to Christ’s publication date that I imagine they did not come onto his radar before he submitted his final draft: V. Azoulay, Xenophon and the Graces of Power (Swansea 2018); and R.F. Buxton (ed.), Aspects of Leadership in Xenophon (Newcastle upon Tyne 2016). Nothing in either book ‘scoops’ him, but there is some common ground covered. While Xenophon and the Athenian Democracy has an argument that sets it apart from other books of its sort, its overlaps with them in certain respects makes this less novel a monograph than were his three previous.
This is a very readable book that will serve the needs of professional scholars, graduate students and even advanced undergraduates. Its organization by works of Xenophon, rather than by theme, makes chapters particularly practical for assignment in classes, primarily graduate ones, and to be employed by students writing papers, in Classics or history classes, on Xenophon or the themes of his works.
