The Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika

"He picks up immediately where Thucydides leaves off. Thucydides was so admired, that people who wanted to make these historical interventions would just start where he left off in 411. Xenophon begins with, ‘After these things…’ That’s why I said that in some ways Xenophon really is the sequel to Thucydides. He goes through to the end of the Peloponnesian War and becomes the major source that we have for what happened in Athens during the rise and the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. He then goes on into this very interesting period, in the first part of the 4th century, when Athens has some aspirations to regain the Aegean empire that it had. So the story doesn’t end with Thucydides. These Landmark editions are just incredibly useful tools. In a single book, you’ll get the main text, with a decent translation, and just about everything that you could want to help you understand what’s actually going on. These books are just absolutely magnificent. This series is wonderful. Xenophon is a little bit more versatile. We only have Herodotus’s Histories and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War . Xenophon also writes Socratic dialogues—he’s very much a contemporary of Plato in that way—he writes treatises, he writes some works that are considered the earliest biographies. He writes in an unusually large number of genres, and is really seen as embodying the literary developments of the 4th century. One that keeps coming back to me is the Sicilian debate. There’s this very poignant moment: the Athenians have basically already decided that they’re going to invade Sicily. Thucydides likes to depict a debate after it’s already been decided, but where people are revisiting or elaborating on the question. In the course of that debate, Nicias says, ‘I think that the greatest, most powerful move we could make would be not to invade at all.’ There’s also the Mytilenean debate, where again there is a revisiting of the original question. In the original assembly debate, about what to do in Mytilene, the Athenians had decided to put all the men of the island to death and to enslave the women and children. Then, for various reasons, that’s revisited. It’s put back on the table and the Athenians change their mind. So I (and I’m not alone here) am now thinking of that in the context of Brexit, where the issue of people being able to change their minds comes up quite a lot. Yes, when I read it I just knew immediately that it would be the epigraph for my book. I was talking to a retired colonel the other day, who had read the book, and that was the first thing he said, that that quotation was spot on."