Xenophon - James Tatum (essay date 1989)
James Tatum (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Revision," in Xenophon's Imperial Fiction: On "The Education of Cyrus, " Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1989, pp. 215-39.
[The following excerpt from Tatum's book treats the "epilogue" of the Cyropaedia, which, Tatum argues, "turns a work of idealistic fiction into a narrative of disillusionment. " Tatum further asserts that Xenophon understood this disjunction and, therefore, anticipated later critiques, most notably Plato's in The Laws.]
Like Cyrus and his empire, Xenophon's achievement should ultimately be measured not by what he created, but by how he created it. [In The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1967] Kenneth Burke has described the circumstances which obtain for many kinds of writing; what he says is especially relevant to readers of this imperial fiction:
Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are...
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