SOURCE: "The Fourth Century," in The Development of Greek Biography, revised edition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993, 43-64.

[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1971, Momigliano locates Xenophon at the forefront of fourth-century experiments in biography, which he claims occupied "that zone between truth and fiction."]

In the fourth century individual politicians found themelves in a position of power very different from that of their predecessors in the previous century. In the fifth century Miltiades, Themistocles, Leonidas, even Pericles and Cleon, had been the servants of the state to which they belonged. The tyrants of Sicily had been the exception, which disappeared in the course of the century. In the fourth century the initiative passes to states which built up their new power under the guidance of individual leaders. The conservative states, such as Sparta and Athens, have to adapt themselves to the new situation. Hence the new power of professional military commanders; hence ultimately the emergence of a professional politician like Demosthenes who cannot rely on the steady support of his city as Pericles had done, but has to establish or re-establish his authority in a succession of crises within his own city. In the fourth century Lysander, Conon, Agesilaus, Dionysius the Elder, Epaminondas, Philip of Macedon, and ultimately Demosthenes and Alexander the Great have a personal political line. They represent, as individuals, a greater source of hope and fear than the Athenian and Spartan politicians of the fifth century.

The new trends in philosophy and rhetoric emphasized the importance of individual education, performance, self-control. We have denied that the origins of biography are to be exclusively connected with Socrates and the Socratics. We have tried to show that the most ancient evidence for Greek biographical and autobiographical work is earlier than Socrates. This has thrown doubt also on F. Leo's thesis that Hellenistic biography is a product of the Aristotelian school and therefore in some sense a Socratic product. But this does not mean denying the obvious—namely that the Socratics were the leaders in biographical experiments in the fourth century.

The Socratics were infuriating in their own time. They are still infuriating in our time. They are never so infuriating as when approached from the point of view of biography. We like biography to be true or false, honest or dishonest. Who can use such terminology for Plato's Phaedo or Apology, or even for Xenophon's Memorabilia? We should all like to dismiss Plato, who cared too much about the bigger truth to be concerned with the smaller factual accuracy. We should like to save Xenophon the honest mediocre historian, who told the facts as he knew them best, by damning Xenophon the Socratic memorialist, who lost interest in historical correctness. But the fact we have to face is that biography acquired a new meaning when the Socratics moved to that zone between truth and fiction which is so bewildering to the professional historian. We shall not understand what biography was in the fourth century if we do not recognize that it came to occupy an ambiguous position between fact and imagination. Let us be in no doubt. With a man like Plato, and even with a smaller but by no means simpler man like Xenophon, this is a consciously chosen ambiguity. The Socratics experimented in biography, and the experiments were directed towards capturing the potentialities rather than the realities of individual lives. Socrates, the main subject of their considerations (there were other subjects, such as Cyrus), was not so much the real Socrates as the potential Socrates. He was not a dead man whose life could be recounted. He was the guide to territories as yet unexplored. Remember Phaedo's words: "I thought that in going to the other world he could not be without a divine call, and that he would be happy, if any man ever was, when he arrived there; and therefore I did not pity him as might have seemed natural at such an hour" (transl. B. Jowett). In Socratic biography we meet for the first time that conflict between the superior and the inferior truth which has remained a major problem for the student of the Gospels or of the lives of Saints. Nor is this the only type of ambiguity we discover in fourth-century biography. If philosophy introduced the search for the soul, rhetoric introduced the search for the improving word: anything can appear better or more than it is, if the right word is used. Plato sensed his enemy in Isocrates and the enmity was cordially reciprocated.

The fourth century is a time of strong, self-willed personalities which offer plenty of good opportunities to biographers. But it is also a time of divergent and conflicting explorations of the limits of human life, in terms of philosophy or in terms of rhetoric.

Both Plato and Xenophon apparently created new types of biographical and autobiographical narration: Xenophon especially must be regarded as a pioneer experimenter in biographical forms. Behind them there is the problematic personality of Antisthenes—an older man who, if we knew him better, might easily appear an original and powerful contributor to biography. Apart from writing two dialogues on Cyrus, which may have influenced Xenophon's Cyropaedia, Antisthenes composed a book (perhaps a dialogue) on Alcibiades. This book certainly discussed details of Alcibiades' life, especially his relation to Socrates. It is going too far to describe it as a biography of Alcibiades, as Mullach did in the Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum; but it contributed to Alcibiades' biography. Antisthenes also wrote an attack against Athenian politicians in general, which was inevitably full of biographical details. Nor must we forget that Theopompus, the first historian to give a large place to biography, was an admirer of Antisthenes, whose skill he praised and whom he declared capable of winning over whomever he wanted by means of agreeable discourse.

Yet Theopompus was also, and even more, a pupil of Isocrates; and Isocrates has his part in the history of biography. In his turn Isocrates cannot be separated from the general trends of rhetorical and forensic eloquence which contributed more than is usually admitted to the technique of biographical and autobiographical accounts. I hope I am not surprising anyone if I say that I shall later treat Demosthenes' De corona as an autobiographical document. The technique for winning lawsuits and making political propaganda relied generally on the ability to present one's own and somebody else's life in a suitable light. The earliest extant biography of Alcibiades is in the speech Isocrates wrote for Alcibiades' son about 397 B.C.: the speech "On the Team of Horses." Later Isocrates added something of his own. He proposed a system of education which selected pupils according to inborn qualities and trained them according to a precise ideal of intellectual and moral perfection. He made it clear that eloquence was in itself productive of moral excellence. He also claimed for eloquence the old prerogative of poetry, which was to confer immortality by discovering and praising virtue. He defended this ideal in an autobiographical speech, "About the Exchange."

Isocrates' περὶ ἀντιδόσως was never uttered before a court of law: it was a rhetorical exercise. But neither were the speeches which Plato and Xenophon put into the mouth of Socrates in self-defense ever uttered, at least not in that form. A conventional form of eloquence was used for new experiments. Being conventional, it set certain clear limits to the experiments. The biographic and autobiographic experiments of the fourth century see a man in relation to his profession, to his political community, to his school: they are portraits of public figures, not of private lives. The transitional character of these compositions is undeniable. The picture becomes even more complex if we remember that Isocrates was conscious of turning into prose that art of encomium for which Pindar had been richly paid. Xenophon, on the other hand, must have had the portraits by Euripides, Suppliants, in his mind when he wrote the portraits of the dead generals in the Anabasis. The interplay between new political and social ideals and old forms is an essential feature of fourth-century writing. At the same time the search for rules of life had to reckon with the new power of words. Plato's fear of being overpowered by rhetoric is as real as Isocrates' fear of having his words controlled by philosophers.

Isocrates' Euagoras was written about 370 B.C. Isocrates was not new to biographical sketches in speeches. I have already referred to the portrait of Alcibiades he drew in the speech "On the Team of Horses" about 397 B.C. But the Euagoras was something more ambitious. He considered it to be the first attempt at a prose encomium by a contemporary. Aristotle apparently did not accept this claim. In the first book of his Rhetorics he implicitly claimed priority for an obscure encomium for the Thessalian Hippolochus who, as Wilamowitz said in one of his most temperamental Lesefrüchte, was the boy for whom the courtesan Lais lost her life at the beginning of the fourth century (Plutarch Amatorius. But Isocrates may not have been conversant with this Thessalian product. Isocrates described Euagoras as an enquiring mind, a man who never thought of injustice and gained friends by generosity. The encomium is organized in chronological order but cannot properly be described as a biography of Euagoras from birth to death. While the reactions of Conon, of the king of Persia, and of the Spartans to Euagoras' achievements are told at some length, there is hardly one episode of Euagoras' life that can be said to be narrated. Isocrates combines rather ineffectually a static description of Euagoras' character with a chronological account of what other people did to Euagoras.

A few years later, about 360, Xenophon took Euagoras as a model for his Agesilaus. He had known Agesilaus personally; he had written or was going to write about him in his Hellenic History: the relation between the encomium of Agesilaus and the relevant sections of the Hellenica is notoriously a matter of dispute. The very fact that he wrote twice on Agesilaus shows that he made a distinction between the historical account of the Hellenica and the encomiastic (I do not say biographical) account of the pamphlet. He described the latter as an ἔπαινος and an encomium, namely an appreciation of the virtues and glory of the dead king. He therefore did for Agesilaus what Isocrates had done for the dead Euagoras. Like Isocrates before him, he must have been conscious of turning into prose the traditional poetic eulogy of a dead man; and he must also have shared Isocrates' belief or illusion that there was no clear link between his encomium and the prose funeral speeches for dead men of earlier times.

Xenophon, however, was not the man to follow Isocrates blindly. To begin with, he was much more interested in Agesilaus' actual achievements than Isocrates had been in Euagoras' deeds. He also had greater historical sense and experience than Isocrates. He knew, for instance, that notable sayings were normally not considered worth presenting in a book of history (Hellenica 2.3.56). We shall later see that he may have experimented with character drawing in the Anabasis. The untidy mixture of static eulogy and chronological account was not easily acceptable to the historian of the Anabasis and of the Hellenica. He therefore divided the encomium of Agesilaus into two parts. The first was written in the chronological order suggested by Isocrates, but was more factual. We can even say that it was much nearer to what later became a conventional biography. The second part was a nonchronological, systematic review of Agesilaus' virtues. As Xenophon explains at the beginning of chapter 3, after having given the record of the king's deeds he is now attempting to show the virtue that was in his soul. In arranging the praise of Agesilaus' virtues—"piety, justice, self-control, courage, wisdom, patriotism, urbanity"— he follows a scheme going back to Gorgias and adopted by other Socratics. There were also contingent reasons for such a systematic review of Greek virtues as typified by Agesilaus. Around 360 B.C. Xenophon was anxious to give an anti-Persian slant to his characterization of the Greek king: "I will next say how his behaviour contrasted with the alazoneia—the vainboasting—of the Persian king." But the dichotomy between the chronological survey of events and the systematic analysis of inherent qualities was an attempt to solve one of the most difficult problems facing a biographer: how to define a character without sacrificing the variety of events of an individual life. When we talk of Life and Works or of The Man and his Work we are still within the borders of Xenophon's dichotomy.

The same Xenophon wrote character sketches of contemporaries in his Anabasis. This work was certainly composed before the Agesilaus, but its relation to the Euagoras is much more difficult to define. The portraits of Proxenus and Meno appear to be written in the antithetic style dear to Isocrates (Anabasis 2.6.16-29), whereas the other two portraits of Cyrus (1.9) and of Clearchus (2.6.1-15) are stylistically independent. Ivo Bruns, who called attention to this difference, sug-gested that Xenophon had just written the portrait of Clearchus when Isocrates' Euagoras came into his hands: he hastened to imitate Isocrates in the portraits of Proxenus and Meno which follow that of Clearchus. This is too good to be true. It would of course imply a date for the Anabasis later than the publication of the Euagoras—that is, a terminus post quem of about 370 B.C. But even apart from the fact that there are more solid arguments for believing the contrary—namely that Isocrates had read the Anabasis when he published the Panegyricus in 380 B.C. (Anabasis 2.4.4 ~ Panegyricus 149)—I am not convinced that the influence of Isocrates' Euagoras on the Anabasis exists. These portraits are not encomia. If anything, the portrait of Meno is a ψόγος, a censure. Taken together, the four portraits represent four different types of men. Cyrus is more complex: a loyal friend and a ruthless enemy, brave in war, skilful in administration. His chief quality is loyalty and generosity towards friends. The typological interest is directly emphasized in the case of Clearchus: "Now such a conduct as this, in my opinion, reveals a man fond of war." Proxenus is the ambitious man in a good sense, Meno in the bad sense. It is worth noticing that even in the brief portrait of Cyrus great importance is attributed to his education. There is here a clear indication of the interest which Xenophon was to develop later in writing about the education of the other Cyrus, Cyropaedia. My tentative conclusion is that Xenophon had already shown an independent inclination to draw character before he came across Isocrates' Euagoras. The portraits of the Anabasis are Xenophon's own, and the influence of Isocrates on the Agesilaus is secondary.

Xenophon made a third experiment in biographical writing with his Apomnemoneumata. We call them Memorabilia, the arbitrary title given to them by Johannes Leonclavius in 1569. The correct translation of Apomnemoneumata is Commentarii, which is the title given to Xenophon's work by Aulus Gellius: "libros quos dictorum atque factorum Socratis commentarios composuit." The unity of the work, which was disputed in the past, is now hardly in doubt. H. Erbse made it clear that the whole work, not only the first two chapters of the first book, is a defense of Socrates in a legal style, which has its parallels in Lysias 16. Xenophon probably had in mind not the real accusers of Socrates, but the sophist Polycrates, who in about 393 B.C. had attacked Socrates' memory. Polycrates had produced an imaginary judicial speech against Socrates, and Xenophon answers in a judicially acceptable form. After having concluded the defense in the first two chapters of book I, he says at the beginning of chapter 3: "I propose to show how Socrates helped his companions both by his deeds and his words, and in order to do so, I shall relate all that I remember about them." This corresponds to the rule enunciated by Lysias: "In the dokimasiai one is justified in giving an account of the whole life." But in taking advantage of a legal device, Xenophon exploits it to an extent which makes it impossible to call his work an apology for Socrates. The report, the Memorabilia or Commentarii, became far more important than the apology.

Two questions interest us: whether Xenophon created the new literary genre of the Memorabilia and whether he intended to preserve real conversations of Socrates for posterity. We do not know of any Memorabilia before Xenophon. The fact that they combine a defense of Socrates with recollections of Socrates seems to speak for their originality.

Collections of sayings of philosophers and wise men had undoubtedly circulated in the fifth century.… [Sayings] of the Seven Wise Men were known before Socrates. Herodotus quotes some of them and knows that there were variants in the tradition. The popular wisdom of Aesop was known in the fifth century. It is also possible that written collections of Pythagorean sayings existed before Aristoxenus. But a collection of philosophical conversations as given by Xenophon is another matter, for which I cannot quote an exact parallel in Greece. What we can say is that Xenophon became a model for later compilations. Zeno collected Memorabilia of Crates. Persaeus similarly tried to preserve recollections of Zeno and Stilpo in convivial dialogues which were apparently also called Memorabilia. This tradition has given us Epictetus' speeches, Memorabilia, or, as Stobaeus called them, Apomnemoneumata Epictetou.

It is even more difficult to decide whether Xenophon intended to present real speeches. The question of Xenophon's intention is of course different from the question of whether Xenophon, even if he had intended to give the substance of real conversations in which Socrates had a leading part, was in a condition to fulfil his intention. The more one looks at the speeches, the less one can believe that Xenophon really intended to preserve the memory of the real Socrates. We may stretch our belief to accept that Socrates was waiting for the arrival of Xenophon to lecture his own son Lamprocles on his duties towards his mother (2.2). But the conversation between Socrates and Pericles the Younger is placed in the year in which the latter was a strategos (407 B.C.), though it reflects the situation of the Theban hegemony about 370 B.C. (3.5). The best research from K. Joël to O. Gigon has shown that what Xenophon does is to discuss topics which had been the subject of debate by other Socratics before him. If Xenophon was not exactly the cynic Joël envisaged in his classic book, he learned perhaps more from Antisthenes' writings than from Socrates by word of mouth. All the Socratics were involved in elaborate developments of Socrates' thought which bore little resemblance to the original. The paradoxical conclusion from our point of view is that in the so-called Memorabilia Xenophon created or perfected a biographical form—the report of conversations preceded by a general introduction to the character of the main speaker—but in actual fact used this form for what amounted to fiction.

This brings us to a point which becomes even more evident in Xenophon's greatest contribution to biography, the Cyropaedia. The Cyropaedia is indeed the most accomplished biography we have in classical Greek literature. It is a presentation of the life of a man from beginning to end and gives pride of place to his education and moral character. Nevertheless it is a paedagogical novel. The Cyropaedia was not, and probably never claimed to be, a true account of the life of a real person. Like Ctesias before him, Xenophon took advantage of his oriental subject to disregard historical truth. He was not the first of the Socratics to do so, if we may assume that Antisthenes' Cyrus preceded Xenophon's Cyropaedia in the same direction. The existence of previous Socratic writings of the same type may explain why Xenophon felt no need to warn his readers about the fictitious character of his biography: this was understood. But we shall never be able to tell exactly—even less than in the cases of Ctesias and Theopompus—how much is conscious fabrication of details and how much is elaboration of a tradition already rich in fictional elements. Xenophon had personal knowledge of the Persian state and of Persian institutions, and especially of the Persian army. He had Greek sources to supplement his information. He obviously tried to look plausible and well-informed. The last chapter of the Cyropaedia shows that he was concerned with the decline of the power of Persia just as in the Constitution of Sparta he had shown his concern for the decline of Sparta.

The papyri have definitely shown that erotic oriental romances existed in the first century after Christ, the date of the three extant fragments of the Ninus romance. The Ninus romance itself must be earlier than the date of the earliest papyri and goes back to 100 B.C. at least. We have therefore good reason to believe in the existence of a Hellenistic novel of oriental character. What interests us is that it claimed Xenophon's Cyropaedia as its model. It was remarked long ago that the Suda lexicon knows three Xenophons as authors of erotic romances, of which the alleged author of the extant story Habrocomas and Anthia is one. It seems probable that the name Xenophon in all these cases is a pseudonym or nom de plume, which shows the popularity of the writer of the Cyropaedia among writers and readers of novels. The Cyropaedia included the episode of Abradatas and Panthea, the classic example of a love story. Xenophon himself would have been surprised to know that he had become the great master and model of erotic stories: his Cyropaedia was highly moral. But this was the price he had to pay for producing the first biography, which was no biography at all, being a mixture of facts and fancies to communicate a philosophic message.

The Cyropaedia confirms a suspicion which the Memorabilia had already suggested: namely that true biography was preceded or at least inspiringly accompanied by fiction. The suspicion is reinforced when we think of Herodotus and even more of Ctesias. If Herodotus had honestly tried to separate what he could vouch for from what he could not, Ctesias had none of these preoccupations. He represented an uneasy compromise between history and historical novel which influenced Xenophon. We might easily extend this consideration to Theopompus, who included in the Philippica a long excursus on θαυμάσια, on wondrous happenings, which gave a great deal of novelistic detail about religious prophets—Zoroaster, Epimenides, Silenus, Bakis. Theopompus was resolved to outbid Ctesias and perhaps Xenophon.

This point is important for the understanding of ancient biography at large even after the fourth century B.C. The borderline between fiction and reality was thinner in biography than in ordinary historiography. What readers expected in biography was probably different from what they expected in political history. They wanted information about the education, the love affairs, and the character of their heroes. But these things are less easily documented than wars and political reforms. If biographers wanted to keep their public, they had to resort to fiction. Socratic philosophy and Isocratean rhetoric joined hands in encouraging the introduction of fiction into biography.

I purposely refrain from probing into this matter more deeply, and turn from biography to autobiography.

The first name we meet in connection with fourth-century autobiography is again that of Xenophon. His Anabasis is for us the prototype of commentaries on a campaign written by one of the leading generals. He may have been preceded by his colleague Sophaenetus of Stymphalus, whose Anabasis is quoted by Stephanus Byzantius: but our ignorance of Sophaenetus is complete. E. Schwartz and F. Jacoby think of Sophaenetus' Anabasis as possibly a later forgery. A satisfactory analysis of Xenophon's work in historiographical terms does not appear to exist. His Anabasis is under the influence of fifth-century travel literature in its geographical sections: we have seen that travel literature inevitably had an autobiographical character. In the matter of military campaigns Xenophon has learned something from Thucydides and perhaps also from Ctesias. But he describes military campaigns with a strongly subjective approach and a clearly apologetic tone: he had his enemies. To redress the balance he writes in the third person. He apparently also uses the device of attributing his book to a non-existent Themistogenes. The Anabasis became a model both for its autobiographical character and for the effort to disguise it. The memorialistic literature of later times, to begin with Caesar, owes much to this double, partly contradictory, approach.

A very different kind of autobiographical production is the apologetic speech before a court of law. The famous model was the speech by Antiphon which Thucydides admired so much. It is all lost but for a fragment in a Geneva papyrus. What an authentic apology of this kind could be like is shown by Demosthenes' De corona, admittedly a later development of this genre: it was produced eighty years after Antiphon's speech in 330 B.C. Demosthenes chose the occasion for a complete apology for his anti-Macedonian policy. Part of the speech is inevitably nothing more than a personal attack by Demosthenes on his rival and accuser Aeschines. The rest is an attempt to make the audience realize under what conditions he, Demosthenes, had acted. Demosthenes never allows himself or his audience to forget that they have been defeated. But by placing his decisions in the proper context, he presents them as the only ones compatible with the honour of Athens and of himself. As he explains, it was inconceivable that Athens "should sink to such cowardice as by a spontaneous, voluntary act to surrender her liberty to Philip … The only remaining and the necessary policy was to resist with justice all his unjust designs." Thus Demosthenes provides fragments of his autobiography against the background of the Athenian resistance to Macedon. He searches his own past. He has to defend himself and therefore the results of his search are predetermined. Yet one feels that his question— whether an alternative conduct was morally possible— is not a rhetorical one. The fascination of the De corona lies in its basic sincerity. The speech is autobiographical not only because it deals with episodes of Demosthenes' life but because it is unified by a strange, powerful, tantalizing examination of the whole of his past.

The real apologetic speech was bound to produce the artificial apology, the speech written not for a trial but for home reading in defense either of somebody else or of oneself. Neither Plato's nor Xenophon's Apologies of Socrates were ever uttered. Though presented as having been composed and pronounced by Socrates, they were in fact written by his pupils long after Socrates' death. They are biographical sketches disguised as autobiographical sketches. They show Socrates aware of what either Plato or Xenophon knew. We shall never know the exact relation of these two documents to Socrates' true speeches. Of course Plato's picture does not agree with that of Xenophon and is incomparably more profound; but both pictures have their limits fixed by the true terms of the indictment against Socrates. The fiction is anchored to truth: the pseudoutobiography must be true biography to a certain extent.