[In the excerpt that follows, Bury assesses Xenophon as one of the primary historians to follow Thucydides 's career. Of the three that he examines, he finds Xenophon the "least meritorious," but influential nonetheless.]

Thucydides had set up a new standard and proposed a new model for historical investigation. He taught the Greeks to write contemporary political history; this was the permanent result of his work. But the secret of his critical methods may be said to have perished with him; it has been reserved for modern students fully to appreciate his critical acumen, and to estimate the immense labours which underlay the construction of his history but are carefully concealed like the foundation stones of a building. Influences came into play in the fourth century which drove history along other paths than those which he marked out; the best of the principles which his work had inculcated did not become canonical; and his historical treatment was not sympathetic under the new intellectual constellations.

The age succeeding his death was perhaps not favourable to the composition of political history. The engrossing intellectual interest was then political science, and the historical method had not been invented. The men who might otherwise have shone as historians were engaged in speculations on the nature of the state. They were eagerly seeking an answer to the speculative question: What is the best constitution? Only three historians of note arose in this period; they were more or less under the influence of Thucydides, but at long intervals behind.

Of these the only name familiar to posterity is Xenophon, who was probably the least meritorious of the three. To the circumstance that he is one of the very few classical Greek historians whose work has survived, he owes a prominence to which his qualities do not entitle him. In history as in philosophy he was a dilettante; he was as far from understanding the methods of Thucydides as he was from apprehending the ideas of Socrates. He had a happy literary talent, and his multifarious writings, taken together, render him an interesting figure in Greek literature. But his mind was essentially mediocre, incapable of penetrating beneath the surface of things. If he had lived in modern days, he would have been a high-class journalist and pamphleteer; he would have made his fortune as a war-correspondent; and would have written the life of some mediocre hero of the stamp of Agesilaus. So far as history is concerned, his true vocation was to write memoirs. The Anabasis is a memoir, and it is the most successful of his works. It has the defects which memoirs usually have, but it has the merits, the freshness, the human interest of a personal document. The adventures of the Ten Thousand are alive for ever in Xenophon's pages.

He took up the story of the Peloponnesian war where Thucydides had left it, and he carried down the history of Greece from that date to the fall of the Theban supremacy, in the work which we know as the Hellenica. By this work his powers as a historian must be judged. Some of its characteristics are due to the superficial lessons which the author learned from the founder of political history. In the first portion of the book he employed strictly the annalistic plan of Thucydides. He adopted the device of introducing speeches, and the objective method of allowing the actors to reveal themselves in their acts and words. He does not himself pourtray their characters, as he pourtrays Cyrus and the generals in the Anabasis. But he never goes down below the surface of events; he never analyses the deeper motives; and he writes with little disguise of his own predilections. His history is an apotheosis of Agesilaus; he does not conceal his strong philo-Laconian leanings or his hatred of Thebes; he pointedly ignores Epaminondas. His ideas about historical happenings were those of the average, conventional Athenian; and he ascribes the fall of the Spartan supremacy to divine nemesis, avenging the treacherous occupation of the Theban citadel. He cannot resist the commonplace attraction of commonplace moralising; he tells anecdotes which his austere predecessor would have disdained; but he has learned from Thucydides to keep to the matter in hand.

Other works of Xenophon had more influence than the Hellenica, on subsequent historiography; or, as it would probably be safer to say, reflected an interest which was to become not only permanent in literature but a conspicuous feature in history. I am referring to biography. Interest, deliberate and serious interest, in individual personalities, had been awakened by the sophistic illumination; and Euripides probably did as much as any single man to heighten and deepen it. A new branch of literature, biography, emerged; and the word [bios] life, acquired a new meaning, charged with the whole contents of a man's actions and character. Biography was founded by Isocrates and the pupils of Socrates. The earliest biography we possess is the Evagoras of Isocrates, and it is to this model that we owe the second, the Agesilaus of Xenophon. In other works of Isocrates also there are biographical sketches, and perhaps the portraits in the Anabasis were due to his influence. We can see too that the original personality of Socrates, which made a deep impression on his disciples, was effective in helping to establish this kind of literature; most of them used their pens; and the incidental portraiture of Plato, and the Memoirs of Xenophon, which are not a Life, have their significance for the rise of biography. I have not to follow its further development or to show how it was stimulated by the Peripatetic school. As a literary art ancient biography reached its highest perfection in Plutarch's gallery of great men. That series is invaluable to us, because the author consulted many books which are now lost; but he was not a historian; his interest was ethical. What we are here concerned to note is that, after Xenophon and Isocrates, historians generally considered sketches of character and biographical facts to be part of their business. It was a feature which was flagrantly liable to abuse, and often led to irrelevancies, which would have shocked Thucydides. But although, in practice, ancient character-portraits tended to be conventional and uninstructive, it was in principle an important advance to recognise that the analysis of character and personality has historical value, and cannot be confined within the limits which Thucydides had allowed.