Cyropaedia: The Education of Cyrus Part 26

[12] In the old time they went out to hunt so often that the chase gave enough exercise and training for man and horse alike. But when the day came that Artaxerxes and all his court were the worse for wine, the old custom of the king leading the hunt in person began to pa.s.s away. And if any eager spirits hunted with their own followers it was easy to see the jealousy, and even the hatred, aroused by such superiority.

[13] It is still the habit to bring up the boys at the palace-gates, but fine horsemanship has disappeared, for there is no place where the lads can win applause by their skill. The old belief that the children of Persia would learn justice by hearing the judges decide the cases has been turned upside down: the children have only to use their eyes and they see that the verdict goes to the man with the longest purse. [14]

Children in former times were taught the properties of plants in order to use the wholesome and avoid the harmful; but now they seem to learn it for the mere sake of doing harm: at any rate, there is no country where deaths from poison are so common. [15] And the Persian to-day is far more luxurious than he was in the time of Cyrus. Then they still clung to the Persian style of education and the Persian self-restraint, merely adopting the Median dress and a certain grace of life. But now the old Persian hardihood may perish for all they care, if only they preserve the softness of the Mede. [16] I might give instances of their luxury. They are not content with soft sheets and rugs for their beds, they must have carpets laid under the bed-posts to prevent any jarring from the floor. They have given up none of the cooked dishes invented in former days; on the contrary, they are always devising new ones, and condiments to boot: in fact, they keep men for the very purpose. [17] In the winter it is not enough to have the body covered, and the head and the feet, they must have warm sleeves as well and gloves for the hands: and in the summer they are not content with the shade from the trees or the rocks, they must have servants standing beside them with artificial screens. [18] To have an endless array of cups and goblets is their special pride: and if these are come by unjustly, and all the world knows it, why, there is nothing to blush for in that: injustice has grown too common among them, and ill-gotten gain. [19] Formerly no Persian was ever to be seen on foot, but the sole object of the custom was to make them perfect hors.e.m.e.n. Now they lay more rugs on their horses' backs than on their own beds; it is not a firm seat they care for, but a soft saddle.

[20] As soldiers we may imagine how they have sunk below the ancient standard; in past times it was a national inst.i.tution that the land-owner should furnish troopers from his own estate, and men were bound to go on active service, while the garrison troops in the country received regular pay; but now the Persian grandees have manufactured a new type of cavalry, who earn their pay as butlers and cooks and confectioners and cupbearers and bathmen and flunkeys to serve at table or remove the dishes, and serving-men to put their lords to bed and help them to rise, and perfumers to anoint them and rub them and make them beautiful. [21] In numbers they make a very splendid show, but they are no use for fighting; as may be seen by what actually takes place: an enemy can move about their country more freely than the inhabitants themselves. [22] It will be remembered that Cyrus put a stop to the old style of fighting at long range, and by arming men and horses with breastplates and giving each trooper a short spear he taught them to fight at close quarters. But nowadays they will fight in neither one style nor the other. [23] The infantry still carry the large shields, the battle-axes, and the swords, as if they meant to do battle as they did in Cyrus' day. [24] But they will never close with the enemy. Nor do they use the scythe-bearing chariots as Cyrus intended. By the honours he gave he raised the dignity and improved the quality of his charioteers till he had a body of men who would charge right into the enemy's ranks; but the generals of to-day, though they do not even know the charioteers by sight, flatter themselves that untrained men will serve their purpose quite as well as trained. [25] So the charioteers will dash off, but before they reach the enemy half the men have fallen from their boxes, and the others will jump out of their own accord, and the teams, left without their drivers, will do more harm to their friends than to their foes. [26] And since in their hearts the Persians of to-day are well aware what their fighting condition really is, they always give up the struggle, and now none of them will take the field at all without h.e.l.lenes to help them, whether they are fighting among themselves or whether h.e.l.lenes are in arms against them: even then it is a settled thing that they must have the aid of other h.e.l.lenes to face them.

[27] I venture to think I have shown the truth of the statement that I made. I a.s.serted that the Persians of to-day and their allies are less religious than they were of old, less dutiful to their kindred, less just and righteous towards other men, and less valiant in war. And if any man doubts me, let him examine their actions for himself, and he will find full confirmation of all I say.

NOTES

C1. Xenophon puts into the mouth of Chrysantas his favourite theory of monarchism, the relationship strongly cemented by obedience and trust between subjects and king.

C1.4, med. On _willing_ service. This again is one of the best utterances in all Xenophon. It has a deep spiritual import.

C1.4, fin. He is thinking of Athens, perhaps. It is a choice: obey the ruler or knock under to foreign foes.

C1.8. Surely a remark of the author. It is an old inveterate thought of his: "the Master's eye." I feel the _old_ man at times.

C1.9-10. This side of the Persian state-machine strongly impressed the mind and imagination of Xenophon. Hence he works it into the treatise on economy as well as here. In fact his expansion of the Socratic reflections into the _Economist_ has to do, I believe, with these reflections on state economy.

C1.13. h.e.l.lenic aristocratic theory of existence. Leisure for the grand duties which devolve on the lords of mankind. It doesn't seem to strike Xenophon that this rigid system of self-absorption in the higher selfhood of the social system might be destructive of individual life.

Of course he would say, "No, it enlarges the individual life."

C1.17-20. Seems to me to show Xenophon struggling with the hard parts of the later Persian system. The theory of Persian feudalism is too high-strung for these grand satraps, rulers of provinces as big as ordinary kingdoms. It tends to snap, and from the beginning did. The archic man has no charm to compel his followers to archic virtue. It is a negative {episteme} after all. Does Xenophon realise this, or is hgd.

wrong?

C1.21. Cf. headmasters with preposters in a public school, based on the same system of high aims and duties corresponding to rights.

C1.23, init. Cf. Louis Napoleon in Browning's poem [_Prince Hohensteil-Schw.a.n.gau_].

C1.23, med. The Magians, the Persian order of priests. Yet we have heard of them throughout.

C1.27. A very true saying and very nice the feeling it gives us towards Xenophon. We think of him with his wife and his little sons and his friends and their friends.

C1.28. How true of women!

C1.33. A reduplication of the description in Bk. I., and also a summing-up of Xenophon's own earthly paradise--quite Tennysonian.

C1.37. An important point or principle in Xenophon's political theory--indeed the key and tone of it: no one has a right to command except by virtue of personal superiority.

C1.40 foll. "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" The section, if, as I think it is, by Xenophon, throws light on the nature and composition of the book. The author isn't so disengaged from "history" that he can set aside obviously integral parts of the Persian system traceable to Cyrus, or at any rate probably original, and their false-seeming and bamboozling mode of keeping up dignity has to be taken account of. It has its a.n.a.logy in the admission of thaumaturgy on the part of religious teachers, and no doubt a good deal can be said for it. The archic man in low spirits, if he ever is so, has some need of bamboozling himself. t.i.tles do give some moral support even nowadays to certain kinds of minds.

C1.46-48. The archic man's dealings by those of his subjects who are apt to rule, the men of high thoughts and ambitions, with whom he must come into constant personal contact. With them the spiritual dominance alone will do. They shall be made to love him rather than themselves.

(The only thing just here that jars is a sort of Machiavellian self-consciousness, resented in the archic man).

C1.46. A c.u.mbrous disjointed sentence, but the thought of it is clear enough. Even Xenophon's style breaks down when he tries to say in a breath more than he naturally can. Is it a sign of senility, or half-thought-out ideas, or what?

C2.2, fin. Does Xenophon feel the bathos of this, or is hdg. wrong and there is no bathos? It may be said that the sacramental and spiritual side is not in abeyance. Xenophon has to account for the "common board"

and he has the Spartan Lycurgan "common board" to encourage him, so that imaginatively he provides this royal being with a sumptuous table at which thousands will share alike.

C2.3. How far was this a custom among h.e.l.lenes? It reveals a curious state of society, real or imaginary; but I suppose that at Rome in imperial days (cf. _panem et circenses_) the theory of meat and drink largesses being the best would hold.

C2.4, fin. The last remark is so silly (?) I am almost disposed to follow Lincke and admit interpolation. Yet on the whole I think it is the voice of the old man explaining in his Vicar-of-Wakefield style, to his admiring auditors, wife, children, and grandsons, I fancy, and slaves, the _raison d'etre_ of Persian dinner-largesse customs.

C2.6. Qy.: What was Xenophon's manner of composing? The style here is loose, like that of a man talking. Perhaps he lectured and the amanuensis took down what he said.

C2.8. Inept.i.tudes. One does somewhat sniff an editor here, I think, but I am not sure. There's a similar touch of inept.i.tude (senility, perhaps) in the _Memorabilia_, _ad fin_. On the other hand I can imagine Xenophon purring over this side of Orientalism quite naturally.

C2.12. This slipshod style, how accounted for? The most puzzling thing of all is the sort of mental confusion between Cyrus and the king in general.

C2.15-16. Thoroughly Xenophontine and Ruskinian and eternal.

C2.24. Here is the germ of benefit societies and clubs and insurances and hospitals. Xenophon probably learns it all from Ctesias, and others of the sort. Cyrus provides doctors and instruments and medicines and diet, in fact, all the requisites of a hospital, in his palace. Nor does he forget to be grateful to the doctors who cured the sick. [Ctesias, the Greek physician to the Persian king. See _Anabasis_, I. viii. Works, Vol. I. p. 108.]

C2.26 ff. Xenophon's Machiavellianism. Does it work?

C2.17-28. It seems to me that all this is too elaborate for an interpolator: it smacks of Xenophon in his arm-chair, theorising and half-dreaming over his political philosophy.

C3.2. Prototype, a procession to Eleusis or elsewhere: the Panathenaic, possibly. Xenophon's sumptuous taste and love of bright colours.

C3.3, fin., C3.4. What a curious prototypic sound! Truly this is the very _modus_ of the evangelist's type of sentence. His narrative must run in this mould.

C3.4, fin. This is the old Cyrus. It comes in touchingly here, this refrain of the old song, now an echo of the old life.

C3.14. Xenophon delights somewhat in this sort of scene. It is a turning-point, a veritable moral peripety, though the decisive step was taken long ago. What is Xenophon's intention with regard to it? Has he any _parti pris_, for or against? Does he wish us to draw conclusions?

Or does it correspond to a moral meeting of the waters in his own mind?

Here love of Spartan simplicity, and there of splendour and regality and monarchism? He does not give a hint that the sapping of the system begins here, when the archic man ceases to depend on his own spiritual archic qualities and begins to eke out his dignity by artificial means and external shows of reverence.

C3.20. Is this worthy of the archic man? It is a method, no doubt, of {arkhe}, but has it any spiritual "last" in it? The incident of Dapharnes somewhat diverts our attention from the justice of the system in reference to the suitors. On the whole, I think Xenophon can't get further. He is blinded and befogged by two things: (1) his (i.e. their) aristocratism, and again (2) his satisfaction in splendour and get-up, provided it is attached to moral greatness. We are in the same maze, I fancy. Jesus was not, nor is Walt Whitman.

C3.23. Cyrus is made to behave rather like the autocratic father of a goody story-book.

C3.25. Realistic and vivid detailing: our curiosity is satisfied. "Who has won?" we ask. "Oh, so-and-so, Smith." Well, it's something to know that Smith has won. Xenophon, the artist, 'cutely introduces the Sakian to us. One scene takes up another, just as in real life. Quite soon we know a great deal more about this young man, a mere Sakian private soldier, who wins the race so easily on his splendid horse. Cyrus and good fortune introduce him to the very man he is suited to: viz.

Pheraulas.

C3.37. Pheraulas' boyhood has already been sketched by himself (II.

C3.7), the active st.u.r.dy little youngster, s.n.a.t.c.hing at a knife, and hacking away _con amore_. We know him well: Xenophon's modernism comes out in these things. Here we have the old father, a heart of oak, like the old Acharnian in Aristophanes. One of the prettiest morsels in all Xenophon. Xenophon's own father, is he there?

C3.47. The desire for "leisure" is as strong in Xenophon as in hgd. or S. T. I., I think. [S. T. Irwin, also a master at Clifton.]

C4.1. Why is the Hyrcanian never named? Is it conceivable that Xenophon shrinks from using a proper name except when he has some feeling for the sound of the language? (Sic. Sakians, Cadousians, Indians, etc.)

C4.4 The "mark" system again which Xenophon believes in, but hgd. not.

Shows how he tried to foster compet.i.tiveness. It's after all a belief in the central sun, a species of monarch-worship, logical and consistent enough.

C4.8. Xenophon reveals himself and the h.e.l.lenic feeling with regard to war and its use. The _pax Romana_ is antic.i.p.ated in their minds.

C4.9. Hystaspas is rather like the sons of Zebedee or the elder brother of the Prodigal.