Xenophon

But I am surprised by how accepting Xenophon is of this, both in the words and the various deeds of his perfect emperor, he so wonderfully measured an author in such things, as a distinguished leader and a philosopher among the first disciples of Socrates.

In that excellent institution that Xenophon attributes to the Persians, we find that they taught their children virtue, as other nations do letters.

Astyages, in Xenophon, asks Cyrus to give an account of his last lesson;

When Agesilaus courted Xenophon to send his children to Sparta to be bred, “it is not,” said he, “there to learn logic or rhetoric, but to be instructed in the noblest of all sciences, namely, the science to obey and to command.

for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own.

If the acts of Xenophon and Caesar had not far transcended their eloquence, I scarce believe they would ever have taken the pains to have written them;

But King Hiero in Xenophon says further, that in the fruition even of pleasure itself they are in a worse condition than private men;

In that bloody battle betwixt Agesilaus and the Boeotians, which Xenophon, who was present at it, reports to be the sharpest that he had ever seen, Agesilaus waived the advantage that fortune presented him, to let the Boeotian battalions pass by and then to charge them in the rear, how certain soever he might make himself of the victory, judging it would rather be an effect of conduct than valor to proceed that way;

which is the reason, says Xenophon, why those of Asia carried their wives and concubines, with their choicest jewels and greatest wealth, along with them to the wars.

We read in Xenophon a law forbidding any one who was master of a horse to travel on foot.

You stake (whatever Chrysanthes in Xenophon says to the contrary) your valor and your fortune upon that of your horse;

Xenophon tells us, that the Assyrians were fain to keep their horses fettered in the stable, they were so fierce and vicious;

There is, as I remember, a passage in Xenophon where he tells us that we ought so much the more seldom to call upon God, by how much it is hard to compose our souls to such a degree of calmness, patience, and devotion as it ought to be in at such a time;

If this good man be yet living, I would recommend to him Xenophon, to do as much by that;

Xenophon reports a like perplexity in Socrates’s doctrine;

Socrates in Xenophon, concerning this affair, says of Anaxagoras, reputed by antiquity learned above all others in celestial and divine matters, “That he had cracked his brain, as all other men do who too immoderately search into knowledges which nothing belong to them:

but I likewise know that the greatest masters, and Xenophon and Plato are often seen to stoop to this low and popular manner of speaking and treating of things, but supporting it with graces which never fail them.

Caesar and Xenophon had a just and solid foundation whereon to found their narrations, the greatness of their own performances;

He was ashamed if any one in public saw him spit, or sweat (which is said by some, also, of the Lacedaemonian young men, and which Xenophon says of the Persian), forasmuch as he conceived that exercise, continual labor, and sobriety, ought to have dried up all those superfluities.

“I do not believe,” says he, “that Xenophon himself, if he were now living, though he were allowed to write whatever pleased him to the advantage of Agesilaus, would dare to bring them into comparison.

Scipio Africanus, Xenophon;

following the advice of Cyrus in Xenophon, forasmuch as the deception is not of so great importance to find an enemy weaker than we expected, than to find him really very strong, after having been made to believe that he was weak.

According to the saying of Cyrus in Xenophon, “’Tis not the number of men, but the number of good men, that gives the advantage”:

Xenophon was sacrificing with a crown upon his head when one came to bring him news of the death of his son Gryllus, slain in the battle of Mantinea:

and the same wound, the same fatigue, is not, says Xenophon, so intolerable to a general of an army as to a common soldier.

Xenophon lays it for an objection and an accusation against Menon, that he never made love to any but old women.

I am of opinion that, in Plato and Xenophon, Socrates disputes more in favor of the disputants than in favor of the dispute, and more to instruct Euthydemus and Protagoras in the, knowledge of their impertinence, than in the impertinence of their art.

and, contrary to others, I am more devout in good than in evil fortune, according to the precept of Xenophon, if not according to his reason;

I would fain know how it was that the Persians, so long ago and in the infancy of luxury, made ventilators where they wanted them, and planted shades, as Xenophon reports they did.

Xenophon, in the very bosom of Clinias, wrote against the Aristippic virtue.

Imagine this in Xenophon, related as a fine commendation of Agesilaus:

and Socrates minutely verifies it in Xenophon.

I don’t know about this, but there are wonderful instances of it that Socrates, Xenophon, and Aristotle, men of irreproachable authority, relate.

It was he who in the Delian battle, raised and saved Xenophon when fallen from his horse;