"If you inquire into the origins of the novel long enough," writes James Tatum in the preface to this work, ". . . you will come to the fourth century before our era and Xenophon's Education of Cyrus, or the Cyropaedia." The Cyrus in question is Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire celebrated in the Book of Ezra as the liberator of Israel, and the Cyropaedia, written to instruct future rulers by his example, became not only an inspiration to poets and novelists but a profoundly influential political work. With Alexander as its earliest student, and Elizabeth I of England one of its later pupils, it was the founding text for the tradition of "mirrors for princes" in the West, including Machiavelli's Prince. Xenophon's masterpiece has been overlooked in recent years: Tatum's goal is to make it fully meaningful for the twentieth-century reader. To accomplish this aim, he uses reception study, philological and historical criticism, and an intertextual and structural analysis of the narrative. Engaging the fictional and the political in a single reading, he explains how the form of the work allowed Xenophon to transcend the limitations of historical writing, although in the end the historian's passion for truth forced him to subvert the work in a controversial epilogue. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The arts of rule cover the exercise of power by princes and popular sovereigns, but they range beyond the domain of government itself, extending to civil associations, political parties, and religious institutions. Making full use of political philosophy from a range of backgrounds, this festschrift for Harvey Mansfield recognizes that although the arts of rule are comprehensive, the best government is a limited one.

There was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored "ethnic and cultural," but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society. Magisterial in scope and scholarship, and engagingly written, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity further suggests that an understanding of ancient attitudes toward other peoples sheds light not only on Greco-Roman imperialism and the ideology of enslavement (and the concomitant integration or non-integration) of foreigners in those societies, but also on the disintegration of the Roman Empire and on more recent imperialism as well. The first part considers general themes in the history of discrimination; the second provides a detailed analysis of proto-racism and prejudices toward particular groups of foreigners in the Greco-Roman world. The last chapter concerns Jews in the ancient world, thus placing anti-Semitism in a broader context.

The role of kings, the source of their authority and the nature of the practical restraints on their power have exercised political and religious philosophers, historians, competing candidates for rule and subject populations from the time of the earliest documented human societies. How the kingly image is created and presented and how the ruler performs his or her function as the source of justice are among the topics addressed in this volume, which also covers the role of queens in maintaining dynastic succession yet being the target of tales of adultery. This volume is of particular interest in bringing together studies of kingly power from Cyrus the Great and Alexander in the ancient world to Shah Abbas in the seventeenth century, and covering the European Middle Ages as well as Iran and the Muslim world.

Introduces Xenophon's writings and their importance for Western culture, while explaining the main scholarly controversies.

'Our present appreciation of Greek and Roman literature should be informed and influenced by consideration of what it was originally appreciated for. The past, for all its alienness, affects and changes the present.'The focus of this book - its new perspective - is on the 'receivers' of literature: readers, spectators, and audiences. Six contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, explore the various and changing interactions between the makers of literature and their audiences or readers from theearliest Greek poetry through to the drama, history, and philosophy of Greece under Roman rule.The contributors deploy fresh insights to map out lively and provocative, yet accessible, surveys. They cover the kinds of literature which have shaped western culture - epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, rhetoric, epigram, elegy, pastoral, satire, biography, epistle, declamation,and panegyric. Who were the audiences, and why did they regard their literature as so important?

In one of the most charming works to survive from classical antiquity, Xenophon’s Symposium depicts an amiable evening of wine, entertainment, and conversation shared by Socrates, and a few of his associates, with certain Athenian gentlemen who are gathered to honor a young man for his recent victory in the Panathenaic games. The subtle playfulness which characterizes the animated discussions conceals a light-hearted, yet surprisingly philosophical inquiry regarding the rival claims of virtue, articulated and defended by the Socratics and gentlemen to establish the praiseworthiness and excellence of their competing ways of life. Gentlemanliness, taken as an admired political virtue, and philosophy, as pursuit of wisdom and self-sufficiency, emerge as contested ideas about what constitutes the path to human happiness, especially in response to the beautiful and its compelling arousal of erotic desire in the body and soul. Offering a comprehensive account and interpretation of the Symposium, this book follows the speeches and action of the dialogue through its many twists and turns, from beginning to end, with particular attention to the place of rhetoric in the argument of the work as a whole. Thus, Xenophon's Socratic Rhetoric examines foundational aspects of the philosophic life manifest in the words as well as deeds of Socrates in this dialogue--starting from an original reading of the opening scene as a harbinger of the competition in wisdom that occurs over the course of the symposium, and concluding with a provocative consideration of conjugal erotics as the continuation and completion of the Socratic logos about the role of love in guiding human beings toward virtue and happiness.

The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 studies the conception of Persia in the literary, political and pedagogic writings of Renaissance England and Britain. It argues that writers of all kinds debated the means and merits of English empire through their intellectual engagement with the ancient Persian empire.

The focus of this book--its new perspective--is on the 'receivers' of literature: readers, spectators, and audiences. Twelve contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, explore the various and changing interactions between the makers of literature and their audiences or readers from the earliest Greek poetry to the end of the Roman empires in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. From the heights of Athens to the hellenistic Greek diaspora, from the great Augustans to the irresistible tide of Christianity, the contributors deploy fresh insights to map out lively and provocative, yet accessible, surveys. They cover the kinds of literature which have shaped western culture--epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, rhetoric, epigram, elegy, pastoral, satire, biography, epistle, declamation, and panegyric. Who were the audiences, and why did they regard their literature as so important? --jacket.

An interpretation of Xenophon's Anabasis of Cyrus, paralleling the text to Machiavelli's The Prince, and focusing on the question: How did the Socratic education help Xenophon reconcile morality with effectiveness, the noble with the good, as a ruler?