Deinarchus appears to have composed for a client at Athens a judicial speech against Xenophon, the grandson of Xenophon Sokraticus. He introduced into the speech some facts relating to the grandfather.
Family of Xenophon — his son Gryllus killed at Mantinea.
Xenophon seems to have passed many years of his life either at Skillus or in other parts of Peloponnesus, and is said to have died very old at Corinth. The sentence of banishment passed against him by the Athenians was revoked after the battle of Leuktra, when Athens came into alliance with the Lacedæmonians against Thebes. Some of Xenophon’s later works indicate that he must have availed himself of this revocation to visit Athens: but whether he permanently resided there is uncertain. He had brought over with him from Asia a wife named Philesia, by whom he had two sons, Gryllus and Diodorus.[11] He sent these two youths to be trained at Sparta, under the countenance of Agesilaus:[12] afterwards the eldest of them, Gryllus, served with honour in the Athenian cavalry which assisted the Lacedæmonians and Mantineians against Epameinondas, B.C. 362. In the important combat[13] of the Athenian and Theban cavalry, close to the gates of Mantineia — shortly preceding the general battle of Mantineia, in which Epameinondas was slain — Gryllus fell, fighting with great bravery. The death of this gallant youth — himself seemingly of great promise, and the son of so eminent a father — was celebrated by Isokrates and several other rhetors, as well as by the painter Euphranor at Athens, and by sculptors at Mantineia itself.[14]
[11] Æschines Sokraticus, in one of his dialogues, introduced Aspasia conversing with Xenophon and his (Xenophon’s) wife. Cicero, De Invent. i. 31, 51-54; Quintil. Inst. Orat. v. p. 312.
[12] Plutarch, Agesilaus, c. 20.
[13] Xenoph. Hellen. vii. 5, 15-16-17. This combat of cavalry near the gates of Mantineia was very close and sharply contested; but at the great battle fought a few days afterwards the Athenian cavalry were hardly at all engaged, vii. 5, 25.
[14] Pausanias, i. 3, 3, viii. 11, 4, ix. 15, 3; Diogenes L. ii. 54. Harpokration v. Κηφισόδωρος.
It appears that Euphranor, in his picture represented Gryllus as engaged in personal conflict with Epameinondas and wounding him — a compliment not justified by the facts. The Mantineians believed Antikrates, one of their own citizens, to have mortally wounded the great Theban general with his spear, and they awarded to him as recompense immunity from public burthens (ἀτέλειαν), both for himself and his descendants. One of his descendants, Kallikrates, continued even in Plutarch’s time to enjoy this immunity. Plutarch, Agesilaus, c. 35.
Death of Xenophon at Corinth — Story of the Eleian Exegetæ.
Skillus, the place in which the Lacedæmonians had established Xenophon, was retaken by the Eleians during the humiliation of Lacedæmonian power, not long before the battle of Mantineia. Xenophon himself was absent at the time; but his family were constrained to retire to Lepreum. It was after this, we are told, that he removed to Corinth, where he died in 355 B.C. or in some year later. The Eleian Exegetæ told the traveller Pausanias, when he visited the spot five centuries afterwards, that Xenophon had been condemned in the judicial Council of Olympia as wrongful occupant of the property at Skillus, through Lacedæmonian violence; but that the Eleians had granted him indulgence, and had allowed him to remain.[15] As it seems clearly asserted that he died at Corinth, he can hardly have availed himself of the indulgence; and I incline to suspect that the statement is an invention of subsequent Eleian Exegetæ, after they had learnt to appreciate his literary eminence.