The military part is exceedingly well done. Xenophon was one of the few good strategists whom Hellas produced, and his remarks on tactics, the hygiene of an army, and discipline are sound and useful. What is more, his novel is interesting and occasionally witty: it is distinctly good reading. He has disguised his powder in the most appetising jam, and so has achieved with success the difficult task of writing a novel with a purpose. Had books been common then, his work would have been both popular and useful in Boys’ Libraries, and have done good service as a school prize. But from Plato it only provoked the malicious and not very deep criticism that it was unhistorical and unsound.[732] “Of Kuros,” he says, “I conjecture that, though he was a good general and a patriot, he had not come across the merest scrap of sound education, and never applied his mind to the art of managing a household.[733] For, being absent on campaigns all his life, he allowed the women to bring up his children. The women spoilt the boys, letting no one gainsay them, and made them effeminate, not teaching them the Persian habits or their father’s profession, but Median luxury. Hence the collapse of Persia under Kambuses.”
[716] Xen. Econ. 19.
[717] Aristotle (Pol. vii. 12) says that “Free Agoras” were customary in Thessaly. He adopts the system for his ideal state—a clear compliment to Xenophon.
[718] Floggings were apparently to be frequent. “Tears are a master’s instruments of instruction” (ii. 2. 14).
[719] viii. 8. 14.
[720] Hence his treatise on hunting.
[721] i. 2. 10.
[722] i. 6. 39-40.
[723] i. 3. 17.
[724] Cp. the experiment which was, I believe, tried in an American school, where the boys learned the national constitution by themselves electing in due form a President, Congress, etc.