Ancient Information on Persia Re-assessed: Xenophon’s Cyropaedia

In the past Xenophon’s Cyropaedia has attracted the attention of scholars primarily for literary-historical reasons. It is one of the main tasks of the present publication to free discussion of the work from this relatively narrow disciplinary constraint. As questions of genre cannot be ignored anyway, the volume opens with contributions that consider where Cyropaedia stands in relation to historiography, the novel and Socratic literature. The next group of studies deals with how Xenophon drew on material from other authors and from his own experience to develop a picture of the emergence of the Persian Empire and of the way in which power was exercised there. Investigations of this sort presuppose questions about the historië that underpins Cyropaedia, and that topic is the focus of two further contributions that deal specifically with the types of information that were available to Xenophon. A final group of contributions looks at the impact of the work in canonical and deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament, in the writings of the Alexander historians and in modern literature up to the 18th century.