Xenophon Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Xenophon

The reputation of Xenophon the Athenian is higher in the present era than it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but whatever the fluctuation in the literary assessments of this versatile writer, his books have traveled through the centuries, all of them surviving, from papyrus roll to codex to contemporary cyberspace. Clearly he has been an enduring literary presence in the Western tradition. He enjoyed a high standing among the Romans and was a standard curricular author. Quintilian, in his Institutio Oratoria (late first century A.D.), quotes Cicero's remark about Xenophon, "that the Muses spoke with his mouth," a fair summation of Roman opinion. Lost to the medieval West, Xenophon continued to be read in the Greek East until his rediscovery during the Renaissance, when his Cyropaedia particularly enjoyed wide popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Xenophon's work continued to be staple reading for the educated, if not in Greek, at least in translation, through the eighteenth century; but by the beginning of the nineteenth century he was becoming the property of the professional classicist.

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