by Xenophon
CHAPTER 11
[1]Lions, leopards, lynxes, panthers, bears and other exotic animals are caught in foreign lands, on or around mountains which provide suitable habitats for such creatures, such as Pangaeum, Cissus north [2] of Macedon,1 Olympus in Mysia, Pindus or Nysa east of Syria. Because the terrain is so difficult, one way of taking them is by using aconite as a poison. Hunters mix it with the animals’ favourite food and leave [3] it near pools and other places they visit. When they come down off the mountain at night, they may be driven into a corner by mounted and armed men, and taken this way, although this method is dangerous [4] for the men involved. For some of these animals, people dig large, deep, round pits, leaving a pillar of earth in the middle. They put a goat in the pit in the evening, tie it to the pillar and build a fence of undergrowth all around the pit, with no entrances, and high enough not to be looked over.* During the night animals hear the goat inside, run around the outside of the fence and, failing to find a way in, leap over the top and are caught.
CHAPTER 12
So much for the practical aspects of hunting.1 A strong desire to hunt [1] can also lead to a great deal of profit. It makes for physical fitness, improves the sight and hearing, slows down the process of growing old, and above all it is good training for warfare.
They will not, for instance, get tired when marching under arms [2] across difficult terrain, because they will have built up their stamina by their habit of carrying weapons when hunting animals.2 Secondly, they will be able to sleep rough and efficiently guard any spot they are assigned. When attacking the enemy, they will be capable of [3] carrying out their orders as well as the assault, because that is how they do things themselves when hunting game. If they have been posted in the front line, they will not break rank, because they are capable of maintaining a position in the face of danger. If the enemy [4] troops are in flight, they will pursue their opponents in the correct manner and without taking risks, across every kind of terrain, because they are perfectly familiar with this kind of activity. If their own force has suffered a setback in terrain that is wooded, precipitous or otherwise awkward, they will be capable of saving themselves in a respectable manner, and of keeping others alive too, because their familiarity with hunting will increase their level of expertise. In the past, in fact, even [5] with the main body of their allies in flight, a few such men have renewed the battle against the victorious enemy and have routed them, thanks to their fitness* and courage in difficult terrain which has caused the enemy to make mistakes. For those in prime physical and mental condition success is never far off.3
Our ancestors too were aware that this is the means of success [6] against the enemy, and that is why they made hunting part of a young man’s course of studies. Even though they were always short of produce, it was the original custom, instituted by them, that hunters could freely follow game through fields bearing any kind of crop; [7] they also prohibited night-hunting within a radius of many stades from the city, so that those who possessed this skill would not deprive young men of their game.4 They appreciated that hunting is the only thing young people enjoy doing which does them a very great deal of good, in the sense that it brings them up surrounded by reality, [8] and so gives them self-restraint and honesty; they realized that their successes in war and in other areas were due to these men. Moreover, whereas other enjoyable activities – the base ones, which should not be studied – debar young men from noble pursuits, hunting does not: they can undertake any other honourable occupation they like.5 These, then, are the kinds of men who develop into fine soldiers and [9] military commanders. For men who have striven to rid their minds and bodies of all that is disgraceful and immoderate, and to instil instead a growing desire for virtue, are men of outstanding worth, because they will not let anyone get away with wronging their city or harming their land.
[10] Some people claim that a passion for hunting is misguided, on the grounds that it makes one neglect one’s domestic affairs. They do not understand, however, that every benefactor of his community and [11] friends is taking particularly good care of his domestic affairs. If hunters are training themselves to be of service to their country in the most important matters, they are not thereby deserting* their own affairs, because everyone’s domestic affairs depend for their preservation or loss on the safety or destruction of the community, and therefore hunters safeguard the affairs of every private citizen in the community, as well as their own.6
[12] The envious irrationality of those who make this claim is often such that they prefer to be ruined by their own badness rather than to be kept safe by other people’s goodness. For the majority ofpleasures are actually bad, and by succumbing to them these people are induced to choose the worse alternative in what they say or what they do – [13] and then their stupid words arouse antagonism, and their evil deeds bring disease, punishment and death down on themselves, their children and their friends. Given that they are incapable of recognizing evil, but quicker than others to recognize a source of pleasure, who is going to make use of them when the community needs protection?7 However, anyone who takes a passionate interest in the pursuit I am [14] recommending will steer clear of these troubles, since a good education teaches people to observe the laws, to speak about justice and to listen only to others doing the same. So these people, by their dedication [15] to a life of hard work and education, may provide themselves with nothing but arduous training and schooling, but they also provide protection for their communities; the others, however, the ones who refuse to submit to an arduous education and prefer a life of intense pleasures, have no redeeming moral features at all. They submit to [16] neither laws nor good advice, because as a result of their avoidance of hard work they have no idea what sort of qualities a good man should have.8 Consequently, they are incapable of piety or intelligence, and their lack of education frequently makes them find fault with those who have submitted to an education. In short, then, these men [17] are never responsible for any good; every discovery and invention that has helped mankind is due to the better sort – that is,* to those who are prepared to make efforts.
There is convincing evidence to support this claim. After all, in [18] times past those students of Cheiron’s who, as I mentioned,9 started when they were young men with hunting, went on to acquire expertise in a large number of fine fields of endeavour; as a result they attained the high virtue for which they are still admired today. It is perfectly obvious that all men passionately desire virtue, but because it takes hard work to achieve it, the majority give up. The point is that the [19] attainment of virtue is never certain, whereas the hard work involved is all too obvious. Perhaps, if virtue had a visible body and people understood that they were just as visible to her as she was to them, they would neglect her less. For under the watchful eyes of his beloved [20] every man does better than his best and allows nothing disgraceful or bad to enter his words or deeds, in case he is seen by him.10 But people [21] openly commit many shocking crimes on the assumption that, just because they cannot see her, virtue is not looking. She is omnipresent, however, because she is one of the immortals, and while she honours those who are good to her, she has no respect for those who are bad. [22] If people knew that she was watching, they would commit themselves without hesitation to the arduous work and training needed for the hard task of catching her, and their reward would be virtue.
CHAPTER 13
[1] What surprises me about the sophists, as they are called, is that although most of them profess to educate young men in virtue, they actually do exactly the opposite.1 It is not just that we have never seen a man become good thanks to the sophists of today; their writings are also [2] not designed to improve people. Much of their writing is concerned with trivia, which can give young men vain enjoyment, but not virtue. To read it in the hope of learning something is a pointless waste of time; their treatises keep people from doing something useful [3] and teach them things that are offensive.2 These are serious criticisms, but then the issue is se
rious; as regards the content of their treatises, my charge is that while they have gone to great lengths over style, they have eliminated the kind of sound views which educate the younger generation in virtue.
[4] I am just a layman, but I know that the best place to look for instruction in goodness is one’s own nature, and that the second best course is to go to people who really know something good rather [5] than to professional deceivers.3 My language may perhaps be plain, but then it is not my purpose to embroider. I am trying to put into words sound opinions of the kind needed by those who have been brought up with the proper attitude towards virtue. After all, education is not afforded by language, but by opinions, provided they are good.
[6] I am far from alone in criticizing the sophists of today – note that I am not talking about genuine lovers of wisdom – for using their skills on style rather than content. I am well aware that someone, probably one of the sophists, might point out the faults in something that is not a well-written, coherent treatise; after all, swift and ill-founded [7] criticism will prove no problem for them. I have written it the way I have, however, because my purpose is to produce a sound treatise, and one which is designed to increase people’s knowledge and virtue, not their sophistic skills. I want it to be useful, not just to seem useful, because then it will never be refuted. The sophists’ [8] intention in lecturing and writing is to deceive others for their own gain; they do no one any good at all. There has never been in the past nor does there exist now a knowledgeable sophist; in fact, they are all perfectly happy to be called sophists, which to a right-thinking man is a term of reproach. My advice, then, is to be wary of the [9] instruction offered by sophists, but not to disregard the considered opinions of philosophers. For whereas sophists hunt wealthy young men, philosophers are prepared to associate with everyone, and they place neither too much nor too little weight on men’s fortunes.4
One should also not envy those who seek their own advantage at [10] all costs, whether they do so in private or in public life. Bear in mind that whereas the best citizens* are well thought of and assiduous, the bad ones fare badly and have poor reputations. As a result of stealing [11] money from private citizens and embezzling from the community they are less valuable when the state’s safety is at stake,* and they are disgracefully far from being physically fit enough for warfare, since they are incapable of exertion. Hunters, however, present themselves and their property in prime condition for the common good of their fellow citizens. Hunters go after wild animals, while the others go [12] after their friends. Moreover, attacking one’s friends is universally disparaged, whereas hunting wild animals is universally acclaimed, because if hunters succeed they overcome a foe, and if they fail they win praise not only for striking at enemies of the whole community, but also because the purpose of their expedition was not to harm a man or to satisfy their own greed. Then again, the very attempt makes [13] them better and more intelligent people, for the following reason: they will never capture game unless they put in an extraordinary amount of effort and a great deal of thought and study. Their adversaries [14] are battling for their lives on their home territory, so they fight hard and all the hunter’s efforts come to nothing if he does not use considerable determination and a high degree of intelligence to overcome them.
In other words, whereas those politicians who seek their own [15] advantage train to defeat their own side, hunters train to defeat public enemies; whereas this training makes hunters better equipped to meet enemies in battle, the others are made far worse in this respect by their training; for the one group hunting goes together with [16] self-control, for the other with immoral impetuosity; hunters can rise above moral corruption and sordid greed, the others cannot; they speak with elegance, the others with harshness; and as for the gods, there is nothing to check impiety in the one group, while the others are paragons of piety.5
[17] There exist old stories about the pleasure the gods find in hunting, whether they are doing it or watching it.6 It follows that the young men who take up the pursuit I have been recommending are the favourites of the gods, and are also acting with reverent piety, because they think that some god is watching their hunting. These men, if any, are good to their parents and to their community as a whole, to [18] every one of their friends and fellow citizens. And hunting has imbued not just all its male devotees with virtue, but also all the women to whom the goddess has granted this gift, such as Atalanta and Procris.7
WAYS AND MEANS
(Poroi)
INTRODUCTION
Modern scholars have at least the benefit of hindsight. Using (or abusing) that advantage, some are pleased to claim that the Greek polis as a form of political community was an evolutionary dead end, doomed to extinction. That was emphatically not how either Xenophon or, yet more tellingly, Aristotle saw it. Xenophon did, once, allow the scope of his pedagogical vision to be enlarged to encompass the whole Persian Empire, but in Cyropaedia he was interested more in Persia’s moral than in its financial economy, and in how the lessons in leadership embodied in his idealized Cyrus the Great (reigned c. 559–530) might be applied to the governance of the Greek city. Elsewhere, like his fellow Socratics, Xenophon measured his ambition to the scale of the polis and its constituent households. And in Ways and Means much more obviously than in any other treatise, apart from How to Be a Good Cavalry Commander, the polis he had centrally in mind was his own native Athens. Internal references and external indications make it extremely probable that the work was composed around the mid-35os, in direct and immediate consequence of Athens’ defeat in a war against some of its major allies within what was left of its Second Sea-League. The temptation is therefore strong to associate the treatise’s composition with Xenophon’s actual or desired return to Athens towards the end of his life.
‘Cities, like households, but to an even greater extent, are often in want of financial resources and in need of more ways of gaining them’ (Aristotle, Politics 1259a40). Whether or not Aristotle had read the present work, that observation provides the context in which Ways and Means should be read within Xenophon’s œuvre. For it is primarily valuable, not, as are several of the treatises, for Xenophon’s views on leadership qualities or any other facets of individual moral virtue, but for how he envisaged practical Athenian. ‘political economy’. It is in fact the most overtly pragmatic of Xenophon’s treatises, more so even than Cavalry Commander. As such, it is an oddity, not only within Xenophon’s œuvre but in Greek literature as a whole. Whereas The Estate-manager fits seamlessly into what the Germans call Hausvaterliteratur, that is homespun wisdom literature regarding domestic management, Ways and Means seeks to operate at the level of ‘national’ or state economy, that is, to be received as an exercise in political economy rather than domestic science. Whereas the central term of The Estate-manager is arguably epimeleia (care, concern), which has inescapably moral implications, the analysis and recommendations in Ways and Means are offered in a spirit of goal-oriented economic rationality.
In fact, so pragmatic in orientation is Ways and Means that it could be read – and perhaps was written – almost as a party-political pamphlet. Athens in the mid-350s was desperately short of public funds, so short indeed that certain forms of pay for public service which were normally distributed out of central funds had to be temporarily suspended. Desperate times demanded desperate measures. In advocating above all a large investment in publicly owned slave labour in the state silver mines, Xenophon was arguing radically against alternative, more conservative and conventional schemes: such as, at one extreme, deep cuts in public expenditure associated with a mild increase in indirect taxation, or, at the other extreme, aggressive overseas imperialism financed initially by hugely increased direct taxation of the very rich.
Its pragmatic orientation, however, does not of course mean that the treatise is value-free. It is noticeable that immediately after the long chapter on slave investment (4) Xenophon ceases to be a narrowly fiscal reformer and puts on again his poli
tical theorist hat, aiming to show his readers how to lead the good life of military and other public political service. Moreover, the treatise simply assumes the validity of slave labour, whereas an important part of the first book of Aristotle’s Politics is given over to an attempted justification of a doctrine of natural slavery against the views of those philosophers or sophists who argued that all slavery, inasmuch as it was based on force rather than rational persuasion, was morally indefensible. Aristotle’s unconvincing rejoinder amounted to little more than an endorsement of the standard Greek view according to which all non-Greek ‘barbarians’ were by their nature morally and intellectually barbaric, and therefore ‘naturally’ suited for slavery in the Greek world. Xenophon too was presumably looking to the non-Greek periphery (Thrace and Asia Minor were the chief actual sources of slave labour) for the supply of his mine-slaves.
Perhaps it is needless to say, but Xenophon’s scheme was not in practice adopted. In the real world of the mid fourth century Athens veered opportunistically between versions of the two extreme solutions to the problems of raising public revenues sketched above. Not that this was at all exceptional: other Greek cities habitually resorted to a variety of expedients that can rarely be dignified with a label other than ‘scams’; many such examples are listed, in sometimes hilarious detail, in the second book of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomica. In a historical context like that, Xenophon’s Ways and Means deserves more credit from us than his contemporaries were willing or able to accord it, as a bold and original intellectual construct.
