Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (Penguin Classics)

by Xenophon

  1. his storeroom: Presumably in both cases the intruders were rats or other rodents. The storeroom (tamieion) gets a mention in an interesting comment on Athenian economy preserved in the Aristotelian Oeconomica 1344b33: ‘The Attic system of economy is also useful; for they sell their produce and buy what they want, and thus there is not the need of a storehouse in the smaller establishments.’ Masters of horses kept only larger establishments.

  2. properly treated: Human medicine was by now a specialist craft-skill (techne), but there were no schools of equine medicine to compare with the centres on Cos and at Cnidus, and the earliest known Greek technical veterinary treatise belongs to the first century BC. The experienced horseman might have found it cheaper to train one of his existing slaves than to buy a ready trained groom.

  3. a mina in weight: An Attic mina weighed 436.6 grams. See also Cavalry Commander 1.16.

  4. horse’s mouth: At The Dinner–party 1.7 Xenophon refers to pre-sympotic unguents, presumably perfumed. These and other olive-oil based emollients for after-exercise anointment were readily available for purchase in the Athenian Agora.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. the horse: What the author might have added is that such manure could then have been used as a vital agricultural fertilizer.

  2. being mated: This amusing piece of fallacious folklore stands in sharp contrast to the ‘scientific’ stance generally adopted by the author. Cf. the discussion of boars’ tusks at On Hunting 10.17.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. Persian fashion: Normally, a Greek would mount the horse unaided, by jumping on, or by getting the horse to crouch first, or from a convenient platform. ‘Persian fashion’ (also at Cavalry Commander 1.17) meant mounting with the assistance of a groom who pushed upwards from the rider’s foot or knee.

  2. regret later: At A History of My Times 5.3.7 Xenophon utters the general principle in the most forceful way: ‘One ought not to punish even a slave in anger.’

  CHAPTER 7

  1. the cavesson: See Morgan, note 39.

  2. bunched-up clothing: Cavalrymen favoured the chlamys, a cloak originating from the specialist cavalry country of Thessaly, worn over a chiton, a wool tunic of varying length: see for these and other items of clothing, Spence, pp. 324–9 (Glossary).

  3. naturally leads… the left: This is true when a horse is bridled and ridden, but not when it is left to its own devices.

  CHAPTER 8

  1. repeating myself: See 3.7 and note (if Xenophon is considered the author of the present treatise).

  2. Odrysians: See Agesilaus chapter 2 note 29.

  3. same ground: See Cavalry Commander 1.18.

  4. wild animals: See Introduction to On Hunting. The Greek huntsman rode to the hunt, but – despite the impression given here – hunted on foot.

  CHAPTER 9

  1. rough ones: On smooth and rough bits, see next chapter.

  2. high-spirited: See also Cavalry Commander 1.14–15. High spirits were presumably less unacceptable in a racehorse.

  CHAPTER 10

  1. two bits: For an extensive description of actual examples see Marchant, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv, and Morgan.

  2. compression or tension: Some ancient bits ‘act mainly by the direct pull on the bars of the mouth, and others… compress the horse’s jaw… when the reins are pulled’ (J. K. Anderson, ‘Notes on some points in Xenophon’s Peri Hippikês’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 80 [1960], p. 7).

  3. never enjoyable: ‘Nothing in excess’ was one of the three maxims with universal Greek application inscribed on the fourth-century temple of Apollo at Delphi.

  4. of turns: See 7.17.

  5. full of spirit: The author’s rampant anthropomorphism extends to making the horse in the image of his own good self. See also 11.6.

  CHAPTER 11

  1. the horses: The Parthenon frieze springs instantly to mind: Spence, pp. 267–71 (Appendix 3).

  2. smart one: Here our present treatise lines up alongside the Cavalry Commander (explicitly referred to at 12.14).

  3. supernatural intervention: The author uses here the abstract phrase to daimonion, referring to the supernatural or divine generally (cf. A History of My Times 7.5.12), rather than a phrase involving the word ‘gods’ (as at 12.11).

  CHAPTER 12

  1. on horseback: See for further detailed discussion Spence, pp. 34–120 (‘The combat potential of the Hippeis’).

  2. too tight… of armour. The same point is made about a hoplite’s body armour in Memoirs of Socrates 3.10.

  3. wearer’s vision: A Thessalian coin depicts both the Boeotian helmet and a gorget (J. K. Anderson, ‘Notes on some points in Xenophon’s Peri Hippikês’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 80 [1960], p. 8).

  4. carry too: It appears that at Athens uniformity of offensive weapons was not imposed by the commanders or the Council: some cavalrymen were equipped with the javelins the author here recommends, some with the cane-shafted spear (here doru kamakinon; normally kamax), some with a combination of both: Spence, p. 54.

  ON HUNTING

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Artemis: The prolix proem is perhaps a trifle over-anxious to establish hunting’s divine pedigree, but to begin and end (13.18) with Artemis, chaste and fearsome patroness of the art (surnamed Agrotera, ‘the Huntress’, at 6.13), was nothing if not diplomatic. The number of easily available handbooks or dictionaries of Greek myths and mythology is legion, but few bring out the myths’ subtle multivalence and contextual plasticity. A shining exception is Y. Bonnefoy and W. Doniger (eds.), Greek and Egyptian Mythologies (University of Chicago Press, 1991), and on Artemis, see P. Ellinger, pp. 145–9.

  2. noble pursuits from him: The note of nobility is sounded at the outset and swells to a diapason in the concluding chapter.

  3. widely celebrated: If our author is to be believed, Cheiron the centaur (man-horse) ran a veritable stable of thoroughbred pupils; many of them had already received lyric praise from Pindar. See A. Schnapp, ‘Centaurs’, in Bonnefoy and Doniger, Mythologies, pp. 151–2.

  4. Asclepius… as a god: Asclepius was worshipped both as a hero and as a god – see Bruit-Zaidman and Schmitt-Pantel, pp. 128–32, and J. Carlier in Bonnefoy and Doniger, Mythologies, pp. 149–51. His most famous shrine was that at Epidaurus in the north-east Peloponnese, where the priests competed successfully – and lucratively – with the relatively new breed of ‘scientific’ doctors. See also Cavalry Commander chapter 9 note 7.

  5. Atalanta: In Bonnefoy and Doniger, Mythologies, Atalanta appears, of course, in Schnapp’s article on ‘Heroes and Myths of Hunting in Ancient Greece’ (p. 121), but also, and no less relevantly, in M. Detienne’s on ‘The Powers of Marriage in Greece’ (p. 96). See chapter 13 note 7.

  6. no need… to speak of it: This is perhaps a conscious touch of humour, since Homer’s Nestor was not backward in coming forward to sing his own praises, at Nestorian length.

  7. against Thebes: Amphiaraus was one of the original ‘Seven Against Thebes’, commemorated notably by Aeschylus in his extant tragedy of that name (467); he was also, like Asclepius, worshipped as a superhuman power of healing by incubation at Oropus on the Athenian-Boeotian border.

  8. Telamon Hesione: The so-called ‘state’ (polis) of Periboea was Megara, although her father Alcathous, son of Pelops and Hippodameia, was originally from Elis. Hesione, sister of Priam king of Troy, was given to Telamon after Troy’s fall to be his slave, the common fate of war-captives in the real Greek world.

  9. forgot the goddess: Meleager’s father was Oeneus, king of Calydon; the goddess was Artemis. What Oeneus forgot to do was make a first-fruits offering to her, alone of all the immortal gods (see Iliad 9.537). Meleager’s misfortune was to fall out fatally with his relatives after successfully killing the Calydonian boar; in one version of the myth he was killed by Oeneus himself.

  10. city’s territory: Theseus had by Thucydides’ time (2.15) become the reputed founder of Athens as a polity occupying the territory of Attica: see N. Loraux in Bonnef
oy and Doniger, Mythologies, pp. 41–2.

  11. death… as a blessed man: Euripides offers a rather less sunny version of Hippolytus’ demise in Hippolytus of 428 (his second tragedy of that title). See Ellinger, ‘Artemis’ in Bonnefoy and Doniger, Mythologies, pp. 148–9.

  12. bad men: The ‘two men’ were respectively Odysseus and Diomedes (see 1.13), who were clearly more to the author’s taste than Achilles (1.16). The sophist Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily (c. 480–375) wrote for Palamedes a typically ‘sophistical’ self-defence, in which he represented himself as one of Greece’s major benefactors (M. Gagarin and P. Woodruff (eds.), Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists [Cambridge University Press, 1995], pp. 195–202).

  13. Castor and Polydeuces… now immortal: They were worshipped as gods, under the title of the Dioscuri, near Sparta (see Agesilaus chapter 5 note 4). For Castor’s interest in hunting, see also 3.1.

  14. and warriors: Curiously, the author fails to mention the Homeric version (Iliad 2.731), according to which Machaon and Podaleirius were sons of Asclepius (in Homer a Thessalian hero) and skilled physicians to the Achaean (Greek) army at Troy.

  15. ‘the devoted son’: Antilochus’ father was Nestor; ‘devoted son’ translates the epithet ‘Philopator’, which was later to be used as a title of the fourth Ptolemy, a member of the Graeco-Macedonian dynasty of Egypt (reigned 221–204).

  16. Greece invincible: Hellas (‘Greece’), even as late as the notional time of Achilles, was not yet a usable concept; this is Xenophon’s – or Xenophontic – ‘Panhellenist big talk’ (see Agesilaus chapter 1 notes 10 and 32).

  17. education in general: Paideia, ‘education’ (literally of paides, ‘children’), was the general framework within which the technical treatises, both the philosophical and the more directly pragmatic, of Xenophon – as of his contemporaries Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle – were framed. But few paides would have been in a position to read them for themselves; this is a rare instance of a direct address to ‘young men’ (neoi). See further main Introduction and next note.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. just out of childhood: Greek lacked a vocabulary of adolescence; a male passed from being a ‘child’ (pais), which included the stage of being a ‘lad’ (meirakion), to the status of ‘young man’ (neos; cf. 12.6, 12.7). At an intermediate stage between childhood and adulthood he might be designated ephebos, ‘on the threshold of adulthood’. Not long after Xenophon’s death, probably, Athens for the first time formalized the ephebeia into a compulsory ‘national service’ for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, at least for those of hoplite status or above; Xenophon would surely have approved.

  2. speak Greek: Typically, therefore, it is envisaged that the net-keeper would be a barbarian slave; cf. 6.18. Ability to speak Greek was a criterion of admission to initiation in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which did not forbid on principle the joint participation of masters and Greek-speaking slaves.

  3. Phasian or Carthaginian flax: Phasis was in Colchis at the far eastern end of the Black Sea (in modern Georgia), and conventionally constituted the easternmost limit of the Greek oecumene (the westernmost being marked by the Pillars of Hercules or Straits of Gibraltar). Flax (linon) of presumably the wrong type or quality was grown much closer to home, e.g. in Messenia. See also 10.2.

  4. avoid snags: Those interested in the finer points are referred to Delebecque, Chasse, which also contains ingenious illustrations.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. hounds: The author refers to them throughout in the feminine gender. See also chapter 7 note 1 .

  CHAPTER 4

  1. thin ears: The ideal type of Greek hunting hound seems to have been akin to our fox-terrier; cf. 3.5.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. moon… obscures them: Had Shakespeare written ‘Fear no more the heat of the moon’, we would have been surprised – but not so, apparently, the Greeks. See e.g. Plutarch, Moralia 658b–d.

  2. bodies are relaxed: Cf. perhaps 4.6, where the good hound does not abandon the chase apparently because she retains a keen sense of smell even in the heat of the day. There may be an allusion to some physiological theory of smell, such as that of Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, according to which scents can be detected only if the appropriate bodily pores or channels are tight enough to keep the air inside the body in proportion with the scent-bearing outer air.

  3. the goddess’s care: Artemis. For the quasi-religious scruple see note 7 below.

  4. sacred islands: The author probably has in mind especially Delos, which was the birthplace of and sacred to both Apollo and his sister Artemis.

  5. eyes bulge outwards: In The Dinner-party 5.4 (Penguin Conversations of Socrates) Socrates is allowed to claim without contradiction that his eyes, because they are bulging and therefore see sideways as well as straight ahead, are ‘more beautiful’ than his interlocutor’s in the sense that they are better constructed for the particular function, sight, for which humans possess eyes.

  6. his passions: For a similar rhetorically expressed point, see Cavalry Commander chapter 8 note 2.

  7. normal practice: The Greek nomos could mean a formal law, but the author specifies none, so the alternative meaning of ‘custom or ‘tradition’ seems preferable. The author’s scruple against hunting through all sorts of crops (contrast 12.6) is probably no more strictly religious than the taboo on hunting leverets (5.14); but springs and streams, inhabited by or identified with nymphs, sprites and even gods, might have been avoided by hunters for properly religious reasons. See also chapter 6 note 1.

  8. days when hunting is forbidden: The tabooed days were religious festivals.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. After praying… Artemis the Huntress: For the tithe consecrated to Artemis by Xenophon and his fellow hunters at Scillous, see Introduction.

  2. hit it: The author, despite 2.2, had omitted to mention that the slave net-keeper (see chapter 2 note 2) might carry a club, an interesting partial exception to the rule that slaves were not permitted offensive weapons.

  CHAPTER 7

  1. best season… develop in: For the breeding of hounds, see 3.1. Up to 7.6 the assumption is that hounds for hunting are female; the adjectival phrase translated ‘physically well-formed’ at 7.7 reverts once again to the feminine gender.

  2. discipline: The word translated here as discipline, kosmos, meant at its root ‘order’, and by extension, because it was assumed that the workings of the universe were ordered and orderly, the cosmos. Because orderliness was considered becoming, kosmos could also mean adornment, whence our ‘cosmetics’. Emphasis is again placed on ‘due order’ (the adverbial kosmios) at 10.8.

  CHAPTER 9

  1. hard work: Anderson, Hunting, p. 49, expressed the wish that ‘this chapter was not Xenophon’s work’, contrasting its opening injunction to hunt fawns with the earlier injunction to spare young leverets (5.14). ‘Indian’ hounds could be a distinct breed specially imported in the author’s day from the Indian subcontinent (or Tibet?), or more generically hounds known or thought to have originated somewhere in the Far East. Herodotus 1.192.4 (four large villages of Babylonia were exempted from all other tribute in return for looking after the huge numbers of Indian hounds belonging to the Persian Great King) makes the latter more likely.

  2. this makes it set off: Had the author perhaps seen a fawn trembling in fear before bolting and assumed that it was cold? For the connection between shivering and physiological contraction, see the Hippocratic treatise Places in Man, chapter 9.

  3. spikes… into it: The scenario we envisage (the text being, as often, less than transparently clear) is as follows: the purpose of the wooden spikes is to give way, so that when the deer steps in the trap, they yield sufficiently to let its foot in; then, when the deer tries to set off, its foot becomes impaled on the metal spikes.

  4. esparto: The plant may be Spanish broom (genista, whence ‘Plantagenet’) rather than the grass now called esparto (stipa tenuissima). Some have seen a connection between
spartos and the town Sparta.

  CHAPTER 10

  1. Indian… and traps: Indian hounds – see 9.1; Laconian – 3.5; Locrian – Agesilaus chapter 2 note 2. Anderson, Hunting, p. 53 rightly comments that the ‘admirable description’ in 10.1 – 18 ‘requires little in the way of either interpretation or commentary’.

  2. a spear: A hoplite’s spear, that is, made from cornus mas.

  3. for deer. See 9.11–16.

  4. right hand: The author, in common with Greek practice generally, did not recognize the ‘natural southpaw’. Plato (Laws 794d-795d) entered a solitary and unheeded protest in favour of ambidexterity.

  5. wrestling stance: The allusion to wrestling invokes another characteristically upper-class leisure activity with its own elaborated codes, rituals and protocols.

  6. by victory: Overcoming the boar is compared to winning a military victory; for another such comparison, to different effect, see 13.12.

  7. to hunt: Now it is the human hunters who must show ‘courage’ or ‘spirit’, eupsukhia; for the hounds, see 4.6.

  8. the pike: This summarizes 10.4.

  CHAPTER 11

  1. Pangaeum… Macedon: It is interesting that the author should have included the Pangaeum district, in Chalcidice and so well within the Greek sphere, as a ‘foreign land’ (xene chora) roamed by exotic fauna. Note that one of the cantons of Macedonia was named Lyncestis, ‘lynx-land’.