Xenophon: Warrior, Historian, Scourge of Persians & Democrats

A History of Mankind (133)

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A third-way style approach to Greek historiography, but one that, like Thucydides’ and unlike Herodotus’, is closer to that of the scholars of the Fertile Crescent and China, is provided by Xenophon, Socrates’ former pupil.

On the loose after the traumatic events in Athens at the tail end of the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon employed himself as a mercenary just at a time when demand was strong in the unstable Persian empire – and that employment provided with his best historiographic material, drawn for the exotic conflicts of the Orient.

As Athens surrendered to Sparta, and the Peloponnesian War ended, Egypt had regained its independence from its Achaemenid masters, and came under the control of what Egyptologists call the 28^th, 29^th and 30^th Dynasties – the last in the long series that started with Narmer well over 2,500 years before.

Tensions were high in the country in years prior. In the first reported pogrom in history, in 410 BC, the Jewish temple in Elephantine was destroyed amid an anti-Persian revolt, as local Jews were perceived as supportive of the foreign oppressor; by 407 BC, that revolt had been put down, as the Jews were requesting Persian help in a letter, but problems resumed when anti-Persian leader Amyrtaeus, apparently of old aristocratic stock, took advantage of Darius II’s death in 404 BC to crown himself pharaoh.