Xenophon

Xenophon was born around 430 BCE in Athens, likely in the deme of Erchia, and moved among elite circles that prized horses, conversation, and command. As a young man he followed Socrates, learning to test arguments against experience. Adventure took him east with Cyrus the Younger, and his Anabasis tells how the Ten Thousand marched through hostile country to the Black Sea, a lesson in leadership under siege. Exiled after he later fought alongside Sparta, he settled at Scillus near Olympia on a Spartan-granted estate—a quiet vantage from which to write about power.

His Hellenica picks up where Thucydides stops—in 411, with fleets, factions, and treasuries strained to the point of rupture. Xenophon’s narrative walks us through the late-war politics of the oligarchic coup and the tensions between armadas and assemblies. He recounts the catastrophe at Aegospotami in 405: the Athenian fleet, complacent and ill-posted, was smashed on the Hellespont by Lysander; only a handful of ships escaped—fewer than a dozen under Conon. The sea went quiet for Athens, and Xenophon shows what followed: the blockade, the hunger, and in 404 the surrender that tore down the Long Walls and pared the city’s fleet to a ceremonial dozen. He carries the story onward to 362, charting a Greece where no hegemon could hold the balance for long.

Xenophon was not a neutral camera. He admired Spartan discipline and the king Agesilaus, and his preferences color his portraits. Yet his soldier’s eye makes him a practical analyst of logistics, leadership, and morale. The man who had starved on the march paid close attention to muster rolls, oar-money, and the rhythms of campaign seasons. His prose is limpid, his moralizing plainspoken. Exile sharpened his sense of civic fragility; gratitude to Sparta softened some judgments—and hardened others.

As a historian of endings, Xenophon framed the consequences of Athens’ naval choice. He shows how a city that once levied assessments across the Aegean struggled to keep ships and crews ready in the war’s last, desperate years, when mistakes compounded and enemies learned. In this timeline, he is the chronicler of the reckoning: after the wooden walls and the tribute lists came the ledger’s final line. The Hellenica preserves the sound of oars lost and teaches later readers that sea power fails suddenly when institutions falter slowly.