[27] I venture to think I have shown the truth of the statement that I made. I asserted that the Persians of to-day and their allies are less religious than they were of old, less dutiful to their kindred, less just and righteous towards other men, and less valiant in war. And if any man doubts me, let him examine their actions for himself, and he will find full confirmation of all I say.
NOTES
C1. Xenophon puts into the mouth of Chrysantas his favourite theory of monarchism, the relationship strongly cemented by obedience and trust between subjects and king.
C1.4, med. On /willing/ service. This again is one of the best utterances in all Xenophon. It has a deep spiritual import.
C1.4, fin. He is thinking of Athens, perhaps. It is a choice: obey the ruler or knock under to foreign foes.
C1.8. Surely a remark of the author. It is an old inveterate thought of his: "the Master's eye." I feel the /old/ man at times.
C1.9-10. This side of the Persian state-machine strongly impressed the mind and imagination of Xenophon. Hence he works it into the treatise on economy as well as here. In fact his expansion of the Socratic reflections into the /Economist/ has to do, I believe, with these reflections on state economy.
C1.13. Hellenic aristocratic theory of existence. Leisure for the grand duties which devolve on the lords of mankind. It doesn't seem to strike Xenophon that this rigid system of self-absorption in the higher selfhood of the social system might be destructive of individual life. Of course he would say, "No, it enlarges the individual life."
C1.17-20. Seems to me to show Xenophon struggling with the hard parts of the later Persian system. The theory of Persian feudalism is too high-strung for these grand satraps, rulers of provinces as big as ordinary kingdoms. It tends to snap, and from the beginning did. The archic man has no charm to compel his followers to archic virtue. It is a negative {episteme} after all. Does Xenophon realise this, or is hgd. wrong?
C1.21. Cf. headmasters with preposters in a public school, based on the same system of high aims and duties corresponding to rights.
C1.23, init. Cf. Louis Napoleon in Browning's poem [/Prince Hohensteil-Schwangau/].
C1.23, med. The Magians, the Persian order of priests. Yet we have heard of them throughout.
C1.27. A very true saying and very nice the feeling it gives us towards Xenophon. We think of him with his wife and his little sons and his friends and their friends.
C1.28. How true of women!
C1.33. A reduplication of the description in Bk. I., and also a summing-up of Xenophon's own earthly paradise--quite Tennysonian.
C1.37. An important point or principle in Xenophon's political theory --indeed the key and tone of it: no one has a right to command except by virtue of personal superiority.
C1.40 foll. "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" The section, if, as I think it is, by Xenophon, throws light on the nature and composition of the book. The author isn't so disengaged from "history" that he can set aside obviously integral parts of the Persian system traceable to Cyrus, or at any rate probably original, and their false-seeming and bamboozling mode of keeping up dignity has to be taken account of. It has its analogy in the admission of thaumaturgy on the part of religious teachers, and no doubt a good deal can be said for it. The archic man in low spirits, if he ever is so, has some need of bamboozling himself. Titles do give some moral support even nowadays to certain kinds of minds.
C1.46-48. The archic man's dealings by those of his subjects who are apt to rule, the men of high thoughts and ambitions, with whom he must come into constant personal contact. With them the spiritual dominance alone will do. They shall be made to love him rather than themselves. (The only thing just here that jars is a sort of Machiavellian self- consciousness, resented in the archic man).
C1.46. A cumbrous disjointed sentence, but the thought of it is clear enough. Even Xenophon's style breaks down when he tries to say in a breath more than he naturally can. Is it a sign of senility, or half- thought-out ideas, or what?
C2.2, fin. Does Xenophon feel the bathos of this, or is hdg. wrong and there is no bathos? It may be said that the sacramental and spiritual side is not in abeyance. Xenophon has to account for the "common board" and he has the Spartan Lycurgan "common board" to encourage him, so that imaginatively he provides this royal being with a sumptuous table at which thousands will share alike.
C2.3. How far was this a custom among Hellenes? It reveals a curious state of society, real or imaginary; but I suppose that at Rome in imperial days (cf. /panem et circenses/) the theory of meat and drink largesses being the best would hold.
C2.4, fin. The last remark is so silly (?) I am almost disposed to follow Lincke and admit interpolation. Yet on the whole I think it is the voice of the old man explaining in his Vicar-of-Wakefield style, to his admiring auditors, wife, children, and grandsons, I fancy, and slaves, the /raison d'être/ of Persian dinner-largesse customs.
C2.6. Qy.: What was Xenophon's manner of composing? The style here is loose, like that of a man talking. Perhaps he lectured and the amanuensis took down what he said.
C2.8. Ineptitudes. One does somewhat sniff an editor here, I think, but I am not sure. There's a similar touch of ineptitude (senility, perhaps) in the /Memorabilia/, /ad fin/. On the other hand I can imagine Xenophon purring over this side of Orientalism quite naturally.
C2.12. This slipshod style, how accounted for? The most puzzling thing of all is the sort of mental confusion between Cyrus and the king in general.
C2.15-16. Thoroughly Xenophontine and Ruskinian and eternal.
C2.24. Here is the germ of benefit societies and clubs and insurances and hospitals. Xenophon probably learns it all from Ctesias, and others of the sort. Cyrus provides doctors and instruments and medicines and diet, in fact, all the requisites of a hospital, in his palace. Nor does he forget to be grateful to the doctors who cured the sick. [Ctesias, the Greek physician to the Persian king. See /Anabasis/, I. viii. Works, Vol. I. p. 108.]
C2.26 ff. Xenophon's Machiavellianism. Does it work?
C2.17-28. It seems to me that all this is too elaborate for an interpolator: it smacks of Xenophon in his arm-chair, theorising and half-dreaming over his political philosophy.
C3.2. Prototype, a procession to Eleusis or elsewhere: the Panathenaic, possibly. Xenophon's sumptuous taste and love of bright colours.
C3.3, fin., C3.4. What a curious prototypic sound! Truly this is the very /modus/ of the evangelist's type of sentence. His narrative must run in this mould.
C3.4, fin. This is the old Cyrus. It comes in touchingly here, this refrain of the old song, now an echo of the old life.
C3.14. Xenophon delights somewhat in this sort of scene. It is a turning-point, a veritable moral peripety, though the decisive step was taken long ago. What is Xenophon's intention with regard to it? Has he any /parti pris/, for or against? Does he wish us to draw conclusions? Or does it correspond to a moral meeting of the waters in his own mind? Here love of Spartan simplicity, and there of splendour and regality and monarchism? He does not give a hint that the sapping of the system begins here, when the archic man ceases to depend on his own spiritual archic qualities and begins to eke out his dignity by artificial means and external shows of reverence.
C3.20. Is this worthy of the archic man? It is a method, no doubt, of {arkhe}, but has it any spiritual "last" in it? The incident of Daïpharnes somewhat diverts our attention from the justice of the system in reference to the suitors. On the whole, I think Xenophon can't get further. He is blinded and befogged by two things: (1) his (i.e. their) aristocratism, and again (2) his satisfaction in splendour and get-up, provided it is attached to moral greatness. We are in the same maze, I fancy. Jesus was not, nor is Walt Whitman.