A Study On Xenophon's Historiography Based On His Hellenica

"Xenophontic scholarship has undergone not only a renaissance but a metamorphosis". In ancient times, his Hellenica was regarded as parallel with Herodotus' Histories and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, for it was the only contemporary historiographical work that recorded the history of Greece in the first half of the 4th century B.C., and was irreplaceable for its vividness. When rational historiography arose at the beginning of the 19th century, Thucydides' methods were canonized, and Xenophon was condemned both by the German scholar B. G. Niebuhr and the English scholar T. B. Macaulay, for his "inequality of treatment, omission of important facts, and political and moral bias". Most of these criticism measured the ancient writer by modern one, aiming to establish a historiographical standard, but failing to understand the history of historiography itself. Up to the second half of 20th century, Xenophon's Hellenica had been reevaluated since H. R. Breitenbach made his book-length entry of Xenophon. More than 40 monographs and commentaries on Xenophon were published, reflecting not only a revival of interest, but also a transformation of attitude. The Character of Xenophon's Hellenica by V. Gray in 1989, The failings of empire: a reading of Xenophon's Hellenica, 2.3.1-7.5.27 by C. G Tuplin in 1993, Xenophon and the history of his time by J. Dillery in 1995, and Lessons from the past: the moral use of history in the 4 century prose by F. S. Pownall in 2004, all of them acknowledged that Xenophon should be taken seriously as a distinctive voice on the history, society, and thought of the late classical and pre-hellenistic times. They took attempts to inaugurate new perspectives with the help of a new historicism, and took into consideration the philosophical and rhetorical developments in the 4th century, and study the Hellenica in the whole system of Xenophon's works, not only regarding it as a continuation of Thucydides, but alo the initiative of the coming moralistic historiography, in this sense to discover the background, motive, content, and influence of Xenophon's Hellenica. The new researches resulted in the conference on Xenophontic scholarship held in the university of Liverpool in 1999, and the articles were gathered to be published in Xenophon and his World.