In this book T. argues that Xenophon's oeuvre offers ‘social criticism of the fourth-century world and its institutions’ (p. 3) or ‘a critique of his world and times (and sometimes of an earlier era as in the case of the Hiero and the Cyropaedia)’ (p. 16). Apology and Memorabilia criticise Athenians for failing to see Socrates was pious, morally irreproachable and a great teacher of aspirants to virtue. Symposium and Oeconomicus expose the materialism of the Athenian upper class, their imperviousness to Socratic wisdom and their absurdly misdirected self-regard. Hipparchicus reveals the horse-owning class as ‘less interested in war and in the physical exertion necessary to train for war than in its appearance and wealth’ (p. 7) and virtually detached from the lessons of De re equestri, which are mostly directed at horses and low-status grooms. There is pedagogic failure in Hiero, On Hunting and Cyropaedia too: On Hunting excoriates contemporary sophists for hunting in the wrong way, Simonides flattered Hiero rather than teaching him, and Cyropaedia reveals the ‘failure of Cyrus’ Persia to live up to the ideal of a pedagogical state’ (p. 185), because Cyrus did not actually know what it took to be a good leader. The subject of Agesilaus is also not a perfect leader, and Respublica Lacedaemoniorum reveals that the city failed to maintain its distinctive laws. And there is further criticism for Athens: quite apart from a failure to understand Socrates and an unappealing upper class, she does not understand (and must be told in Poroi) that peace is better than war – a message that also emerges from Hellenica (witness the work's final sentence) and Anabasis, which offers the pacifist and Panhellenic dream of an army turning into a colonial civic community under the leadership of a narrative hero who also happens to be the work's author.
These propositions are of varying prima facie plausibility, but what binds them together is discursive irony. For T. Xenophon is an ironic author, and she claims to reveal this in a way that sets her apart from both hard-line Straussians and readers with a more moderate sense that Xenophon's discourse is less simple than it seems. She is certainly not a Straussian (she rightly says we must read the lines as well as between them and that our reading cannot be ahistorical), but if she succeeds in the other differentiation, it is arguably by having a rather baggy concept of irony.
Initially all seems well. Irony ‘occurs when matters are different from the way most people think that they are or should be, and this difference is perceived by someone or some others, who only implicitly suggest that this is the case and allow others to also perceive the alternative view but do not widely publicize the difference of perception’ (p. 7): that is awkwardly expressed but workable, and the concomitant conclusion that Xenophon ‘produces a double text, one which may be read at face value as describing affairs in a positive and affirmative light and another in quite another voice, as faulting the situation and individuals being depicted’ (p. 210) may only disturb moderate ironists in implying the permanent and consistent presence of the second voice. It is a small step from that to Xenophon producing ‘an alternative narrative within the text, one that exists side by side with the ostensible non-ironic narrative but is nonetheless more authoritative than the latter’ (p. 13), where one might cavil at ‘more authoritative’: subtexts in Xenophon arguably invite questions rather than affirm positive answers.
Some of the ironies that T. discusses exemplify the statements just quoted, though, when they are stagings of Socratic irony and only make the text ironic because (as T. remarks several times) Socrates is an intrinsically ironic character, they are not making Xenophon an ironic author in any sense from which non-ironists need dissent. But other (non-Socratic) ironies do not seem to qualify in the first place. If RL 14 undermines what has preceded it, it does so overtly and does not make RL an ironic text. What would do so is detection of a critical subtext in RL 1–13, but T. does not offer such a reading (though others have). Again the ‘sudden, if not startling, change in the text [of Cynegeticus at 13] marks the irony and the social criticism that irony effects here’ (p. 87). But the attack on sophists is overt, and T. does not expound a critical or alternative subtext in Cynegeticus 1–12 that would make it an ironic text in a useful sense, even though one could imagine ways in which she might have done so. Meanwhile back with Socrates, the situation in Apology – a pious and beneficial teacher condemned for impiety and moral abuse – is (perhaps) ironic, but the message that the Athenians were wrong is overt, and to make the work ironic T. has to postulate that Xenophon expected most readers not to accept the overt message, thus making Apology ‘a re-enactment of the irony experienced in the trial of Socrates’ (p. 28). But the postulate seems arbitrary and the sense of ‘ironic’ not especially useful: T. has not identified an alternative critical reading – perhaps because there is none to be found.
In dealing with works much larger than Apology, T. takes a broad-brush approach: Cyropaedia 8.8.1–27 and Hellenica 7.5.27 reveal that something is wrong with what has preceded them, but there is no detailed exposition of Cyrus’ eventually unsatisfactory trajectory or the ‘irony’ of so much fighting producing an impasse in 362 bce (p. 163), so we get no really new insights. In Anabasis the putative irony consists in unexpected developments – that Xenophon emerges as an able leader (p. 187) or that the work turns out not to be completely about Cyrus (p. 193) and to demonstrate Greek superiority (p. 205) or that a military venture becomes the pretext for a peaceful venture (the mooted colony foundation) (p. 204) and the creation of a model Panhellenic society and civic community (pp. 200–1). Readers of Anabasis may feel that some of these propositions can only to be intended ironically, but without full exposition one cannot be sure.
The treatments of Oeconomicus and Symposium (tricky works) and Hiero, Hipparchicus and Poroi (perhaps less obviously so) offer more food for thought, though the upshot is not aways clear. For example, the perception that the plan for citizen trophē in Poroi 4 will also produce lots of the silver that historically funded war (which Poroi 5–6 is against) is interesting, but the consequences of this for reading the whole text are not spelt out, and the exposition of Hiero leaves me uncertain where the undermining of Simonides’ authority leaves our understanding of tyranny.
A similar uncertainty affects a rather different issue in Memorabilia. T. sees Memorabilia as an aetiology of Xenophon's role as narrator of Socrates’ life ‘and of the author's subsequent role as observer of his times’ (p. 41). This evidently involves extending the principle that most people lack understanding from Socratic topics to other ones. Does it also involve extending the principle of dealing with issues ‘ironically’, so that Xenophon's implicit education in Memorabilia makes him a Socratic author both in his system of value and in conducting the discursive process in an ironic fashion – i.e. using a pretence of ignorance to undermine the authority of others? This would make Xenophontic discursive disingenuousness an imitation of Socratic dialectic disingenuousness and link Xenophontic and Socratic irony. But is this what T. means to suggest? She does not say so. So, am I putting words in her mouth? Or might I even be articulating the ‘other voice’ in her ironic discourse?
Some parts of this book, then, can set one thinking. But it is not the last word on Xenophontic irony – or whatever other term we might more helpfully use for his habits of discursive subversion, and it is certainly not likely to persuade those who do not believe that he had such habits to see the light.
