Classical Receptions Journal Vol 5. Iss. 2 (2013) pp. 199–211
Redeeming Xenophon: historiographical
reception and the transhistorical
Tim Rood*
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
...
And after this our exile.
T. S. Eliot1
***
The aim of this article is to explore some of the ramifications of Charles Martindale’s
work for the study of the reception of classical historiography and to highlight some of
the particular challenges facing researchers in this branch of reception studies.
Historiography is a relatively undeveloped field within the area of classical reception
studies, though there are signs that this is starting to change (notably through the
large AHRC-funded project on the reception of Thucydides run by Neville Morley at
Bristol University2).There is, however, a strong tradition of research on the influence
of ancient historians on the modern conception and writing of history, associated
above all with the work of Arnoldo Momigliano and more recently with that of Antony
Grafton.3 The particular influence of reception studies themselves may be seen in
the indirect light shed on the reception of Herodotus by recent work on cultural
responses to the Persian Wars, including the growing scholarly literature on the film
300.4
I want to focus in this article on the main area of my own research in classical
reception, Xenophon’s Anabasis (Rood 2004a, 2010), but I will start with some
more general comments on the implications of Martindale’s approach for historiography. In explaining his resistance to traditional models of literary influence,
*Correspondence: St Hugh’s College, Oxford OX2 6LE. [email protected]
1 Epigraph in Martindale (1993: p. viii) (from ‘Ash Wednesday’). I am grateful to Tom
Phillips for proposing some helpful clarifications and suggestions.
2 See Harloe and Morley (2012); Morley (2012). Other recent work on Thucydidean
reception includes Fromentin, Gotteland, and Payen (2010) and Iglesias-Zoido (2011).
3 See Momigliano (1990) for a summary; also e.g. the essays in Momigliano (1966).
Grafton (2007) includes some detailed discussion of the reception of Curtius Rufus
among others.
4 See Hall, Rhodes, and Bridges (2007) on the Persian Wars; on 300 and its reception, see
e.g. Nisbet (2012) — a volume from the Nottingham AHRC-funded project ‘Sparta in
Comparative Perspective, Ancient to Modern: history, historiography and classical
tradition’.
ß The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/crj/clt003
TIM ROOD
Martindale suggests that when Jonson reworks a piece by Martial, we should not see
Jonson as simply influenced by Martial, but rather as ‘trying to find out what sort of a
poet Martial is, constructing him and his tone of voice, so to say’ (2007: 209).
Welcome though this approach is, one problem with applying it to historiography
is that historians do not tend to respond in quite the same way as poets to their
source texts. We might well substitute Syme and Tacitus for Jonson and Martial,
but it would probably be overambitious to view even, say, Grote’s reading of
Thucydides in these terms.5
Two key terms for Martindale’s model of reception are dialogue and the transhistorical. His preferred mode of transhistorical reception involves instances of
reception that ‘initiate us into a serious or profound dialogue with antiquity’:
‘Dialogic reception energizes the classics, and illuminates antiquity; superficial reception studies do not generate dialogue, do not tell us about the classical.’ And yet
in the pedagogical contexts with which Martindale is concerned, the question of
what creates an energizing dialogue with antiquity depends on the way in which that
dialogue is taught as well as on the nature of the receiving text. More broadly, the
degree to which reception illuminates antiquity may depend on the way in which we
view antiquity. Martindale himself engages in a rich dialogue with great works of art
and literature as they have been received over the centuries. But too limited a
conception of the classical world may be as much of a threat to the status of
Classics as the trends he deplores. A film that one might regard as in some ways
‘bad’ can still help one engage with antiquity: thus Gladiator, like Spartacus before it,
is part of a story about the reception both of gladiatorial combat and of ancient
representation of violence — a story that does offer a chance of an engaging dialogue
with writers such as Virgil or Lucan. Similarly 300 provides an interesting challenge
to canonical thinking of the classical in part because it takes place in a medium and
utilizes effects which were unforeseen until recently; as Susanne Turner has shown,
it is particularly effective in making us rethink classical conceptions of the male
nude.6
I would go further, however, and argue that studying 300 would be valuable even
if it did not meet Martindale’s criteria for the transhistorical — and that the reason it
would be valuable is that the film and its contemporary reception matter. The film
drew on a long tradition of representations of Greeks and Persians that have been
historically important; it has become itself a notably contested part of that tradition.
I have myself supervised an undergraduate thesis on 300 that focused in part on the
film’s reception in Iran and that was written by a student moved by his own
5 Grote himself suggested another way of thinking about reception when he wrote in a
letter after his narrative of the Peloponnesian War had reached the point where
Thucydides stopped that it was ‘a terrible loss to be divorced from Thucydides, with
whom I had been so long in intimate communion’ (quoted by his wife in Grote 1873:
196).
6 Turner (2008).
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experience of an audience disturbance at a showing of the film in Bradford. Studying
300, then, is a valuable rather than dangerous part of reception studies if one views
the products of antiquity not just as sources of aesthetic pleasure and reflection but
as liable to political appropriation. The danger may rather be that ‘reception’ seems
too tame a word for the study of the political appropriation of antiquity.7
Not the least reason why studying the political appropriation of ancient historiography is integral to reception studies is that ancient historians were themselves
often concerned with the political appropriation of the past. They analyse the potential for good or ill of the stories that societies tell themselves about their own
pasts: Herodotus and Thucydides were both in their different ways theorists of the
reception of the Persian Wars; Tacitus probed deeply into the reception history of
the Roman republic. It follows from this thematic concern that ancient historiography is itself part of the reception of antiquity: Herodotus is part of the reception of
the Persian Wars, Tacitus part of the reception of the Roman republic. The ancient
historian’s deep self-consciousness about the uses of the past — grounded in the
realization of its political potency — in turn imposes some moral responsibility on
the reader of ancient history as well as on scholars who explore how particular
readers have faced up to that responsibility.
In the rest of this article I propose to practice some reception criticism, reading
some responses to the Anabasis through some of Martindale’s concerns — his notion
of the transhistorical; the ‘erotics of reception’ that Joshua Billings (2010) has
identified as fundamental to classical reception and that Martindale glosses as a
‘dialectic of resource and loss or absence or lack’; and, finally, the question of the
theorization of reception studies, especially the question of the reception of ancient
historiography as a mode of historical narrative in its own right. My examples will all
be drawn from the reception history of a famous section where Xenophon describes
the sanctuary he set up for Artemis of Ephesus at Scillus, near Olympia, following
his return to Greece (5.3.7-13). Xenophon looks ahead to his foundation of this
sanctuary after describing how the Greek army he had helped to lead back from
Mesopotamia sold some prisoners taken during the course of the retreat through
Asia. It was then decided to offer a tithe that was to be shared between Apollo and
Artemis of Ephesus, and to distribute the money among the generals to offer to the
gods in due course. Xenophon then explains that he himself used his portion to buy
an estate for Artemis near Scillus, where he had been settled by the Spartans after
being exiled from Athens. He also set up an annual festival for the goddess to which
the young men of the neighbourhood would come to hunt while all feasted on game
7 In a review of Krebs (2011) — a study of the German nationalist appropriation of
Tacitus’ Germania — Grafton warns that ‘dull, abstract terms’ like ‘reception’ or ‘classical tradition’ suggest that ‘the uses of ancient texts have a modest literary and pedagogical interest but are not of deep, existential importance to anyone, modern or early
modern’ (2011: 16).
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and on fruit from the orchards that Xenophon had had planted. Xenophon does not
need to state outright the personal distinction that arranging the festival gave him.
Even though Artemis’ estate at Scillus derived ultimately from (not redeeming
but) selling slaves, Xenophon’s account of the estate has been frequently idealized.
In another paper (Rood 2012), I have explored how it was appropriated in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the name of the picturesque, and viewed
as a delightful retreat where Xenophon could find escape from the political turmoil
of contemporary Greece and devote himself to writing and philosophy. The two
stories that will form the largest part of this article will concern the earlier reception
of Scillus, but I will start by briefly giving one example of this picturesque reception
and exploring how it can be approached via Martindale’s concept of the
transhistorical.
Emblematic of the view of Scillus as picturesque retreat is a sketch offered by the
conservative historian William Mitford in a volume of his History of Greece published in 1797, under the shadow of the threat posed by the French Revolution to
landed property and the personal freedom of the elite. There is room here only for
some excerpts (1789–1818: iii. 534):
According to antient accounts, (modern are yet wanting) all the various beauties of landscape
appear to have met in the neighbourhood of Scillus. Immediately above the town and the
adjacent temple, with their little river Selenus, inclosed between the hilly woodlands,
Diana’s property and the barren crags of Typæum, . . . we may conceive the finest classical
compositions of the Poussins. Up the course of the Alpheius and its tributary streams,
toward Erymanthos and the other loftier Arcadian mountains, the sublimest wildness of
Titian and Salvator could not fail to abound; while the Olympian hill . . . would offer the
various beauty, the rich grandeur, and the mind-filling expanse of Claud.
These excerpts are enough to show that Mitford — himself the owner of a country
estate — offers a strong aesthetic response to the landscape of Scillus, shaped in part
by the desire for plenitude (‘all the various beauties of landscape . . . ’), in part by a
sense of loss (modern accounts ‘are yet wanting’).8 The very aestheticism of
Mitford’s description of the property makes it ripe for ideological criticism (for
an attempt, see Rood 2012: 89–99, 113–14) at the same time as it caters to
Martindale’s preference for the transhistorical: we can read Mitford reading
Xenophon’s account, in line with the picturesque aesthetic of his own time, through
the eyes of seventeenth-century French and Italian painters — and perhaps even
doing so as a way of figuring out what sort of a man Xenophon was, and what sort of
life he himself aspires to lead. Arguably, the type of reading of Xenophon that
8 Tom Phillips further suggests to me that Mitford here presents the ancient landscape as a
construct in need of a modern supplement and thereby points up the lack in Xenophon’s
own text that arouses the reader’s desire for fulfilment; at the same time, the very terms of
Mitford’s supplementation (‘the sublime wildness . . . could not fail to abound’) enforce
that lack further.
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REDEEMING XENOPHON
Mitford offers has also had some impact on the way that Xenophon’s works have
come to be read, as the product of a country gentleman of some (but not vast) talent.
I have started with a brief summary of this instance of reception because it shows
that Martindale’s aesthetic and transhistorical approach to reception can find some
echoes in the reception history of the Anabasis. I now want to tell two stories that
could be interpreted as fables about reception9 in general — at least if we follow
Martindale’s gloss on Billings’ ‘erotics of reception’. Together with the Mitford
passage, they will also lead to the question of how we theorize the narrativization of
reception.
The first story starts in 1637, when Leone Allacci, librarian to Cardinal Francesco
Barberini, published a Greek manuscript that contained thirty-five letters, some
written by Socrates himself, some by his disciples. For Allacci, these newly discovered letters, ‘reborn’ (‘renascentes’) through his own toils, afforded an extraordinary insight into Socrates and his circle. As well as discussing the relative value of
philosophy and the pursuit of money and political honours, the letters also had a
delightful informality, seemingly springing from the realia of day-to-day interaction
in the Socratic circle. Xenophon himself was prominent in the new texts as author of
six letters and recipient of three, including one written by Socrates to Xenophon: ‘I
am told that you are in Thebes, and have caught up with Proxenus as he was setting
off to Cyrus in Asia. Whether this venture of yours will turn out well God knows, as
some people here are already trying to criticize it’ (Ep. 5, trans. Costa). Here, as
Allacci commented in his notes, was direct confirmation of Xenophon’s own account
of how Proxenus had summoned him to join Cyrus’ expedition and Socrates had
warned him of the danger of disapproval at Athens, since Cyrus had funded Sparta’s
victory in the recent war (Anab. 3.1.4-7).10 In other letters, written after Socrates’
death, Xenophon spoke of the death of his son Gryllus at the battle of Mantinea and
invited Socrates’ disciples to join him for his festival at Scillus. He reported that two
of the disciples, Aristippus and Phaedo, had already visited him, ‘and they delighted
in the place and the construction of the buildings and the plants which I myself had
planted with my own hands’ (Ep. 18, my translation).11 Again Allacci’s notes cited
the relevant ancient evidence: Diogenes Laertius, he notes, attested to the pleasantness of Scillus (‘loci amoenitatem’) — but why, he adds, cite other sources, when
Xenophon himself offers an eloquent description? By way of commentary (‘loco
9 To use the term of Martindale (1993: 3).
10 And yet Allacci does not alert readers to two contradictions with the Anabasis: Socrates
gave Xenophon the precise warning about the political undesirability of joining Cyrus
when he was still in Athens (3.1.5); and Xenophon caught up with Proxenus in Sardis,
not in Thebes (3.1.8). The epistolary form may explain the first change (Socrates was able
to speak to Xenophon directly without the need of a letter).
11 Again note the undetected addition: Xenophon does not mention doing any planting with
his own hands; contrast Cyrus’ revelation to the astonished Lysander in the paradise
scene at Sardis described at Oec. 4.22.
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TIM ROOD
commentarii’), therefore, he does not shrink (‘non grauabor exscribere’) from reproducing Xenophon’s account of Scillus in full. Rather than reading the Letters as part
of the reception of the Anabasis, that is, he uses the Anabasis to confirm the authenticity of the Letters (1637: 211–12).
Allacci’s claim that the Socratic letters were authentic did not survive a withering
attack from the great English scholar Richard Bentley. Bentley had engaged in a
lively dispute over his exposure of the inauthenticity of another set of ancient letters,
attributed to the tyrant Phalaris. In a later edition of his famous treatise, he demolished the authenticity of other collections of ancient letters — including the letters
of Socrates and the Socratics. As well as pointing to historical errors, Bentley was
able to set the presentation of Xenophon against what was known from Xenophon’s
own writings.12 In a letter ‘Xenophon’ spoke of entertaining Aristippus at Scillus
and reading to him his memoirs of Socrates — and this alone, Bentley noted, is
‘sufficient to blast the reputation of our famous Epistles’ (1777: 406): Xenophon had
in fact attacked Aristippus’ views in his Memorabilia. Then again, an impoverished
Xenophon appears in a later letter at Megara — ‘whereas every body knows, that he
got great riches in the war; and lived in very great splendor and hospitality at Scillus’
(1777: 407).13 Bentley was similarly appalled by the disparity between Xenophon’s
polite reference to Socrates’ famously shrewish wife, Xanthippe, in one of the letters
and his disparaging reference to her in the Memorabilia: ‘what shall we say of
Xenophon’s double-dealing? For my part; rather than I will harbour such a thought
of that great man, I will quit a whole cart-load of such Letters as these’ (1777: 411).
Though, as Martindale has written, ‘a reception history need not be part of a
narrative of progress’ (2007: 303), it seems hard not to read the shift from Allacci to
Bentley in those terms. Bentley’s philological acumen triumphs over Allacci’s naı̈ve
willingness to believe in the authenticity of the letters. And yet Allacci’s reading of
the letters also speaks to that longing for recovery that Billings identifies as fundamental to classical reception. If, then, ‘reception provides a way of compensating for
the loss of so much of the archive’ (Martindale 2007: 309), Allacci’s reading of the
letters shows how attempts to compensate for the loss of the archive can themselves
be part of its reception. More disturbingly, the erotics of reception — the desire to
recapture the irrecoverable past in all its fullness — also appear to blind Allacci to
some parts of the evidence contained within the archive. As for Bentley, his reading
can be seen not just as a scholarly advance on Allacci, but also as part of a more
complex narrative about the shifts of scholarly fashion. When Bentley stridently
rejects the letters as presenting a picture unworthy of ‘that great man’ Xenophon
and as inferior products in their own right (‘I will quit a whole cart-load of such
Letters as these’), the personal tone of his response to Xenophon can in some ways
12 Though Bentley does not pick up the minor contradictions pointed out in the previous
two footnotes.
13 Yet Xenophon was generally thought to have left Scillus at some point (though Corinth,
not Megara, is the other home mentioned in the ancient biographical tradition).
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REDEEMING XENOPHON
still be aligned with Allacci’s acceptance of the letters’ authenticity: both are moves
towards the recapturing the past in its lost vitality. As for Bentley’s dismissal of the
Socratic letters, recent scholarship has started to paint this type of material in a
much more positive light. This sympathetic picture reflects two trends that are both
partly influenced by the growth of reception studies: a widening conception of the
canon and an increased interest in how the Greek literature of the Roman empire
received the classical past.14
My second fable starts a few decades after Bentley’s discussion of the Socratic
letters. In 1758, Giacopo Nani, admiral of the Venetian navy, discovered (or at least
was shown) a small inscribed plaque of white marble in a church on one side of the
bay of Vathi on the island of Ithaca, then under Venetian control. Nani brought the
plaque — which measured a mere eight inches by six — back to Venice and gave it to
his brother Bernardo, a senator and the most prolific collector of antiquities in
Venice in the eighteenth century. Three years after its discovery, the inscription
was published by the antiquarian Paolo Paciaudi, a monk in the Theatine order, in
his two-volume Monumenta Peloponnesia (1761: 139–204), a treatise on some of the
antiquities in the Nani collection. Paciaudi subjected the thirty-one words of Greek
to a commentary of sixty-five pages of Latin. What made the inscription unusual was
that it was an exact replica of the inscription that Xenophon had set up in Artemis’
sanctuary and reproduced at the end of his account of Scillus (Anab. 5.3.13):
IEQOS O V WQOS SGS AQSELIDOS. SOM EV OMSA JAI JAQPOULEMOM
SGM LEM DEJASGM JASAYUEIM EJASSOU ESOUS. EJ DE SOU
PEQISSOU SOM MAOM EPISJEUAFEIM. AM DE SIS LG POIGI
SAUSA SGI YEWI LELGSEI.
(‘THIS PLACE IS SACRED TO ARTEMIS. HE WHO OWNS IT AND HARVESTS
ITS FRUITS MUST EVERY YEAR OFFER A TENTH OF THE PRODUCE TO THE
GODDESS, AND MUST USE SOME OF THE REMAINDER TO KEEP THE
TEMPLE IN GOOD REPAIR. NEGLECT OF THESE DUTIES WILL NOT GO
UNNOTICED BY THE GODDESS.’)
When Paciaudi published the inscription from Ithaca, he recognized that the wording was the same as Xenophon’s inscription. But he did not publish it as a mere copy
of Xenophon: he gave it a far grander title — ‘the sacred law of the Ithacans’. With
numerous citations from ancient Greek texts, he discussed a number of topics that
he claimed were relevant to understanding the inscription — in particular, rules on
working and renting sacred land. After an extensive discussion of shared laws on the
gods, he concluded that the Ithacans had borrowed the phrasing for their sacred law
from Xenophon. He even argued that the stone solved a question surprisingly left
open by the one poetic masterpiece set on Ithaca, Homer’s Odyssey — namely, the
question of who the major deity at Ithaca was.
14 For the letters as a novel, see Holzberg (1994: 38–47); see also Döring (1979: 114–28) for
the philosophical background.
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The Ithaca inscription also attracted the attention of two early nineteenth-century
English travellers, William Gell and Edward Dodwell. Gell and Dodwell visited
Ithaca together in 1806; Dodwell was subsequently detained by the French, and it
was only in 1819 that he was able to publish his Classical and Topographical Tour
through Greece, twelve years after Gell had produced a monograph on Ithaca. Noting
that the inscription did not even mention Ithaca, Dodwell argued that it was probably brought to the island ‘from Patra, on the opposite coast of Achaia, where there
was formerly a temple of Diana Laphria’ (1819: i. 71). Small and hilly Ithaca, after
all, was no place to dedicate a sanctuary to the goddess of the hunt. Gell had in the
meantime endowed the inscription with a more striking degree of authenticity:
observing that Scillus itself was not far from the sea, he speculated that ‘the stone
or marble might possibly have been carried to the island either as ballast, or from
devotion to the church’ (1807: 38) — in other words, that the stone found on Ithaca
was the very inscription set up by Xenophon at Scillus. The erotics of reception at
work again . . . 15
As scholarship on Greek epigraphy developed in the course of the nineteenth
century with new collections of inscriptions, more sceptical views were advanced
about the copy of Xenophon’s inscription found on Ithaca. When August Boeckh
edited the text, he dismissed Paciaudi’s long discussion as ‘extraordinary and fruitless sedulousness’ (1828–77: ii. 41: ‘mira atque infructuosa sedulitate’), and claimed
that the very title ‘The Sacred Law of the Ithacans’ was a ruse to make the stone
more valuable (‘ut maioris videretur pretii’). Boeckh did think that the stone was
evidence of an actual foundation from the second century AD modelled on
Xenophon’s, but the rules of this sanctuary could not be taken as ‘the sacred law’
of the Ithacans as a whole.16 Other scholars, however, suggested that the stone was
not connected with an actual cult, but was a mere imitation set up by an admirer of
Xenophon e.g. (Ziehen 1906: 246). As for Gell’s view that the inscription could have
been Xenophon’s actual stone, no reputable scholar even bothered to engage with
that fantasy.
If we place the inscription in the second or third century AD, then it can become
part of a powerful story about the reception of Xenophon within antiquity. As Greek
writers under the Roman empire looked back to what they saw as the greatest period
of Greek history, Xenophon’s style, variously characterized as charming, graceful
and sweet, was upheld as a model for imitation in various critical works, including a
lost treatise by ‘Longinus’, the author of the famous treatise On the Sublime; Lucian
even claimed that other historians imitated Xenophon’s stylistic mannerisms right
15 Yet Gell added in an afternote (120) that ‘from the form of the letters in the original, it
may be presumed that the inscription is not of very remote antiquity’. He also slips when
he writes (38) that ‘this is precisely similar to that inscription which Xenophon found in
Asia’; other aspects of the Scillus cult evoke Artemis’ sanctuary at Ephesus, but not the
inscription.
16 See also Boeckh (1842: 328).
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down to the notorious stages and parasangs formula that maps out Cyrus’ march
upcountry (Hist. Conscr. 24). This was also the era when Arrian forged a whole
literary career for himself as the second Xenophon: writing an Anabasis, updating
Xenophon’s treatise on hunting, recording the day-to-day musings of Epictetus as
Xenophon had done with Socrates, even setting up an inscription of his own to
Artemis.17
While the second century AD seems to offer a satisfactory context for the Ithaca
inscription, its interpretation took a startling new turn after the Nani collection was
dispersed in the nineteenth century and the inscription given to the Musée du
Cinquantenaire in Brussels. The epigraphist Charles Michel (1913: 144) concluded
from an examination of the letter forms that they were of different dates and so the
product of an erudite — if fallible — Renaissance forger. In dismissing the stone as a
forgery, Michel was going to the other extreme from Gell. But he was also reopening
a possibility that Paciaudi (1761: 145–6) in his initial publication of the inscription
had raised — but rejected: why, Paciaudi had objected, would a forger set on making
a profit put the stone on the small and scarcely inhabited island of Ithaca? That
objection may not be enough in itself to overturn Michel’s scepticism; at any rate,
the question whether the stone is a second-century AD imitation or Renaissance
forgery is left open in its most recent manifestation (as IG i2.4.1700).
To oppose ancient imitation to modern forgery is itself of course to beg an important question. How does second-century imitation differ from Renaissance forgery? We speak of imitation in the first case and forgery in the second because we
assume that the second-century carver was not trying to pass the stone off as ancient
while the Renaissance carver was. But this assumption only shows that if the meaning of this inscription is realized at the moment(s) of reception, then the realization
of meaning itself depends on our reconstruction of other possible moments of reception. The study of classical reception, that is, calls both for historical imagination
and for the detailed examination of often difficult pieces of historical evidence. At
the same time, all individual reconstructions of previous moments of reception will
themselves reflect their own specific historicities. The transhistorical, then, must
always remain in dialogue with the historical.
Paciaudi’s defence of the inscription’s authenticity raises the further question of
why Xenophon’s inscription came to be copied in Ithaca. Trying to answer this
question shows again how hard it is to interpret a text that is undated and divorced
from context. The stone’s alleged discovery place was first reported fifty years later
(Gell 1807: 36) — and even if it was found in a church it is still uncertain where it
had been before that. Whatever the stone’s origin, Ithaca may seem to modern
readers an eloquent place for it to be found: the island above all others associated
17 See Swain (1996), index, s.v. ‘Xenophon, atticist model’; Rutherford (1998: 64–79);
Tuplin (1993: 28), esp. nn. 59 (sweetness, grace, pleasantness), 60 (persuasiveness), 61
(thin style), 63 (purity) and 64 (books on Xenophon). For Arrian’s inscription, see
Stadter (1980: 52–3).
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with the return of an epic hero had become home to an inscription associated with a
return from a long and dangerous journey that is itself figured as a new Odyssey.
Does studying the reception of Xenophon’s Scillus inscription energize our dialogue with Xenophon’s original text? Let us return to the final phrase of Xenophon’s
inscription: AM DE SIS LG POIGI SAUSA SGI YEWI LELGSEI
(‘NEGLECT OF THESE DUTIES WILL NOT GO UNNOTICED BY THE
GODDESS’). Xenophon here parades his concern for the goddess’ sanctuary for a
future audience — perhaps because he was writing at a time when he had himself
been cast out of Scillus in the aftermath of the Spartan defeat at Leuctra. His
inscription, read in the light of the glowing account of the goddess’ festival that
precedes it, conveys a sense of the ample resources of the goddess’ sanctuary and the
human dedication required to perpetuate the rich local identity that Xenophon has
created through the foundation of the festival. Yet his whole account of Scillus,
while suggesting redemption from the loss imposed on Xenophon by exile from
Athens, also, as John Ma has written (2004: 341), ‘already implies future absence.’
That is to say, Xenophon’s account speaks to that dialectic of resource and loss that
is central to classical reception. He prepares for his own reception history. At the
same time, the transhistoricity of Xenophon’s inscription may also be a dehistoricizing gesture that aims at redeeming Xenophon’s reputation: Xenophon could well
have been writing to defend himself from charges of deriving personal advantage
from his obligations to the goddess.
The way Xenophon anticipates his own reception in the Anabasis is complicated
by an echo of another passage where he is overtly concerned with the question of his
own reception. The same verb used of the watchful goddess in the Scillus inscription
is used in the last sentence of the Hellenica: e’mo1 me;n d1 mŒcri to0tou gra’Œsqw t1 de;
m"t1 taNta 4sw& 4llN m"l–s"i (7.5.27: ‘To this point, then, let it be written by me.
Perhaps someone else will be concerned with what happened after this’, trans.
Marincola). As has often been noted, Xenophon ends this work with an echo of
its opening sentence: L"t1 de; taNta o2 polla8 & 3mŒrai& 4st"ron . . . (‘And after
this, not many days later . . . ’).18 If that opening sets Xenophon up as a continuator
of Thucydides, then the closing sentence of the Hellenica gestures towards the
future, expressing the hope that Xenophon himself will have continuators. If we
read the end of the Hellenica alongside the end of the Scillus inscription, then we can
see Xenophon as setting up an opposition between the human contingency of history
and the realm of the divine, untouched by uncertainty. In other words, we can view
Xenophon (like Herodotus and Thucydides before him) as a reception theorist.
The stories I have told about Scillus could be dismissed as antiquarianism rather
than transhistorical reception. But the advantages of a reception approach, if broadly
conceived, is that it questions such distinctions while also expanding the number of
stories that can be told about antiquity. This expansion places a burden of responsibility on the person telling reception stories, particularly in view of the
18 See Rood (2004b: 349), with further bibliography.
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simultaneous expansion in the easy availability and accessibility of reception data
owing to electronic resources. The stories I have told evidently do not ‘matter’ in the
way that the German appropriation of Tacitus’ Germania matters — but the construction of different sorts of Xenophon is of some historical importance all the
same. Methodologically, my stories could perhaps be dismissed as marked not by a
Pateresque receptivity but by the sort of naı̈ve historical positivism that Martindale
sees it as the task of reception to overcome — he has written elsewhere that his own
‘aesthetic turn’ might be seen as a move in his ‘war against the determination of
classicists to ground their discipline in ‘‘history’’ ’: ‘I would like to see ‘‘history’’
giving place to ‘‘reception’’ ’ (2005: 29). I am not so disturbed by ‘history’, however,
nor so convinced that its practitioners are guilty of the lack of theorizing that
Martindale suspects. It may be that they can be found guilty of occluding their
own theoretical reflections, but by the same token any reading that is open about its
own theoretical position must also at some point be guilty of occluding the politics of
its own lack of occlusivity. Rather than opposing history and reception, I would
prefer to see the terms as mutually implicated: doing history is a type of reception;
doing reception is a type of history. Both history and reception are culturally significant and pedagogically useful ways of telling stories about the past.
Doing reception is also one of the types of story-telling that are most likely to
promote theoretical reflection about the constructedness of narrative — even if the
process of reflection is not foregrounded in the way the narrative is told. I have
presented a number of stories in this short paper that can be seen as fragments of a
larger history of the reception of a particular description in Xenophon. This larger
history is not in any real sense ‘out there’, ripe for verbal imitation. It is forged in the
very act of ordering the wild paradise that is the classical heritage. To acknowledge
this is not to demean reception studies: it is, rather, to foreground their
meta-narratological potential. Reception, that is to say, fosters consciousness
about how we construct our historical narratives as we go about the process of
redeeming the texts of antiquity in the ways that seem best to us, now, following,
however uncertainly, in the tracks of the unknown hands that created Socratic letters
or sculpted on a small piece of Ithacan stone the same words Xenophon had had
inscribed in Scillus.
And after this our exile . . .
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