Noreen Humble’s monograph offers a polemical, deeply considered and largely convincing reinterpretation of Xenophon’s Lacedaimoniôn Politeia. For her, the work represents a Socratic enquiry into how Sparta’s harsh way of life paved the way for the abuses of Spartan commanders abroad, figures criticized both in the work’s infamous fourteenth chapter and throughout Xenophon’s historiographic output. Humble, accordingly, offers an integrative reading of the work, rather than seeing the fourteenth chapter—a seeming “palinode,” where the author laments how the Spartans, corrupted by exposure to money and power abroad, have strayed from the traditional “laws of Lycurgus”—as an inorganic or late addition. The book recasts and weaves together a host of the author’s influential publications over the last quarter century that have already made its major conclusions a reference point in discussions of Xenophon’s attitude towards Sparta.[1]
Humble’s book takes its cues from two key publications that helped push back against the traditional view of Xenophon as a Spartan apologist and the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia as a propagandistic celebration: on the one hand, Leo Strauss’s influential but idiosyncratic attempt to find a subversive undercurrent in the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia that works against its surface message and, on the other, Christopher Tuplin’s influential rereading of the Hellenica as highly critical of Sparta’s hegemony.[2] Humble is careful to note that she is not a Straussian. However, she takes seriously the discontinuities and contradictions that Strauss and his followers identified in the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia (pp. xxiii-xxv, 61-69), while at the same time refusing to read Xenophon through a biographical tradition that has often reductively inferred his Laconophilia. For instance, she convincingly shows how the rosier picture of Agesilaus from his eponymous encomium, as against that in the Hellenica, has often been assumed to reflect Xenophon’s actual views rather than resulting from the conventions imposed by a laudatory genre (pp. 36-37, 221-237).
Humble divides her work into three parts. In the first, covering two chapters, she sets the stage for her reading of the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia. The initial chapter turns to the Anabasis and presents a reading of Xenophon’s autobiographical flashback (to his interactions with Socrates about consulting Delphi over joining Cyrus’s expedition, 3.1.4-10) and flash-forward (to his establishment of a shrine and festival to Artemis while exiled in Scillus, 5.3.5-13) as together pointing the reader to approach his works as Socratic explorations of statecraft. The younger ‘Xenophon’ emerges in her interpretation as a typical politically ambitious pupil of Socrates, who lost his access to an Athenian political career by ignoring his teacher’s warnings about the blowback that his participation in Cyrus’s expedition might produce. It thereby positions the author’s literary project as a philosophical investigation of leadership on the model of Socrates, whose wisdom Xenophon came to appreciate only after his exile. It is an investigation, moreover, conducted in a manner that can substitute for the author’s frustrated political ambitions, educating aspiring Athenian leaders through a self-reflective and dialogic form of enquiry. The next chapter goes on to provide a model review of previous approaches to the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia, clarifies Humble’s debt to predecessors such as William E. Higgins and Francois Ollier, and sets out her own approach to Xenophon (as described above).
The second part of the book offers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia, which emerges not as a work of Laconophilia but instead as a critical philosophical investigation of Sparta’s characteristic institutions. It organically sets up the controversial Chapter 14 by showing the active reader troubling signs throughout of how Spartan education inculcated negative habits that flourished among unsupervised Spartan officials abroad, focusing on three areas in particular: First, the valorization of obedience and good behavior only out of fear of punishment within an environment of omnipresent supervision by other Spartans, without concern for internalized moral intelligence. Xenophon draws implicit attention to this last factor by the almost total absence of references to sōphrosunē. This faculty of moral self-regulation is closely associated in other sources with the Spartans, whereas Xenophon instead makes it a centerpiece of the more intellectual system he pictures for Persian and Socratic education, foils for Sparta within his larger corpus. The priorities that Sparta drills into its young men are reflected in its practice on campaign. For example, what Xenophon sees as setting its army apart is an ability, given its training under the laws of Lycurgus, to retain discipline in the disorder of battle, rather than any tactical agility (11.5-7). The motivation for this discipline appears in the earlier nineth chapter, on the extreme social penalties that drive cowards to suicide (pp. 169-172).
The second recurrent problem at Sparta that Xenophon draws out is its inability, even within such a harsh and panoptic system, wholly to eliminate negative behaviors like the illicit accumulation of wealth. Key here is Xenophon’s reuse of a “microstructure” across chapters, where, among other features, after presenting an idealized picture of how Spartan institutions successfully inculcate a desired behavior, the author adds several buttressing regulations that imply cruder forms of enforcement had to deal with the many exceptions in practice. For instance, the author boasts of why Spartans have no need of money given a state that provides for them and rewards martial excellence but then goes on to note that domestic raids to suss out hoarded wealth were frequent (7.6; pp. 47-52, 142-144). Third, Humble sees Sparta as fostering a violent competitiveness. The desire for victory in the young that other poleis channel towards choral or athletic competitions is at Sparta redirected into striving to qualify as one of the three hundred youths selected by the Hippagretai. However, this supposedly virtuous competition is only described as playing out in the form of constant brawling between those chosen and those passed over (4.2-6, pp. 113-121).
The book’s third part first makes the argument that the flaws which Xenophon emphasizes in the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia predict the rivalrous, violent and unscrupulous behavior of Spartan officials operating abroad without supervision, whom Xenophon and his readers encounter repeatedly in the Anabasis and Hellenica. These figures, in fact, form a type marked also by a susceptibility to the flattery of foreign potentates, as the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia specifically mentions in its “palinode” (14.2). The book’s final chapter then shows how the connection between Sparta’s harsh educational system and its imperial malpractice is echoed in the discussion of the decline of timarchy into oligarchy from Book 8 of Plato’s Republic, another work that fuses the genres of constitutional literature and active philosophical enquiry. These similarities indicate that the two authors knew each other’s work and suggests Plato’s views on Sparta may have evolved in response to the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia. Meanwhile, a non-Socratic Athenian like Isocrates, despite showing evidence of having read Xenophon’s work, does not engage with his core thesis, instead crediting Sparta’s imperial hubris to a more general corrupting power of empire. The book ends with an appendix containing a text (based on Marchant’s OCT, with modifications) and translation of the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia.
Humble’s monograph is a model addition to the recent trend of reading Xenophon’s works as an integrated whole (e.g. the very different studies in this vein of Vincent Azoulay and Vivienne Gray). This approach lets her, for example, contrast how the strategic skills that boys at Sparta are said to learn through stealing extra food are in Persia and at Athens gained instead by young men on the hunt (pp. 99-100, 105). The latter at Sparta is restricted to adults (4.7), whereas at Persia boys are forbidden to practice deception, since when allowed in the past it seriously undermined their moral foundation (Cyr. 1.6.31-34). Although the book’s focus is on the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia, perhaps its most rewarding stretch concerns the consistent characterization of Spartan imperialism through its overseas representatives in the Anabasis and the Hellenica (pp. 206-221).[3] Humble’s sensitive attention to Xenophon’s experimentation with genre, touched on above, is also outstanding.
Where Humble’s argument is least convincing is, perhaps unsurprisingly, where it is most speculative, namely her provocative suggestion that the analeptic and proleptic passages in the Anabasis serve to orient the reader towards reading the author’s works as Socratic investigations. There is the practical problem that the Anabasis was seemingly published under the pseudonym Themistogenes of Syracuse (Hell. 3.1.2), which makes its digressions on the character ‘Xenophon’ an odd place to locate the key for understanding the larger output of Xenophon the author. The prolepsis involving Scillus also lacks any direct sense of what are for Humble its key takeaways, namely Xenophon’s frustration in missing out on an active political life at Athens or his Socratic literary output as a successful substitute. Instead, the focus is on Xenophon’s religious practice, just as it was in the analepsis. It is not that readers must limit themselves to the surface meaning, but it is odd that the piety at the center of both digressions plays no role in what Humble sees as their deeper meaning. Nevertheless, the notion that much of Xenophon’s works emulates what he saw as Socrates’ goal of forming virtuous political leaders can stand on its own. The strongest and most original argument for approaching the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia in this light, in fact, is Humble’s insightful analysis of how the narrator’s opening thauma at how Sparta grew so powerful signals, through an intertext with Plato (Theaet. 155d) rather than Herodotus, a philosophical and not a historiographic stance (pp. 26-28).
Humble’s monograph is self-consciously iconoclastic, which leads to a presentation that concentrates on the flaws which Xenophon points out for his readers at Sparta at the cost of underplaying the many features his surface praise and larger corpus suggest he admired. Although obedience for Xenophon is best when willingly secured through persuasion rather than force (e.g. Cyr. 3.1.28), he is no stranger to the complementary role that fear, punishment and peer pressure play in imposing social order. In the Memorabilia, obedience to the law like that achieved by Lycurgus is, for Socrates, the necessary foundation on which voluntary forms of association are built in peace and war (4.4.15). Meanwhile, while the Anabasis criticizes the alienating effect of Clearchus’s characteristically Spartan reliance on fear and punishment (2.6.8-14), it also emphasizes that the contrastingly benevolent Proxenus was often dismissed as an ineffectual pushover (19-20). Similarly, Humble overstates violent competitiveness as a specifically Spartan malady in Xenophon, since he also places it among Athens’ elite (Mem. 2.6.17-21).
In Chapter 14, Xenophon laments that the laws of Lycurgus do not yet remain “unshaken” now that the Spartans have acquired an empire overseas. Noreen Humble makes a convincing case that Xenophon wants his reader to see how the seeds of this evolution were planted within these laws themselves, but his lament nevertheless suggests that there was much at Sparta which those interested in successful statecraft might adapt. Nonetheless, Humble’s careful reading of the Lacedaimoniôn Politeia against Xenophon’s other works, even if it can veer into over-interpretation at the margins, makes a highly persuasive case for a consistent view in them of Sparta’s imperial maladies and his careful presentation of their origin in its own institutions. The book, proofread to a very high standard, is important reading for scholars of Xenophon and Classical Sparta, challenging both to question received wisdom and pay careful attention to illuminating intertexts within and without the author’s corpus.
Notes
[1] See, for example, Paul Christensen, “Xenophon’s Views on Sparta,” in Michael Flower, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Xenophon (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 387-391.
[2] Leo Strauss, “The Spirit of Sparta, or the Taste of Xenophon,” Social Research 6 (1939): 502–536. Christopher Tuplin, The Failings of Empire: A Reading of Xenophon Hellenica 2.3.11– 7.5.27 (Stuttgart, 1993).
[3] Humble’s work here complements that of Ellen Millender, most recently “Foxes at Home, Lions Abroad: Spartan Commanders in Xenophon’s Anabasis,” in Anton Powell and Nicolas Richer, eds. Xenophon and Sparta (Swansea, 2020), 223-259.