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“... recounts the progress of his army (which included around 13,000 hired Greek soldiers, among them Xenophon) from his headquarters in Sardis through modern Turkey and the Syrian desert to the plains of Mesopotamia. The first book culminates in Cyrus’ death at the hands of his brother in the battle of Cunaxa. The remaining six follow the ordeals of the ...”

“... the earlier and more substantial literary sources, it all depends on whether you favour Aristotle, Xenophon or Plutarch, all non-Spartans. None focuses on women, but all use them in their analyses of the alleged strengths or weaknesses of the Spartan constitution. Which came first: the inadequate constitution that allowed women to own property, or the ...”

“... were Homer and the epic poets; and a little lower down, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, along with the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and (less congenial to modern taste) those bombastic orators Lysias and Demosthenes. What’s more, as Menippus’ answer to Apollonius shows, judgments of literary quality were always ...”

“... boar, but his example – Achilles – is not typical. Around the turn of the fifth century BC, Xenophon noted that the boar is designed to attack animals taller than himself. Boars have been known to knock over camels, attack elephants and charge bullock carts and motorised trucks. In the late 1980s, two young boars attacked an F16 fighter plane attempting ...”

“... the lyric poet of the mid-fifth century, and his odes deal only marginally with his own region. Xenophon, the Athenian soldier of fortune whose Hellenica follows events in Greece from 410 to 362, might have borne witness to the great age of Thebes, but in fact did more than anyone to make sure the city was ‘forgotten’. A Spartophile who admired the ...”

“... so he can use antique Greek terms that are seriously confusing in places, and calls the commander Xenophon. These are allowable affectations perhaps for some Greekling on the fringes of Roman society, but as it happens Arrian was himself in charge of that operation as governor of the important two-legion province of Cappadocia, and not coincidentally an ...”

“... is at once a scientific one . . . and a religious one’. It is Socrates – Socrates as Xenophon discovers him – who has a ‘fundamentally religious motivation’, who produces a ‘teleology that is far more overtly and explicitly anthropocentric than anything we have met in his predecessors’, and in whom there is an ‘almost complete absence ...”

“... and given hereditary Athenian citizenship. Ritual and cult were not confined to public ceremony. Xenophon was a down-to-earth cavalry officer with an intelligent interest in Socratic philosophy. When he was asked to take sole command of the mercenary army in which he was serving, his decision was determined by the sacrifice of two animals and the ...”

“... texts – including the court speeches of Lysias, Demosthenes and Lycurgus, the histories of Xenophon and Thucydides, and plays and poems by Euripides, Aristophanes and Pindar – in order to re-examine a number of facets of life in democratic Athens, including the daily activities of men and women, buying and selling, participation in legal cases, and a ...”

“... cultivated Socrates was to acquire that sharpness of dialectic essential for public debate. As Xenophon wrote in his Memorabilia, ‘politics had brought them to Socrates, and for politics they left him.’ Nevertheless Alcibiades and Socrates remained friends for at least a decade, as two anecdotes, both military, testify. At the outset of the ...”

“... book of the same title. The original On Tyranny is a commentary by Leo Strauss on a dialogue by Xenophon in which a poet named Simonides counsels a tyrant named Hiero on how best to exercise his rule. Strauss’s study was presented along with a critique by Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher and proto-EU bureaucrat, who himself once played a ...”

“... of Many in One, is set up as a man’s intricate filtering of a woman’s story of delusion. Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray is imagined as an old Australianised Greek woman, a friend of Patrick White – the widow, in fact, of his lover. White himself ‘intrudes’ in person into the action as well as editorially into her text, and appears as an old man with a ...”

“... ones. In one of the earliest surviving novels of the Roman Imperial period, the Ephesiaka by Xenophon of Ephesus, the hero has a similar dream, in similar circumstances. The hero, Habrokomes, is imprisoned largely because of love-complications (the same applies to McCarthy’s young John Grady Cole). Tortured, immured, separated from his ...”

“... grise of American conservatism, Leo Strauss. They disagreed about whether a little dialogue that Xenophon wrote in the fourth century BC provides an adequate understanding of modern tyranny. Strauss had said that it did, but he was sufficiently impressed by Kojève’s objections to write a reply in an essay called ‘Restatement on ...”

“... as ‘the Old Oligarch’, is the author of a Constitution of the Athenians wrongly attributed to Xenophon. He goes on about how cleverly the Athenian people have set things up to exploit the rich, and dreams of managing the same thing in reverse when his side gains power. Evidently, Greeks were less squeamish than we are about the relation between ...”