If Thucydides is often regarded as too good a historian to moralise, Xenophon is often regarded as too much of a moralist to be a good historian. Scholarship in the nineteenth century regarded Xenophon as an incompetent historian who wanted to think and write like Thucydides, but was intellectually incapable of doing so. This trend persisted throughout much of the twentieth century; but at the same time a trickling stream of scholars began to study the Hellenica on its own terms and discuss what its purpose may have been. Such discussions have generally concluded that the work's purpose was to a certain extent moral. Grayson (1975) has even argued that the Hellenica is not historiography at all, but is a purely moral treatise. It is part of the purpose of the present study to show that a work can comfortably be both at the same time, and even that this was, in fact, the norm for Greek historiography. In the following, we shall see how Xenophon's Hellenica in many ways functions as the link between Classical and Hellenistic historiographical moralising.

There is general agreement that Xenophon wrote the Hellenica in (at least) two instalments, the first (1.1.1–2.3.10) as a continuation of Thucydides probably shortly after the end of the Peloponnesian War, the second (2.3.11–end) some, perhaps many, years later in a style more his own. Nevertheless, I shall treat the work as a unified whole, in the belief that Xenophon intended it to be read as such, regardless of how many years passed between his writing of the first and second part.

PROGRAMMATIC STATEMENTS

The Hellenica has no preface. The fact that the first and last lines of the work make it, in effect, a chapter in a continuous story says much about Xenophon's view of history; but it does not provide any information about the content or purpose of the work. For such information we need to turn to four brief, programmatic narratorial statements within the narrative. The first one concerns the last words of Theramenes, who pretended to play the drinking game kottabos with the last drops of his hemlock and toasted Critias, his former friend, now persecutor.