The Oxyrhynchus historian achieves this, Xenophon almost does in the first two books of his Hellenica
or Greek History, which carry the story of the Peloponnesian War down to its end in 404 B.C. But when
later in life he came to continue the story to the battle of Mantinea in 362, covering the period of the
Spartan leadership in Greece, its collapse, and the short-lived Theban leadership, he produced an
account so careless, so lop-sided, and so prejudiced that it would not be taken seriously if it were not the
only surviving contemporary account: even the claim that he was writing memoirs, not history, fails to
excuse a work whose omissions are more interesting than its contents. The sadness is that Xenophon did
fulfil the Thucydidean criterion of being an eyewitness and participant in these events, and yet missed
completely the tragic theme of the failure of the Spartan way of life which he was so well qualified to
interpret. Nevertheless Xenophon's fresh and easy style, his simple view of virtue and vice, and his
unqualified admiration for Sparta make a pleasant change from the rigours of his predecessor.
Style and a moral content suitable for schoolchildren made Xenophon popular throughout antiquity and
ensured the survival of all his works. Many of these are on the fringes of history. The Anabasis is a boy's
own adventure story of the march of 10,000 Greek brigands through the heart of the Persian Empire, told
by one of its leaders; the Agesilaus is an obituary piece praising the record of Xenophon's lifelong friend
and protector, Agesilaus, king of Sparta; the Memoirs of Socrates presents an intimate portrait of a
famous man whom Xenophon probably never met, in the tradition of literary memoirs going back to the
fifth century. Another work of Xenophon's, the Cyropaedia, can claim to be the first historical novel: it
is a very long and completely fictitious account of the education and exploits of the founder of the
Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great; its usefulness as a mirror for princes and its emphasis on moral
leadership made it one of Europe's most popular books until kings went out of fashion. In antiquity it
was responsible for a number of semi-historical accounts of the education of the hero from Alexander
the Great onwards. But the East had more claim to be exotic than moral; and Ctesias of Cnidus, court
doctor of Artaxerxes II in the early fourth century (who had actually been present at the same battle of
Cunaxa as the Xenophon of the Anabasis, but on the other side) wrote an enormously popular and wildly
fanciful (lost) history of Persia, which gave inside authority to a view of Persia 'breathing seraglio and
eunuch perfumes, mixed with the foul stench of blood' (Eduard Meyer). Never trust a doctor: such
writing derives from Ionian popular story-telling, and has its proper continuation in the romantic novels
of the Hellenistic period.
Hellenica
The mainstream of Greek history-writing remained the Thucydidean history of city-states in conflict, but
now standardized in a series of connecting and competing Hellenica or histories of Greece. Among the
lost historians of the fourth century two stand out. Ephorus of Cyme wrote a Greek history in thirty
books, which sought to replace all rivals by beginning, at the beginning with the return of the sons of
Heracles and ending in 341 B.C. He is interesting for his attempt to delimit the sphere of history from
that of myth, and for the way he justified his wider approach in a series of prefaces to individual sections
which asserted the unity of history. As a pupil of Isocrates (below, p. 230), he began the dangerous
relationship between rhetoric and history, with its tendency to sacrifice truth to effect. He also had other
vices: he had a sharp eye for the use of poetry as evidence for history, but little judgement in exploiting
it; and he sought to disguise his dependence on earlier historians by 'modernizing' facts and figures, and