Genre, models and functions of Xenophon's work in comparison with Isocrates’ λόγοι

It is evident that the framework of the Anabasis has areas of overlap with works of history,whether by Thucydides or by Herodotus, but it is equally evident that its individual components are used in a different way and to different purposes. The encomiastic and auto-eulogising component is flanked by the description of characters who are described in their positive and negative aspects, according to a tendency that will be consolidated in the historiography of the fourth century. Both elements coincide in the characteristics of the ideal commander. Further, the very theme of the work leads to undeniable convergences with rhetorical works both real and fictitious, such as Isocrates’ Panegyricus, on the theme of the comparison, military and otherwise, between Greeks and Persians. The fusion of the Iliadic line (war, and moreover that of Greeks against an Asian people, as the Trojans were) with the Odyssean line (the journey, the return) also refers back to the model par excellence: Homer.If we shift our attention from genre to function, we are able to approach a better understanding of the Anabasis: Xenophon is offering paradigms that concern the spheres of ethics, politics and warfare, and the function of his work may thus be, in some respects, parallel to that of “intentional history”, a category introduced by Hans-Joachim Gehrke to indicate “the projection in time of the ele- ments of subjective, self-conscious self-categorization which construct the identity of a group as a group”. In particular, Xenophon projects onto the expedition of the Greek mercenaries, who constitute a well-defined group, the identity of the military class and that of the Greeks as opposed to other peoples. At the indivi- dual level he is projecting his own identity as a member of the higher classes and as a pupil of Socrates. The liberty granted to prose and its lack of bonds dictated by an occasion permit Xenophon to use strategies belonging to different genres in order to create a literary space that is populated by its own internal relations and its own laws: in this Xenophon is very close to the choices and literary strategies deployed by Isocrates. The code of the Anabasis is constructed in relation to the function, orbetter the functions, that Xenophon assigns to his own work. In the hierarchy of functions a very prominent position is given to the paideutic function, which subsumes the various levels at which the text’s paradigmatic character operates. On this point an exchange between Xenophon and Cheirisophus on the topic of Spartan and Athenian education may be considered a kind of mise en abîme (4.6.14–16). To Xenophon, who is exhorting Cheirisophus to give a display of the results of Spartan education, and in particular the ability to steal something without being seen, Cheirisophus replies jokingly that the most eminent Atheni- ans, who occupy public positions, are extremely skilled in thieving. Far from being a precursor of the romance or of autobiography, and no differently from his contemporaries Isocrates and Plato, Xenophon aspires to be a new educator of the Greeks, in other words a new Homer