2
Two puzzles perplex readers of Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus. The first relates to the
title of the work; the second, to its conclusion. If the title is taken to refer, as it typically
has been, to the education Cyrus receives—first at home in the Persian republic and later
in the Median court of his grandfather, Astyages—then we must confront the awkward
fact that Cyrus’ formal education ends at the conclusion of Book I. The puzzle then
becomes: what does Cyrus learn thereafter? It is hard to see what he learns, since he acts
according to a single set of consistent principles throughout the subsequent course of his
career. The second puzzle is this: if Cyrus is so great, why does his empire degenerate
after his death? The two puzzles can be solved at once by recognizing that the most
important “education of Cyrus” in the Kyrou paideia is the education Cyrus imparts to his
subjects and followers, not the ones he receives from the laws of Persia and at the court
of his grandfather Astyages.
The Cyropaedia is best read, I argue, as a series of lessons in moral corruption
and an illustration of a series of political temptations to be avoided by those who would
remain the free and equal citizens of a republican order. Xenophon’s Cyrus succeeds
admirably in this education, gradually reducing the virtuous and free men of Persia into
little more than animals, slaves to their enlarged and debased passions. Having reduced
his followers to the virtual status of beasts, he rules them without difficulty; the moral
decay of the Persians Xenophon documents in the closing chapter of the Cyropaedia is
the necessary consequence of the despotic institutions Cyrus establishes during his
lifetime. Although it has frequently been suggested that Cyrus rules his subjects in a
Socratic manner (because he rules “with knowledge”) that identification must be rejected;
indeed, Xenophon’s Cyrus stands as the mirror image to his Socrates—the true corrupter
Convention