The Straussian Reception of Xenophon's Cyropaedia

Abstract

In 1948, Leo Strauss wrote about Xenophon’s Cyropaedia: “This work has never been studied by modern historians with even a small fraction of the care and concentration it merits and which is needed if it is to disclose its meaning.” Thanks in part to his students, this is no longer true, and this article reviews the Straussian reception of the Cyropaediabetween 1969 and 2015. But it begins with Strauss, who could scarcely have recognized the difficulties involved in disclosing “its meaning” unless that meaning had disclosed itself to him, and it is the elusive nature of that disclosure that has given his students the interpretive freedom to reach conclusions that are sometimes diametrically if not explicitly opposed to Strauss’s own. An investigation of those differences sheds light on both Strauss and his followers, and also on the distinction between Strauss’s interpretive methods and his political philosophy. No less importantly, such an investigation also helps us to better understand Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.