One thing I keep wondering about as we have read Thucydides and Xenophon: how did their works spread? Did they intend to publish them? Did they share them with family or a select few friends? Were they written as pieces of political philosophy in response to bad decisions by other leaders? Did they write them to train others in both war and peace?

Xenophon is attested to by a handful of his contemporaries (Plato and Aristotle) and certainly by a number who come later, like Plutarch. He also seems to mention his own writing in the Hellenika, but there he refers to it pseudonymously, as the work of Themistogenes of Syracuse. Perhaps that means someone named Themistogenes (about whom we know nothing) was the author, and the Anabasis is wrongly attributed to Xenophon? Or perhaps Xenophon’s pseudonymous self-citation is a sign that the Hellenika was also intended to be published, and he wanted to separate these two works from one another.

One effect of reading these books again is I am seeing more depths in what is not written. The first time I read them I saw what was on the surface. They helped me become a Greek scholar and teacher, and they helped me understand some of the major events in Ancient Greek history. This time through, I am seeing things that were left out, or left unsaid, and those things are helping me to understand what Xenophon (and Herodotus, and Thucydides, and Diodorus Sicullus, and others) were doing when they wrote histories.