stranger than fiction; for the purpose of Herodotus was truth, whereas the purpose of Xenophon was fiction of a particular kind—not the fiction which grasps the poetry of human life, but the dry fiction which treats all incidents as a mere framework on which ethical or political moralisings may be hung.
It may be supposed, however, that Xenophon, who under the younger Cyrus had penetrated into the heart of the Persian territory, must have had great opportunities of studying Persian customs, and that his book would be found to contain valuable information with regard to those customs, and to the Oriental character viewed on its best side. But in this expectation the reader is disappointed, for here again we find that it was Xenophon's object to set forth, not facts, but his own conceptions of what ought to be. Throwing the scene of his Utopia into the far East, and the time of his narrative one hundred and fifty years back, he appears to have thought himself emancipated from restrictions of truth, or even probability, and accordingly he transfers to ancient Persia all that he most admired in the Lacedæmonian institutions of his own time. Even the distinctive and remarkable characteristics of the Persian religion are blurred over and confused by his constantly attributing to his hero the performance of sacrifices according to the Grecian mode, and the practice of the art of divination, of which he was personally so fond.
Taking the 'Cyropædeia' as we find it—not as a history, nor as a true picture of national life and manners, nor yet as a romance of the higher kind, like
