Ch. 2. Tyrants as Impious Leaders in Xenophon's Hellenica

Abstract

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the consistent focus throughout Xenophon’s large and disparate body of work upon articulating a very specific set of virtues that define a good leader. I examine the reverse side of this trend in scholarship by identifying the characteristics that Xenophon employs to define bad leaders. I argue that Xenophon deliberately shaped his narrative in the Hellenica to portray egregiously bad leaders as tyrants, focusing in particular upon their impiety, which he presents as the crucial explanatory factor in their downfalls. Appropriating the figure of the evil tyrant from Athenian democratic ideology, he bequeaths to the later Greek historiographical tradition the topos of the impious tyrant. Published in Richard Fernando Buxton, ed., Aspects of Leadership in Xenophon (HISTOS Supplement 5), p. 51-83.