II

The Title and the Form

While practically everything said in the Hiero is said by Xenophon’s characters, Xenophon himself takes full responsibility for the title of the work.1 The title is No other work contained in the Corpus Xenophonteum has a title consisting of both a proper name and an adjective referring to the subject. The first part of the title is reminiscent of the title of the Agesilaus. The Agesilaus deals with an outstanding Greek king, just as the Hiero deals with an outstanding Greek tyrant. Proper names of individuals also occur in the titles of the Cyri Institutio, the Cyri Expeditio, and the Apologia Socratis. Agesilaus, the two Cyruses, and Socrates seem to be the men Xenophon admired most. But the two Cyruses were not Greek, and Socrates was not a ruler: the Agesilaus and the Hiero, the only writings of Xenophon the titles of which contain proper names of individuals in the nominative, are the only writings of Xenophon which may be said to be devoted to Greek rulers.

The second part of the title reminds one of the titles of the Hipparchicus, the Oeconomicus, and the Cynegeticus. These three writings serve the purpose of teaching skills befitting gentlemen: the skill of a commander of cavalry, the skill of managing one’s estate, and the skill of hunting.² Accordingly, one should expect that the purpose of the Tyrannicus is to teach the skill of the tyrant, the (or ) ³ and in fact Simonides does therein teach Hiero how best to exercise tyrannical rule.

There is only one work of Xenophon apart from the Hiero which has an alternative title: the (Ways and Means). The purpose of that work is to show the (democratic) rulers of Athens how they could become more just by showing them how they could overcome the necessity under which they found themselves of acting unjustly.4 That is to say, its purpose is to show how the democratic order of Athens could be improved without being fundamentally changed. Similarly, Simonides shows the tyrannical ruler of Syracuse how he could overcome the necessity of acting unjustly under which he found himself without abandoning tyrannical rule as such.⁵ Xenophon, the pupil of Socrates, seems to have considered both democracy and tyranny faulty regimes.⁶ The Ways and Means and the Hiero are the only works of Xenophon which are devoted to the question of how a given political order of a faulty character could be corrected without being transformed into a good political order.

Xenophon could easily have explained in direct terms the conditional character of the policy recommended in the Hiero. Had he done so, however, he might have conveyed the impression that he was not absolutely opposed to tyranny. But “the cities,” and especially Athens, were absolutely opposed to tyranny.⁷ Besides, one of the charges brought against Socrates was that he taught his pupils to be “tyrannical.” Reasons such as these explain why Xenophon presented his reflections on the improvement of tyrannical rule (and therewith on the stabilization of such rule), as distinguished from his reflections on the improvement of the Athenian regime, in the form of a dialogue in which he does not participate in any way: the Hiero is the only work of Xenophon in which the author, when speaking in his own name, never uses the first person, whereas the Ways and Means is the only work of Xenophon whose very opening word is an emphatic I. The reasons indicated explain besides why the fairly brief suggestions for the improvement of tyrannical rule are prefaced by a considerably more extensive discourse which expounds the undesirable character of tyranny in the strongest possible terms.

The Hiero consists almost exclusively of utterances of men other than the author. There is only one other work of Xenophon which has that character: the Oeconomicus. In the Oeconomicus, too, the author “hides himself”⁸ almost completely. The Oeconomicus is a dialogue between Socrates and another Athenian on the management of the household. According to Socrates, there does not seem to be an essential difference between the art of managing the household and that of managing the affairs of the city: both are called by him “the royal art.”⁹ Hence it can only be due to secondary considerations that the dialogue which is destined to teach that art is called Oeconomicus, and not Politicus or Basilicus. There is ample evidence to show that the Oeconomicus, while apparently devoted to the economic art only, actually deals with the royal art as such.10 It is then permissible to describe the relation of Xenophon’s two dialogues as that of a Basilicus to a Tyrannicus: the two dialogues deal with the two types of monarchic rule.¹¹ Since the economist is a ruler, the Oeconomicus is, just as the Hiero, a dialogue between a wise man (Socrates)¹² and a ruler (the potential economist Critobulus and the actual economist Ischomachus). But whereas the wise man and the rulers of the Oeconomicus are Athenians, the wise man and the ruler of the Hiero are not. And whereas the wise man and the potential ruler of the Oeconomicus were friends of Xenophon, and Xenophon himself was present at their conversation, the wise man and the ruler of the Hiero were dead long before Xenophon’s time. It was evidently impossible to assign the “tyrannical” teaching to Socrates. But the reason was not that there was any scarcity of actual or potential tyrants in the entourage of Socrates. Rather the reverse. Nothing would have been easier for Xenophon than to arrange a conversation on how to rule well as a tyrant between Socrates and Charmides or Critias¹³ or Alcibiades. So doing, though—giving Socrates such a role in such a context—he would have destroyed the basis of his own defense of Socrates. It is for this reason that the place occupied in the Oeconomicus by Socrates is occupied in the Hiero by another wise man. After having chosen Simonides, Xenophon was free to present him as engaged in a conversation with the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus;¹⁴ but he apparently wished to avoid any connection between the topics “tyranny” and “Athens.”

One cannot help wondering why Xenophon chose Simonides as a chief character in preference to certain other wise men who were known to have conversed with tyrants.¹⁵ A clue is offered by the parallelism between the Hiero and the Oeconomicus. The royal art is morally superior to the tyrannical art. Socrates, who teaches the royal or economic art, has perfect self-control as regards the pleasures deriving from wealth.¹⁶ Simonides, who teaches the tyrannical art, was famous for his greed.¹⁷ Socrates, who teaches the economic or royal art, was not himself an economist because he was not interested in increasing his property; accordingly, his teaching consists largely of giving to a potential economist an account of a conversation which he once had with an actual economist.¹⁸ Simonides, who teaches the tyrannical art, and therewith at least some rudiments of the economic art as well,¹⁹ without any assistance, was an “economist.”

In the light of the parallelism between the Oeconomicus and the Hiero, our previous explanation of the fact that Xenophon presented the “tyrannical” teaching in the form of a dialogue proves to be insufficient. With a view to that parallelism, we have to raise the more comprehensive question as to why the Oeconomicus and the Hiero, as distinguished from Xenophon’s two other technical writings, the Hipparchicus and the Cynegticus, are written in the form not of treatises, nor even of stories, but of dialogues. The subjects of the two former works, we shall venture to say, are of a higher order, or are more philosophic than those of the two latter. Accordingly, their treatment too should be more philosophic. From Xenophon’s point of view, philosophic treatment is conversational treatment. Conversational teaching of the skill of ruling has these two particular advantages. First, it necessitates the confrontation of a wise man (the teacher) and a ruler (the pupil). Besides, it compels the reader to wonder whether the lessons given by the wise man to the ruler bore fruit, because it compels the author to leave unanswered that question which is nothing less than a special form of the fundamental question of the relation of theory and practice, or of knowledge and virtue.

The second advantage of conversational teaching is particularly striking in the Hiero. Whereas the proof of the unhappiness of the unjust tyrant is emphatically based on experience,20 the proof of the happiness of the beneficent tyrant is not: that happiness is merely promised—by a poet. The reader is left wondering whether experience offered a single instance of a tyrant who was happy because he was virtuous.²¹ The corresponding question forced upon the reader of the Oeconomicus is answered, if not by the Oeconomicus itself, by the Cyropaedia and the Agesilaus. But the question of the actual happiness of the virtuous tyrant is left open by the Corpus Xenophonteum as a whole. And whereas the Cyropaedia and the Agesilaus set the happiness of the virtuous kings Cyrus and Agesilaus beyond any imaginable doubt by showing or at least intimating how they died, the Hiero, owing to its form, cannot throw any light on the end of the tyrant Hiero.²²

We hope to have explained why Xenophon presents the “tyrannical” teaching in the form of a conversation between Simonides and a non-Athenian tyrant. An adequate understanding of that teaching requires more than an understanding of its content. One must also consider the form in which it is presented, for otherwise one cannot realize the place which it occupies, according to the author, within the whole of wisdom. The form in which it is presented characterizes it as a philosophic teaching of the sort that a truly wise man would not care to present in his own name. Moreover, by throwing some light on the procedure of the wise man who stoops to present the “tyrannical” teaching in his own name, i.e., of Simonides, the author shows us how that teaching should be presented to its ultimate addressee, the tyrant.