Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/344

 320 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE The style of the Anabasis is not very skilful, and the narrative is sometimes languid where the actual events are stirring. Still, on the whole, one feels with Gibbon that " this pleasing work is original and authentic," and that constitutes an inestimable charm. The details are most vivid — the officer pulled over the cliff by catching at the fine cloak of one of the flying Kurds ; the Mossyn- dwellers exhibiting their fat babies fed on chestnut-meal to the admiration of the Greeks ; the races at Trebizond conducted on the principle that ''you could run any- where " ; the Thynians waking the author up with the invitation to come out and die like a man, rather than be roasted in his bed — there are literally hundreds of such things. Of course Xenophon is sometimes wrong in his distances and details of fact, and the tendency to romance which we find in the Cyropcedeia has a slight but visible effect on the Anabasis. The ornamental speeches are poor and unconvincing. Still, on the whole, it is a fresh, frank work in which the writer at least succeeds in not spoiling a most thrilling story. To touch briefly on his other works. When Socrates was attacked and misunderstood, when Plato and the other Socratics defended him, Xenophon, too, felt called upon to write his Memoirs of Socrates. His remarkable memory stood him in good stead. He gives a Socrates whom his average contemporary would have recognised as true to life. Plato, fired by his own speculative ideas, had inevitably altered Socrates. Xenophon's ideas were a smaller and more docile body : he seldom misrepre- sents except where he misunderstood. In the later editions of the Memorabilia he inserts a detailed refuta- tion of the charges made by ' the Accuser,' as he calls Polycrates, against Socrates's memory ; and he seems