Page:The works of Xenophon Vol III Part II.djvu/9

 interest attaching to the three "minor works" of Xenophon, translated in this volume, will be found, I think, altogether disproportionate to the length of the treatises themselves, which, if small in compass, are rich in matter of a kind to fix the attention of many different readers.

To the critical scholar the writings, as handed down to us, are interesting for many special reasons, which, I need not further dwell on here; to the student of Greek literature they are important as specimens of a type of writing somewhat analogous to the review article familiar to us in the journalistic literature of our own day. As the product of a particular author's pen, they throw light at once on the problems of the age in which he wrote and reveal certain mental and moral characteristics of the man himself. In other words, they have, like all the writings commonly attributed to Xenophon, not only their peculiar literary worth, but also a certain biographic value.

From a somewhat different point of view, regarded as early specimens of what we should nowadays speak of as technical treatises (dealing respectively with particulars concerning the organisation and