Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/36

26 policy of perfect good faith to his friends; he led the Greeks to rely on him implicitly, and, unlike one with despotic traditions, he treated them as citizens, on a basis of fair reasoning between man and man. Many a trait does Xenophon record of his behaviour en bon camarade. It is true that all this time he was on his promotion, and therefore on his best behaviour. But there was something really Napoleonic in his ascendancy over the minds of men. These powers, thus early manifested, might have had a formidable influence on the affairs of mankind. Xenophon justly thinks that no one who had sat on the throne of Persia since the great Cyrus could have compared in ability with Cyrus the younger. Mr Grote is of opinion that, if he had succeeded in his enterprise, he would successfully have played the game of employing the Greeks against each other, and that, forestalling the work of Macedonia, he would have destroyed the independence of Greece by subjugating her to Persia. On the whole, then, it may have been of advantage to the interests of civilisation that Clearchus did not better follow out, at the battle of Cunaxa, the instructions of Cyrus.