SOURCE: "Revision," in Xenophon's Imperial Fiction: On "The Education of Cyrus, " Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1989, pp. 215-39.

The following excerpt from Tatum's book treats the "epilogue" of the Cyropaedia, which, Tatum argues, "turns a work of idealistic fiction into a narrative of disillusionment. " Tatum further asserts that Xenophon understood this disjunction and, therefore, anticipated later critiques, most notably Plato's in The Laws.

Like Cyrus and his empire, Xenophon's achievement should ultimately be measured not by what he created, but by how he created it. [In The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1967] Kenneth Burke has described the circumstances which obtain for many kinds of writing; what he says is especially relevant to readers of this imperial fiction:

Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers.

The Cyropaedia's romance of model fathers...