ed
into a wineskin full of human blood. Perhaps also the monarchical rule
of Cyrus was too absolute for Greek taste. At any rate, later on
Xenophon adopted a more real hero, whom he had personally known and
admired.

Agesilaus, king of Sparta, had been taken as a type of 'virtue' even by
the bitter historian Theopompus. Agesilaus was not only a great general.
He knew how to 'honour the gods, do his duty in the field, and to
practise obedience'. He was true to friend and foe. On one memorable
occasion he kept his word even to an enemy who had broken his. He
enjoined kindness to enemy captives. When he found small children left
behind by the barbarians in some town that he occupied--because either
their parents or the slave-merchants had no room for them--he always
took care of them or gave them to guardians of their own race: 'he never
let the dogs and wolves get them'. On the other hand, when he sold his
barbarian prisoners he sent them to market naked, regardless of their
modesty, because it cheered his own soldiers to see how white and fat
they were. He wept when he won a victory over Greeks; 'for he loved all
Greeks and only hated barbarians'. When he returned home after his
successful campaigns, he obeyed the orders of the ephors without
question; his house and furniture were as simple as those of a common
man, and his daughter the princess, when she went to and fro to Amyclae,
went simply in the public omnibus. He reared chargers and hunting dogs;
the rearing of chariot horses he thought effeminate. But he advised his
sister Cynisca about hers, and she won the chariot race at Olympia.
'Have a king like that', says Xenophon, 'and all will be well. He will
govern right; he will beat your enemies; and he will set an example of
good life. If you want Virtue in the state look for it in a good man,
not in a speculative tangle of laws. The Spartan constitution, as it
stands, is good enough for any one.'

But it was another of the great Socratics who uttered first the
characteristic message of the fourth century, and met the blows of
Fortune with a direct challenge. Antisthenes was a man twenty years
older than Plato. He had fought at Tanagra in 426 B. C. He had been
friends with Gorgias and Prodicus, the great Sophists of the Periclean
age. He seems to have been, at any rate till younger and more brilliant
men cut him out, the recognized philosophic heir of Socrates.[87:1] And
late in life, after the fall of Athens and