Tobias Philip, Rutgers University
In a curious passage of Xenophon’s Cynegeticus the author concludes his exhaustive description of a hare’s visible qualities with the judgment: “and so pleasing is the spectacle, that no one, if he sees it being tracked, found, chased, and captured, could not forget if he should love anything” (5.33). The notion of a sight so overpowering as to obliterate love compares to a later statement in the treatise that refers to hunting and identifies it as the only pleasure of young men that also benefits them (12.7). Among the competing pleasures Xenophon could have had in mind, those of love would have featured prominently. Read alongside the sustained pedagogical discourse of the treatise (Kidd 2014), the spectacle (θέαμα) of the hare and, by extension, of the hunt, as the visual incentive for the only profitable pleasure of the young, itself serves an educational end. In this paper, I argue that the edifying sight in the Cynegeticus should be read alongside the numerous uses of spectacle language throughout Xenophon’s corpus. Xenophon uses the material of mystery, theatrical, and athletic spectacles to create a new ethical mode of viewing the experiences of mundane life.
The notion of learning through sight and spectacle is nothing new to the study of the ancient world, and has been especially well explored in Plato (Nightingale 2004; 2021), but less has been made of the scattered yet frequently recurrent spectacles in the works of Xenophon. The spectacle of dance is most conspicuous in Xenophon’s Symposium (Wohl 2004; Garelli 2002), and the same dialogue describes the spectacular sight that a lover provides to those initiated in temperate love (Symp. 1.10), which, as Zuckermann (2022) observed, appears to be an intertext with Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. Xenophon’s invocation of mystery spectacle numbers one of many resonances scholars have recognized between his Symposium, its Platonic counterpart, and the Phaedrus (Carrière 1998; Huss 1999; Hindley 2004). The metaphor of initiatory viewing, however, extends beyond Xenophon’s Symposium and its subject of love to his Oeconomicus as well, applied to the sight of a good leader (21.12).
Besides manipulating the connotations of mystery spectacle, the Oeconomicus also draws on the language of theater, with Socrates and Ischomachus prompting their interlocutors to view mundane objects and activities the same way that they might watch comedies and choruses (3.7, 8.3). Finally, the Hieron appropriates the experience of attending athletic contests for viewing and being viewed in political life generally (11.10), bringing the spectacle of the agōn fully under the power of the sovereign. Xenophon brings religious, theatrical, and athletic spectacles to more quotidian contexts because of his conviction, conveyed in the resolution to Socrates’ conversation with Euthydemus (Mem. 4.2), that education proceeds from the imitation of models directly encountered. As opposed to Sophistic writings (Cyn. 13.7), Xenophon’s moving sight of the hare, just as the love-inspiring pantomime at the end of his Symposium (9.7), shows that spectacle most truly stirs the desire to imitate.