Same question, different answers

In 401 BC, Xenophon joined Cyrus the Younger's expedition against the Persian king Artaxerxes II. After Cyrus was killed at Cunaxa and the Greek commanders were seized and executed, thousands of Greek mercenaries were stranded deep in hostile territory without effective leadership. Xenophon emerged as one of their new commanders and helped lead their arduous retreat to the Black Sea, an experience he later recounted in the Anabasis. In 394 BC, he fought alongside the Spartans against Athens and its allies at Coronea, after which he was exiled from Athens.

Although the dates of Xenophon's works remain uncertain, much of his writing, including his Socratic works, is thought to belong to his later years. His Hellenica, which continues Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War from 411 BC to 362 BC, makes him one of the principal surviving sources for 4thcentury BC Greek history.

According to Peng, Xenophon's later reputation as a historian rather than a philosopher owes something to the way 19th-century German scholarship came to define philosophy as an increasingly systematic body of concepts and arguments. By that measure, Plato was an obvious philosopher, while Xenophon, whose thought was dispersed across history, biography, political writing, and practical reflection, proved harder to classify. He was consequently relegated to the role of "another disciple who wrote about Socrates".

"In antiquity, philosophy was not confined to abstract theorizing; how one shall live was itself a philosophical question. Reading Xenophon made us rethink the modern classification of academic disciplines we encountered in our study of classical civilization, because his work blurs the boundaries between history, literature and philosophy. Xenophon is, above all, a classical writer," said Peng, who first studied ancient Greek between 2006 and 2009 while pursuing his doctorate in philosophy and theology. He now heads the Classics Research and Teaching Section at School of Liberal Arts of Renmin University of China.

He Fangying, head of the Classical Studies Research Office at the Institute of Foreign Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is co-editor-in-chief of Classics and Interpretation, the series under which the volume was published. "Working on a classic can be a solitary experience, yet there is also something serendipitous about it. You may find yourself drawn to a particular author — Xenophon, for instance — and follow his work wherever it leads. Perhaps each of us finds our own guide among the classics," said He, one of the organizers of this year's Conference of Classics, held in Athens in June, where the series was on display.

"Around 800 books have so far appeared in the series. Together, they reflect the willingness of Chinese scholars to work with their Western counterparts to rediscover works of classical wisdom that are rarely studied today," she added.

Comparing the portrayals of Socrates (c. 470-399 BC) and Confucius (551-479 BC) by their disciples and later followers — in the works of Plato and Xenophon on the one hand, and the Analects on the other — Peng said, "The Analects, a collection of quotes and conversations associated with Confucius, preserves much of his teaching in brief quotations and dialogues. By contrast, Plato and Xenophon offers a much more detailed and rounded portrayal of Socrates."

Peng suggested that Socrates and Confucius were remarkably alike. Neither taught according to a single, fixed formula. They responded to different students in different ways. Their answers could even shift with the person and the moment on the same question.

"Perhaps that is also why neither can be fully captured in abstract concepts or confined to a set of philosophical terms. To distill Socrates into a system of doctrines is to miss the living quality of his thought, which unfolded in conversation. Likewise, to take a single saying of Confucius and turn it into a definitive interpretation is to lose the nuances and richness of his teaching," he said. "Perhaps the classics endure precisely because they resist any single, final meaning. They continue to speak anew to each generation, and to each person who reads them."