Xenophon is a lying dog. From the Times Literary Supplement, a review of a new collection of essays on Xenophon's Anabasis.

It goes without saying, of course, that the Xenophon of contemporary academic taste is far removed from the bluff figure – a scout-master manqué – whom Victorian schoolmasters found so inspiring. A writer once admired for his plain and manly style is now seen as someone altogether tricksier, “evasive, apologetic, and a master of leaving unwelcome things out” – while the Anabasis itself, as befits the testament of such an unreliable narrator, is reconfigured as something almost approaching a postmodernist text. George Cawkwell, in the opening essay of the collection, repeats his argument that Xenophon’s memoir had a ghostly twin, penned by his comrade on the expedition, the shadowy Sophaenetus; and even though P. J. Stylianou, in the succeeding essay, applies Occam’s razor with great ruthlessness to this theory, we are still left with a sense of the Anabasis as haunted by silenced voices, by depths barely hinted at. Even its most celebrated phrase, once routinely interpreted as a cry of ecstasy and release, can now be represented as something altogether bleaker and more delusory. “The protracted activity of ‘going home’”, John Ma argues in the book’s concluding essay, “solves nothing; resolution and return are constantly deferred.”

I could not disagree more, which means I shall have to acquire this book as soon as possible.