Xenophon's minor works Author:Xenophon Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFATORY REMARKS CONCERNING THE TEEATISES ON THE LACEDAEMONIAN AND ATHENIAN GOVEENMENTS. The minute attention which I have necessarily given to the sty... more »le of these Treatises in translating them induces me to form a much more unfavourable opinion with regard to their genuineness than I conceived when I read them for the first time some years ago. In the Life of Xcnophon prefixed to the previous volume, I said, relying on my own early impressions and the judgment of Weiske, that there was nothing in the style or manner of the treatises to prove that Xenophon was not their author. Nor is there so much discrepancy in the style of them from that of Xenophon's acknowledged works as to make it clear to all readers that Xenophon did not write them; for, as Weiske observes, mere dissimilitude of diction will not suffice to demonstrate that they are spurious, since a writer may, for various reasons, adopt different forms of style in different compositions. But the numerous repetitions of the same phrases in the treatise on the Laced;emonian Government, and the curtness and aridity of the phraseology, seem to convict the writer of a poverty of words never chargeable upon Xenophon ; and I am now, therefore, inclined to think with Heyne, Heindorf, and F. A. Wolf, that they are the work of some other writer than the Attic bee. As to the style of the Treatise on the Athenian Government, it certainly approaches nearer to that of Xenophon, in structure and flow, than the style of the other, but is still far beneath the excellence of the master's own compositions. With regard to the matter, in both treatises, especially in that on the Lacedaemonian Government, much of it is so extremely poor and trifling, that it cannot be thought to have proceeded from Xenophon. PREFATORT REMARKS. 203 ...« less