The Use of Documents in Xenophon’s Hellenica

Xenophon appears to be less interested in documents than his predecessors. He uses documents but not as widely as Herodotus and Thucydides, and he does not consider them as methodologically relevant as they do. The corroboration of the historical reconstruction, which is typically provided by documents in Herodotus and Thucydides, depends in Xenophon on other methodological tools, such as authorial interventions and quotations of others’ opinions. These “tools” are parsimoniously inserted in Xenophon’s work in compliance with programmatical and methodological principles, and are privileged over documents in order to increase the reliability of the historical reconstruction. The special authoritativeness attributed to oral testimonies in comparison with written documents can probably be connected to the strictly contemporary nature of the Hellenica, since documents are more often used in the reconstruction of the past while oral testimonies are on the contrary preferred when reconstructing contemporary events.