Bibliographic record
Abstract
Before properly entering into the complex relationship between Machiavelli's modernism and a certain dimension of Christianity limned in previous chapters, we need to complete our examination of his relationship to the classical tradition in its own right by turning to the one classical thinker and Socratic who perhaps comes closest to anticipating the modern project launched by Machiavelli. This chapter examines Xenophon's lengthy and explicit exploration of the possibility that the best regime might be that of a monarch possessing what Aristotle terms “superlative virtue,” undertaken through his pseudo-history of Cyrus the Great. Whereas, as we have seen in the previous chapters, this monarchical claim is muted by Plato and Aristotle for the sake of the political community, Xenophon goes much further than either of them in jettisoning the claims of republican self-government in favor of an open endorsement of rational, benevolent absolutism. Hence, Xenophon's Education of Cyrus can be regarded as his monarchical utopia, a direct riposte (as noted by later Hellenistic, Roman, and Renaissance commentators) to Plato's republican utopia, the Republic . As I argue, the Education of Cyrus is the full elaboration, in the form of a utopian historical narrative, of the prescription for reforming tyranny into “leadership” set forth by Simonides as he is depicted by Xenophon in the Hiero . Roads to the education of cyrus : The Distinctiveness of Xenophon's Political Thought It is a commonplace regarding ancient political philosophy that it has no relevance for us today because the Greeks had no experience of large-scale societies and governments like our own. According to this view, because the ancient Greeks lived in small city-states, they idealized this particular kind of government as the best one in principle for all places and times.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".