Xenophon
Poroi — ways and means to raise Athens' revenue
Πόροι ἢ περὶ προσόδων · About 355 BCE, in the wreckage of the Social War. Xenophon was near eighty and died within a year or two of writing it.
Athens has lost her empire and the income with it, and the obvious remedy is to squeeze the remaining allies harder. Xenophon, near eighty, argues instead that the city is sitting on assets it has never counted: silver under Laurium, the best harbour in Greece, and a resident foreign population it taxes for the privilege of staying.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Edgar Carew Marchant, in the Loeb Scripta Minora (Heinemann, 1925). Marchant edited the Oxford text of Xenophon and knew the corpus as well as anyone alive, and his English is the confident, unfussy prose of a scholar who has decided the reader wants the argument rather than the flavour. He modernises the finance without apology — 'per cent.', 'capital', 'investment', 'public company', 'shareholders' — which makes the text startlingly readable and quietly does some of the interpreting for you. Where Xenophon says a subscriber of ten minae gets roughly what he would get 'on bottomry', Marchant supplies 'nearly twenty per cent.' as a gloss, and a reader cannot tell from the English which half of that sentence is Xenophon's. He also renders ἀφορμή, the capital fund at the centre of the proposal, by several different English words depending on context.