The Persia of Xenophon's Cyropaedia is an important site of political pedagogy, providing a historical scenario for a ruler's education and then a reference point for subsequent sites of instruction in power. Cicero informs us that Scipio Africanus kept the Cyropaedia by his side to supply himself with an image (effigies) of just empire (Ep. Quintum I.I.23; also Ep. ad Fam. 9.25 and De Senectute 79–81). Later, Renaissance scholars regarded Xenophon's work as a prescriptive account of how to produce an ideal ruler of an ideal state, and prior to Machiavelli, as the most influential ‘mirror for princes’. Modern readers add their voices to this regard for the work, continuing to find in Xenophon's portrayal of Cyrus the Great and his career a paradigm of ancient kingship and the system that produced it. In this chapter, I want to suggest, however, that this is not the only narrative provided by the Cyropaedia. If the work as a whole affirms the link between education and political authority, it also qualifies it. Xenophon's text presents a system of education which precipitates the collapse of a kingdom, not least because it tolerates a series of discontinuities between the knowledge Cyrus requires to be a good leader and the knowledge he actually possesses.

In the first book of the Cyropaedia Xenophon provides the idealising image of a pedagogical Persia whose authority is to be called into question.