What Word Embeddings Show About Xenophon

Series: Race & Antiquity

In Xenophon, βάρβαρος reverts to a military-operational category — but differently from Herodotus. Tyranny disappears entirely from the barbarian’s semantic field, γένος becomes its strongest association, and the Cyropaedia’s admired Persian king dismantles the barbarian/tyranny equivalence that tragedy and Plato constructed.