About this edition
This is a reading edition of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia — The Education of Cyrus — his fourth-century-BCE portrait of Cyrus the Great as the ideal ruler. It is the foundational “mirror for princes”: a Greek soldier and pupil of Socrates imagining the upbringing, character, and statecraft of the founder of the Persian Empire.
The translation is Henry Graham Dakyns’, revised by F. M. Stawell and long in the public domain. The text is presented in its canonical divisions — book, chapter, and section — so any passage can be cited and linked: the small lapis numerals in the text are the section marks, and each is its own anchor.
The five voices
The right-hand margin carries commentary from five readers, each in its own colour and mark. Four are written for this edition — a Guide for the plot and the cast, a Historian for the real Achaemenid world behind the romance, a Philosopher for the argument about virtue and rule, and a Strategist for the campaigns and institutions. The fifth is not an invention at all: Henry Dakyns’ own marginal notes, scribbled in his working copy of Xenophon and preserved by his editor — wry, learned, and a century old.
Use the toolbar at the head of each book to turn any voice on or off, or press Focus to clear the margin and read the text alone. On a narrow screen the notes fold up beneath each passage; tap one to open it. Your choices are remembered.
The pictures
The cover and the plates are imagined glazed-brick reliefs in the manner of the Achaemenid palaces at Susa and Persepolis — a Greek author’s Persia, rendered in the empire’s own lapis and gold. They were generated for this edition and are decorative, not documentary.
Colophon
Built as a lean static site. The text and commentary are assembled from the source by a small Python parser; the layout is hand-written. Text in the public domain; commentary and design by Jörn Dinkla. The source lives on GitHub.