(Ps)Xenophon’s AP: Genre, Audience, and Fourth-Century Themes of Debate

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the literary genre of the AP, the audience of the treatise, as well as the date of composition. It suggests that the treatise is a kind of (provisional) rhetorical exercise on the close relationship between extreme democracy, fleet and empire, that was delivered in front of a real audience. If the AP is apparently redolent of the Peloponnesian war’s atmosphere, this does not necessarily entail a fifth-century date for the composition of the treatise, whose author, purpose, and original extension remain highly problematic. In fact some of the AP’s intertextual links to fourth-century authors (chiefly Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Xenophon) might imply a later date (the 390s at latest).