Cyropaedia

Cyrus the Great grows up in Persia, where boys are raised under a public system of education, and later spends years at the Median court of his grandfather Astyages. From there the narrative follows him into war and government, up to the founding of the Achaemenid Empire.

Only the first of the eight books deals with his schooling in the strict sense. The remaining seven trace his conquests of Armenia, Scythia and Assyria, and the methods he uses to organise and hold an empire made up of many peoples.

Xenophon, an Athenian soldier and historian, wrote it around 370 BC. It blends historical narrative with a treatise on leadership and kingship, and its intended readers were Greeks who might one day command armies or rule cities.

Renaissance Europe rediscovered the work and read it as a manual of political virtue. It became a foundational text of the "mirror for princes" tradition, so the Cyrus on the page is a portrait of the ideal ruler as much as a biography. Expect an instructive, measured account of how power is won and kept.