We thus see, from the personal history of Xenophon, how his attention came to be peculiarly turned to the difficulty of ensuring steady obedience from subordinates, and to the conditions by which such difficulty might be overcome. The sentence, above transcribed from the Oekonomikus, embodies two texts upon which he has discoursed in two of his most interesting compositions--Cyropædia and Hieron. In Cyropædia he explains and exemplifies the divine gift of ruling over cheerful subordinates: in Hieron, the torment of governing the disaffected and refractory. For neither of these purposes would the name and person of Sokrates have been suitable, exclusively connected as they were with Athens. Accordingly Xenophon, having carried that respected name through the Oekonomikus and Symposion, now dismisses it, yet retaining still the familiar and colloquial manner which belonged to Sokrates. The Epilogue, or concluding chapter, of the Cyropædia, must unquestionably have been composed after 364 B.C.--in the last ten years of Xenophon's life: the main body of it may perhaps have been composed earlier. [Side-note: Hieron--Persons of the dialogue--Simonides and Hieron.] The Hieron gives no indication of date: but as a picture purely Hellenic, it deserves precedence over the Cyropædia, and conveys to my mind the impression of having been written earlier. It describes a supposed conversation (probably suggested by current traditional conversations, like that between Solon and Kroesus) between the poet Simonides and Hieron the despot of Syracuse; who, shortly after the Persian invasion of Greece by Xerxes, had succeeded his brother Gelon the former despot.[31] Both of them had been once private citizens, of no remarkable consequence: but Gelon, an energetic and ambitious military man, having raised himself to power in the service of Hippokrates despot of Gela, had seized the sceptre on the death of his master: after which he conquered Syracuse, and acquired a formidable dominion, enjoyed after his death by his brother Hieron. This last was a great patron of eminent poets--Pindar, Simonides, Æschylus, Bacchylides: but he laboured under a painful internal complaint, and appears to have been of an irritable and oppressive temper.[32] [Footnote 31: Plato, Epistol. ii. p. 311 A. Aristot. Rhetor. ii. 16, 1391, a. 9; Cicero, Nat. Deo. i. 22, 60. How high was the opinion entertained about Simonides as a poet, may be seen illustrated in a passage of Aristophanes, Vespæ, 1362.] [Footnote 32: See the first and second Pythian Odes of Pindar, addressed to Hieron, especially Pyth. i. 55-61-90, with the Scholia and Boeckh's Commentary. Pindar compliments Hieron upon having founded his new city of Ætna--[Greek: theodma/tô| su\n e)leutheria|]. This does not coincide with the view of Hieron's character taken by Xenophon; but Pindar agrees with Xenophon in exhorting Hieron to make himself popular by a liberal expenditure.]