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In Cyropaedia Xenophon investigated leadership by presenting the life story of Cyrus II, founder of the Persian Empire. Because the story differs flagrantly from other sources and the narrative’s pace and texture are unlike those of ordinary Greek historiography, many analysts have classed the work as fiction. Story line is certainly subordinate to didactic agenda, but Xenophon may have drawn opportunistically on current versions of the Cyrus story rather than pure imagination. The result is fictive history, more analogous to Socratic literature than to the Greek novel (to which it is sometimes pictured as antecedent). In the Cyropaedia, techniques of military and political leadership are exposed both through example and through direct instruction.