Laudator Temporis Acti

George Miller Calhoun, "Xenophon Tragodos," Classical Journal 17.3 (December, 1921) 141-149 (at 141-142):

Most of us are only too ready to applaud these criticisms when we recall the peculiarly depressing circumstances under which we became acquainted with Xenophon; how we struggled through the earlier books of the Anabasis with the help of a vocabulary, a collection of arid notes, and an instructor whose interest in Greek seemed to be limited to irregular verbs and mixed conditions. We looked on Xenophon as rather a stupid sort, and thought of the Anabasis as a mere stop-gap between the beginning book and the golden treasures of Homer, a linguistic Slough of Despond through which we had to toil under an ever-increasing burden of rules and paradigms.

Id. (at 148-149):

If you feel that I have been carried away by my enthusiasm and have allowed myself to become a bit sophomoric—a thing unpardonable in a respectable pedant—do but suspend your judgment until you have reread at least the earlier books of the Anabasis. Even this little taste will make you a lover of the man and an admirer of his art. You will easily bear with my enthusiasm, the more readily when you remember that as I pen this, I come fresh from a ramble in the philological dissecting room, where the post-mortem over the remains of Xenophon is still in progress.

When those of you who have not done so lately take down Xenophon from his place on the dusty top shelf, between Wentworth's geometry and Myers' General History, and read him again, you will form your own opinions of his merits, instead of taking them from the introduction to some edition which is too likely to be an in-bred weakling, sired by the latest German Schülerausgabe and mothered by the Greek grammar.

Max Radin, "Xenophon's Ten Thousand," Classical Journal 7.2 (November, 1911) 51-60 (at 51):

It is desperately unfortunate that for most of us so fascinating and human a narrative is indissolubly associated with the principal parts of ὄλλυμι, and the rules of Indirect Discourse. Those of us who return to the story with other ends in view than the discovery of illustrations of syntactical principles cannot fail to feel a personal and kindly interest in all the actors of that most romantic of expeditions.

Id. (at 60):

These "zehntausend Griechenherzen," then, were mercenaries, cohering by the hope of loot, and recruited with somewhat less fastidiousness than were the members of the Areopagus. Romance-loving centuries have spread a kindly glamor over them, which it would be in the highest degree ungenerous to attempt to dispel. One cannot help feeling that the majority of them would have been in hearty accord with the protest of Kipling's Tommy Atkins that they were no "thin red 'eroes" but just single men on the march, "most remarkable like you." And they chaffed each other in the face of imminent peril, fought, intrigued, lied and cheated, saved and betrayed each other, much as other men of their type have continued to do for centuries since then, under similar conditions.