The shepherd king and his flock: paradoxes of leadership and care in classical Greek philosophyWe bore in mind that, for example, cowherds are the rulers (archontes) of their cattle, that grooms are the rulers of horses, and that all those who are called herdsmen might reasonably be considered to be rulers of the animals they manage (epistatōsi).(Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 1.1.2) When Xenophon, the fourth-century BCE Athenian soldier and writer, and once one of Socrates' students, tried to explain the nature of leadership, in his extended case study and biography of Cyrus the Great, king of Persia in the sixth century BCE and founder of its empire, his Cyropaedia, he turned to a familiar image, that of the king or leader as shepherd. 1For Xenophon, Cyrus provided a model of how to lead and inspire troops, and how, after the campaign was over, to set up a stable government in the conquered territory. Xenophon explores what qualities enabled Cyrus to rule more successfully than others. But when he invokes the image of the king as shepherd, Xenophon opens a set of questions about the consequences of the unequal and asymmetric relationship between leaders and those they lead, as well as emphasising the centrality of care to ideas of what constituted good leadership. Like other thinkers of his time, the image of the ruler as shepherd enables a debate on the paradoxes of leadership and care (Brock 2013: 43-52).Among the questions were: does being led somehow dehumanise the led, or deprive them of agency? Does it imply a duty of care for the leader? Is this duty different when leading creatures of the same type (other humans) or different (animals)? What qualities in the ruler, such as intelligence and knowledge, might persuade subjects to obey him? Or could all humans be treated as if they were of the same status as the leader, dissolving the hierarchy implied by the power relationship of shepherding? Because a principal goal of ancient politics was to secure a happy or 'flourishing' existence (Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia, or living well), individuals' surrender of political agency could be seen to create obligations for the ruler to whom they had assigned their claim to political participation. The image of the shepherd king provided a means of exploring this problem from the perspectives of both rulers and ruled.