Cyropaedia

The Cyropaedia, sometimes spelled Cyropedia, is a partly fictional biography of Cyrus the Great, the founder of Persia's Achaemenid Empire. It was written around 370 BC by Xenophon, the Athenian-born soldier, historian, and student of Socrates. The Latinized title Cyropaedia derives from the Greek Kúrou paideía (Κύρου παιδεία), meaning "The Education of Cyrus". Aspects of it would become a model for medieval writers of the genre mirrors for princes. In turn, the Cyropaedia strongly influenced the most well-known but atypical of these, Machiavelli's The Prince, which fostered the rejection of medieval political thinking and development of modern politics.