Leaders have always found it useful to have an enemy at their gates in times of trouble, distracting the public from their difficulties. In using your enemies to rally your troops, polarize them as far as possible: they will fight the more fiercely when they feel a little hatred. So exaggerate the differences between you and the enemy—draw the lines clearly. Xenophon made no effort to be fair; he did not say that the Persians weren’t really such a bad lot and had done much to advance civilization. He called them barbarians, the antithesis of the Greeks.
