Telling the story of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, the Cyropaedia has been often linked to the spartan world. According to some scholars, Persia is only a screen used by Xenophon to better praise or criticize Sparta. This reading has been recently challenged : the Cyropaedia would not have any connection with Sparta. This paper aims to put forward an happy medium between those two interpretations: there is indeed an analogical link between the Cyropaedia and Sparta, but this analogy is limited and partial. First of all, the analogy is only valid for the beginning of the Cyropaedia; furthermore, even in this section, the analogy implies no absolute concordance between Persia and Sparta : the persian politeia embodies an ideal-type of the polis that is related to Sparta, but far exceeds this only example.
