William Barker’s Education of Cyrus is the first full translation into English of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. The text presents a fictional life of Cyrus the Great, a ruler of Persia in the sixth century BCE, and was popular among Renaissance readers for its moralizing content and as a mirror-for-princes. The first six books of Barker’s translation, which cover the first six books of Xenophon’s Greek (out of eight), were published in London by Reyner Wolfe around 1552 (STC 26066). By his own account, Barker translated these six books at some point before temporarily leaving England at the end of the 1540s – he spent three to four years in Italy – and translated the final two books later at the request, so he says, of ‘learned friends’. His translations of those last two books first appeared in 1567 in another Wolfe edition, in which Barker’s earlier and later Xenophon translations are presented together as a complete eight-book set (STC 26067).