“The Significance of Strauss’s Epigraph: Examining the Choice of Macaulay’s Passage in the Preface to his Commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero”

Leo Strauss prefaces his commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero with an abridgment of a passage from Macaulay’s History of England. What sense can you make of this choice of epigraph? This is only a short essay, so you may (but are not required to) limit your response to considerations drawn from Strauss’s introduction to the commentary. In crafting your answer consider not just the lines from Macaulay that Strauss reproduces but Macaulay’s passage as a whole (to which Strauss may be taken to refer us).