CONVERSATIONS OF SOCRATES
XENOPHON was an Athenian country gentleman born c. 430 BC. He may have helped to publish Thucydides’ History and certainly wrote his own Hellenica as a continuation of it. By his own (probably reliable) account he was a fine officer and outstanding leader, but his admiration for Sparta and devotion to Socrates led to his banishment. He was given an estate at Scillus and settled down to enjoy the life of a landed aristocrat under Spartan protection, and it was during this period that he began to write histories, biographies, memoirs and specialist treatises. Events forced him to move to Corinth in 371, but he was allowed to return to Athens in 365, where he lived until his death in c. 354.
HUGH TREDINNICK was born in 1899 and educated at King Edward’s, Birmingham, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he received a double first in Classics. He was Professor of Classics at Royal Holloway College from 1946 until 1966, and was also Dean of the Faculty of Arts at London University from 1956 to 1960. He was joint editor of the Classical Review from 1961 to 1967. He edited and translated works by Aristotle, as well as Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates and Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates for the Penguin Classics. Hugh Tredinnick died in 1982.
ROBIN WATERFIELD was born in 1952. He graduated from Manchester University in 1974 and went on to research ancient Greek philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge. He has been a university lecturer, and both copy editor and commissioning editor for Penguin. He is now a self-employed writer with publications ranging from academic articles to children’s fiction. He has translated various Greek philosophical texts, including several for Penguin Classics: Xenophon’s Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises, Plutarch’s Essays, Plato’s Philebus and Theaetetus and (in Plato’s Early Socratic Dialogues) Hippias Major, Hippias Minor and Euthydemus. His biography of Kahlil Gibran, Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran, is published by Penguin. He has also edited The Voice of Kahlil Gibran for Penguin Arkana.
Translated by Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield,
and edited with new material by Robin Waterfield
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Published in Penguin Classics 1990
18
This selection and introductions copyright © Robin Waterfield, 1990
SOCRATES’ DEFENCE this translation copyright © Robin Waterfield, 1990
MEMOIRS OF SOCRATES this translation copyright © Hugh Tredennick, 1970
Revisions to this translation copyright © Robin Waterfield, 1990
THE DINNER-PARTY this translation copyright © Hugh Tredennick, 1970
Revisions to this translation copyright © Robin Waterfield, 1990
THE ESTATE-MANAGER this translation copyright © Robin Waterfield, 1990
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To T. J. S.
