Xenophon, son of Gryllus, was born in Athens c. 428 BC and died c. 354; he was therefore an exact contemporary of Plato (429–347), the other author whose Socratic writings survive. Xenophon’s family was fairly well off, but we must take into account Athens’ stormy political history in the last decade of the fifth century, and the fact that the Peloponnesian War, which Athens eventually lost, began in 431 and ended in 404. Under such circumstances, and particularly during the formative years of one’s life, wealth does not necessarily imply security.
Nevertheless, many of the details of Xenophon’s life, and the topics on which he wrote, reflect the concerns of the well-to-do. He wrote, among other things, on hunting, horsemanship and cavalry command, on estate-management and military history. It is important to note this right from the start, so that when we find these topics peppering Socrates’ conversations as reported by Xenophon, we avoid the temptation to think that these were Socrates’ interests and experiences rather than Xenophon’s.
In 401 Xenophon left Athens, and soon afterwards (possibly in 399) he was formally exiled. What were the reasons for this official disfavour? The last couple of years of the fifth century saw a fervent return to democracy in Athens, following the arbitrary and tyrannical rule of the Thirty Oligarchs in 404–403. Quite possibly, then, Xenophon had, or had been suspected of, oligarchic inclinations. The historian Thucydides, whom Xenophon held in great esteem (Xenophon continued Thucydides’ unfinished history in his Hellenica, or A History of My Times, as the Penguin edition has it), expressed admiration for the moderate oligarchy of 411, and the young Xenophon too may well have been impressed by this form of government. Certainly his portrait of Theramenes, one of the leaders in 411, who was also appointed one of the Thirty Oligarchs in 404, is favourable (Hellenica, 2.3.15–56); and further evidence of his sympathies may be found in his approval of the laws of Draco and Solon (The Estate-manager, 14.3–10; p. 337) – ‘restoring the laws of Draco and Solon’ was the slogan of the oligarchs of 411. Moreover, Xenophon’s life and writings reflect an admiration for Athens’ enemy Sparta, and such admiration was often expressed by those in Athens who tended towards oligarchy. However, it is probably more true to say that Xenophon was not particularly passionate about politics; rather, he commended the traditional virtues wherever he found them and, as a soldier, particularly the military virtues of Sparta. In his view, although Athens’ past reveals these virtues, Sparta’s present more closely conformed to the ideal (see especially p. 149). But when Sparta acted viciously, he was prepared to condemn it (Hellenica, 5.4.1).
The question of Xenophon’s unpopularity in Athens cannot be separated from his association with Socrates.1 The duration and depth of this association can only be guessed, but it was there, and in a town as small as Athens was at the time it would have been well known. Not only were several members of Socrates’ circle overt or covert oligarchs, but they were all, without exception, members of the upper classes,2 which in divided political times are always suspected of seeking dominion in one way or another. And the restored democracy was to put Socrates himself to death in 399 (on the reasons for his trial and execution, see pp. 32–40).
In short, while there are reasons to think that Xenophon was not especially committed to politics, the charges which led to his formal exile are likely to have been based on suspicions of oligarchic and pro-Spartan tendencies.1
The rest of Xenophon’s life can be briefly chronicled. On leaving Athens in 401, he joined (apparently not with Socrates’ wholehearted approval: see Anabasis, 3.1.4–7) Cyrus the Younger’s expedition to wrest the Persian throne from his brother Artaxerxes. The attempt failed; Xenophon chronicles the expedition and his own part in leading – if he is to be believed – the Greek mercenary troops back to Greece in Anabasis (published by Penguin as The Persian Expedition). After a short period as a mercenary in Thrace, from 399 to 394 Xenophon fought for Sparta; however, it is not clear whether he actually fought against Athens in the battle of Coronea in 394. For the next thirty years he lived, with his wife and two sons, the life of a country gentleman under Spartan protection, until he returned to Athens in 365 (his exile had been repealed in 368), where he lived until his death.
Not surprisingly all his writing was carried on in the last, more secure, forty years of his life. It should be noted that the process of publication was a far more haphazard affair than it is today, and it is arguable that Xenophon wrote chiefly for his own and his intimates’ pleasure, and his sons’ education; where he crusades, however, as when he is defending Socrates, he doubtless wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible. All the same, he not infrequently completed books started many years earlier. The datable parts of Hellenica were written as much as twenty years apart; the first two books of Memoirs were possibly written c. 380, but the last two books may have been as late as c. 355; the beginning of The Estate-manager (the conversation with Crito-bulus) seems to be contemporaneous with the last two books of Memoirs, whereas the conversation with Ischomachus, as is evident to even a casual reader, is a later addition.
Xenophon’s writings have undergone variations in popularity. The Romans admired him a great deal and, for reasons that will become apparent, Europe in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries found him edifying;1 in between, however, opinions have not always been favourable. Those ages and those people who dislike moral earnestness will not find Xenophon attractive. Xenophon’s Socrates is bound to come across as one of those people who tell you how to live your life. This is particularly annoying when, like Socrates, they are ‘right’. Nor does good philosophy arise out of such an attitude: philosophy should be a form of inquiry – it is generated by curiosity, as both Plato and Aristotle said. Xenophon’s Socrates, however, is plainly more interested in conclusions than in the process of reaching them.
Xenophon’s literary style should become clear from the translations in this volume with little need for comment. At his best – and he is often at his best – he is plain and readable, though perhaps somewhat repetitious; at his worst he descends into awkwardness or embarrassing rhetoric (e.g. Memoirs, 2.4.5–7, 4.8.3; The Estate-manager, 5.1–17). His eulogies too can be overdone (Agesilaus and Cyropaedia are good examples of this). He is neither as great a historian as Thucydides, nor as great a philosopher as Plato (though we will find philosophy wherever We look in Xenpphon), nor as outstanding a writer as either of these two. But he has a style which is all his own, whether one loves it or loathes it. He is informative and, when he tries, he tells a good story; and he does all this with writing which can afford pleasure and is always easy to read. Certainly, he is not an original thinker or writer: the conservatism of his thought is matched by the plainness of his style, and both are apparent on every page. But to us he is unique because he is our best and most accessible witness to events and attitudes without which our knowledge of ancient Greece would be considerably less. For more on Xenophon’s style, see pp. 55–9, 282–4.
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As already mentioned, Xenophon’s own interests and experiences are reflected in his Socratic writings, and often even put into the mouth of Socrates. This raises the question to which I shall devote the rest of this general introduction: Who was Socrates? In so far as approaching this question involves considering Socrates’ philosophy as described by Xenophon, I will reserve some of the discussion until later, when introducing Memoirs (pp. 59–67); here I shall outline the extant portraits of Socrates with a view to answering the question whether any one of these portraits is to be preferred as more accurate than the others.1 We have to rely on other portraits because, as must never be forgotten, Socrates himself wrote nothing (but perhaps only because writing was not widespread at the time).
The first portrait which needs considering, and the only one which is contemporary with Socrates, is that of the comic playwright Aristophanes, who in 424 BC wrote Clouds and chose Socrates as one of the main characters. The play is great fun. In it Socrates is shown running a fee-paying school, teaching philosophical mysteries. The teaching is largely of rhetoric, to enable a person to argue an opponent down, even if the opponent has the morally stronger case. But Socrates and his students also research subjects such as astronomy, geometry and meteorology; they have a novel and off-beat approach: a geometry lesson, for example, involves considering how many flea-feet fleas can jump (see The Dinner-party, 6.8). Socrates and his students are also religious non-conformists, who substitute natural explanations for the traditional gods. They are ragged and dirty, work-shy, impecunious and thieving. What they concern themselves with is at best hair-splitting and time-wasting, at worst absurd and subversive.
Fully to rehearse the arguments for and against regarding all or some of this as an accurate portrait of Socrates would be simply to repeat the work of Sir Kenneth Dover, in his edition of Clouds (Oxford University Press, 1968). The portrait is so starkly opposed to that of Plato and Xenophon that the issue is polar: either Plato and Xenophon were engaged in a massive cover-up or Aristophanes is wrong. The former alternative is both difficult to entertain, and is disproved by other fragmentary evidence about Socrates, which also contradicts Aristophanes’ portrait. Therefore, Aristophanes is not providing us with a true likeness of Socrates.
What is Aristophanes up to then? The answer should already be clear from the timeless nature of some aspects of the portrait (though others are peculiar to ancient Greece). He is using Socrates as a figurehead for intellectuals of all types; the sophists and natural scientists of fifth-century Greece are particularly represented. Socrates in Clouds is a catch-all character who displays features which popular prejudice and the collective unconscious attribute to intellectuals; he can hardly, therefore, be used as evidence for what the historical Socrates was really like. There was considerable fear of intellectualism at the end of the fifth century; Aristophanes is playing up to that fear.
We might still ask, however, why Aristophanes picked on Socrates. The answer is simply that Socrates was visible.1 Not only was he one of the very few native Athenian philosophers of the time, but his work carried him on to the streets, into the agora and other crowded meeting-places. Athens was a small enough town for Socrates to have been easily recognizable by a large number of Athenians. It is noticeable that just about the only aspect of Aristophanes’ portrait which can be securely attributed to Socrates is asceticism (albeit in the comically exaggerated form of scruffiness), which would, of course, have been his most visible trait.
As a sad postscript, we should note the following possibility. In his Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes and Socrates together at a party, and on good terms. Supposing this to be the truth, then Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates was mere jest, with little or no underlying malice. Nevertheless, both Plato, in his Apology of Socrates, and Xenophon (especially Memoirs, 1.1.11–16, 4.7), feel that Socrates was implicitly on trial as an archetypal intellectual (that is, a religious non-conformist etc.). This is precisely Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates, and Plato, at least, alludes to Clouds. No doubt the issue would have arisen in Socrates’ trial anyway; but Aristophanes’ Clouds cannot have helped. If it was mere jest, then, the joke turned extremely sour.
There are other occasional comic references to Socrates, which, for the reasons discussed above, can be dismissed as unreliable evidence; there were also others who wrote Socratic dialogues. Among Socrates’ disciples, apart from Plato and Xenophon, the following are known to have written such Sokratikoi logoi (as Aristotle calls them at Poetics, 1447b11): Aeschines, Antisthenes, Aristippus, Cebes, Crito, Euclides, Phaedo and Simmias. At the beginning of Defence, Xenophon refers vaguely to ‘others’ who have written versions of Socrates’ defence. It is clear that writing Socratic dialogues constituted a minor industry and a sub-genre of Greek prose literature at the time. It is also clear that there were even stock settings in which Socrates was portrayed: for instance, we have both Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposium (Dinner-party) and their Apology of Socrates (Defence). It is less surprising, of course, to find that there were standard characters with whom Socrates was regularly portrayed as conversing, since these would be the members of his circle.
The probable nature of these Sokratikoi logoi is something I shall come back to. For the present, it need simply be noted that we possess only a few disconnected fragments of most of them. Their evidence is, therefore, almost worthless for our present concerns, and we have to concentrate on the two major surviving proponents of the genre – Plato and Xenophon. Having dismissed Aristophanes’ evidence, can we decide which of their portraits, in so far as they differ, is the more accurate?
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It would take a book in itself to list and fully discuss the points of similarity and difference between Xenophon’s and Plato’s portraits of Socrates; here I restrict myself to more general argument.
Let us start with the parameters. By ‘Xenophon’s Socrates’, I mean simply Socrates as he is found in any or all of the works in this volume; despite the fact that these works were written sometimes years apart, there is no sign of any changes in the ideas that Socrates is made to express. By ‘Plato’s Socrates’, however, I mean Socrates as he is found in Plato’s earlier dialogues.
Few, if any, scholars would disagree that it is in his earlier dialogues that Plato approximates more closely to a portrait of the historical Socrates. Socrates remains the protagonist in some of Plato’s later dialogues, but increasingly becomes a mouthpiece of Plato’s own ideas. Here are four of the most important philosophical issues which make the point. A consideration of these issues will give us an idea as to the nature of Socrates and his thought, and also be relevant later, when we come to compare Xenophon and Plato.
First, in Plato’s early dialogue Protagoras (352b-e, 355a-357e, 358b-d; see also Meno, 77b-78a), Socrates provocatively denies the existence of akrasia, which may be roughly translated as ‘weakness of will’. It is the state that causes one to ‘see the better course and approve of it, but follow the worse course’, as Seneca’s Medea would later put it. Socrates claims that everyone always follows the course which is perceived as better, and that no one can see a course as worse and yet follow it. People can be wrong, but this is an intellectual error, not weakness of will – that is, they can be wrong in what they perceive as good for themselves. In a later dialogue such as Republic, however, Socrates admits without argument that appetites and emotions can lead a person to act against even a perceived better course.
Second, and most remarkably, there is no sign in the early dialogues of the standard Greek, pre-Christian tenet that it is acceptable, and even morally sound, to do good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies. Instead, Socrates argues in Crito, 49a-d that if someone does wrong to me, I should not do wrong back, and ‘doing wrong’ is identified with harming in any way. However, in later dialogues, Socrates is made to mouth the standard tenet (e.g. Republic, 471b; Philebus, 49d).
Third, the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues is content with trying to define moral terms. He is concerned with trying to find out what courage or justice are, for instance, but not with theoretical questions such as what properties they must have in order for me to be able to know them and even ask the question in the first place. His pungent method of questioning and his thought centre entirely on getting people to try to change their lives for the better. In the later dialogues, however, Socrates is made to have an interest in metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, astronomy, mathematics, politics and a whole host of subjects foreign to the earlier Socrates.
Fourth, and finally, with one or two outstanding exceptions, in Plato’s early dialogues Socrates is constantly, both explicitly and implicitly, denying that he himself knows anything; from this profession of ignorance (‘Socratic irony’) stems his questioning method, his mission to rid people of the illusion that they know anything important, and all his philosophy. Whether or not we think that this profession of ignorance is sincere, it is the cardinal characteristic of Socrates in the early Platonic dialogues.1 In later dialogues, however, Socrates teaches from a standpoint of certain knowledge.
So, ‘Plato’s Socrates’ means the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues. His portrayal of Socrates differs markedly from that of Xenophon. There are many differences of substance between the two pictures and, even where there are similarities, many differences of emphasis. I shall illustrate these differences of emphasis and substance using the four philosophical issues outlined above as both foundations and test-cases.
These four issues are important: the very fact that there are such differences between the earlier and later Platonic portraits makes it highly plausible to claim that here, if anywhere, we have a starting-point – we can assume that the Socrates of the early dialogues is, if not the ‘historical Socrates’ (who I believe to be irrecoverable – see below), at least Plato’s version of Socrates.
First, then, Plato’s Socrates denies the existence of moral weakness, on the grounds that no one deliberately chooses what is perceived as bad for them. This is the famous Socratic paradox that ‘No one deliberately goes wrong’ (which, given an ambiguity in the Greek, also means ‘No one deliberately does wrong’). This paradox goes hand in hand with another famous Socratic paradox, that ‘Virtue is knowledge’. The two paradoxes are related in the sense that, if virtue is knowledge, then plainly no one can deliberately or knowingly do wrong (act unvirtuously). Where the paradox ‘Virtue is knowledge’ is concerned, we often find in Plato that this knowledge is assimilated to knowledge of crafts: virtue, and all its branches (courage, justice, etc.) could and should have experts who have been taught and can teach others; virtue has products, just as a cobbler’s product is shoes; a virtuous person can explain his actions, just as a craftsman can.
Like Plato, Xenophon has Socrates discuss moral weakness (Memoirs, 3.9.4); he has Socrates claim that the basis of the denial of such weakness is that ‘everyone acts by choosing from the courses open to him the one which he supposes to be most expedient’, which is to say that ‘No one deliberately goes wrong’ (see also Memoirs, 4.6.6 and The Estate-manager, 20.29); in the very next paragraph he has Socrates claim that ‘virtue is wisdom’; and we find the Craft Analogy referred to here and there (for example, Memoirs, 4.2.12, 4.4.5; The Estate-manager, 6.13–14; and more obliquely at Memoirs, 1.2.37).
So here we have a difference of emphasis. Xenophon has all the tools, but doesn’t make anything very much with them – certainly, nothing as philosophically stimulating as Plato’s Socrates does. There are signs of philosophical muddle. For instance, as we have seen, he has Socrates pronounce the principle which denies moral weakness, but at another point (Memoirs, 4.5.6) has Socrates affirm the existence of such weakness.
It is also interesting to see how Plato and Xenophon diverge on the consequences of the paradox that ‘Virtue is knowledge’. In Hippias Minor Plato has Socrates implicitly adopt the extreme position that such knowledge is sufficient for virtue: anyone with the relevant knowledge will by definition be virtuous. He has Socrates take this route as a consequence of a possible flaw in the Craft Analogy. A craftsman makes a product, but it is beyond his sphere of responsibility, qua craftsman, to guarantee that the product is used for good rather than ill. The products of virtue, however, must necessarily be good: the analogy is in danger of breaking down at this point. There are two possible responses: one is the Platonic response, that knowledge is sufficient for virtue, which keeps the Craft Analogy central to Socrates’ thought; the other is Aristotelian, that the virtuous man naturally desires good. This Aristotelian option relegates the Craft Analogy to the sidelines, since the desire for good is now just as important as the bare knowledge. Whereas Plato takes the former response, Xenophon attributes to Socrates the Aristotelian response (Memoirs, 3.9.5: those who know how to act justly ‘would choose to do nothing else’).
However, Plato and Xenophon do agree on a political consequence of Socrates’ intellectualism. They both show Socrates as critical of the Athenian political system in which people who are merely rich, charismatic or persuasive can be appointed to positions of power and responsibility; according to Socrates, positions of responsibility in all spheres, including politics, should be open only to experts with the appropriate knowledge. In Plato, see for example, Protagoras, 319b–320b (and later, of course, Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-king); in Xenophon, see especially Memoirs, 3.6 and 3.9.10–11–and note that this aspect of Socrates’ thought was well enough known for it to be used against him: Memoirs, 1.2.9.
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Second, we have seen that Plato’s Socrates appears not to hold the normal Greek view that it is morally sound to do good to one’s friends, but harm to one’s enemies. Xenophon’s Socrates, however, is constantly reiterating this tenet (for example, Memoirs, 2.1.19, 2.1.28, 2.3.14, 2.6.35, 4.2.16, 4.5.10). Here we have a difference of substance, rather than merely one of emphasis.
Third, Plato’s Socrates is far more concerned with the moral life of the individuals he meets than with theoretical issues. Here there are points of both similarity and difference between Xenophon and Plato. On the one hand, Xenophon’s Socrates expresses more certainty about matters such as religion (Memoirs, 1.4, 4.3) than is conceivable for Plato’s Socrates. On the other hand, his concern, even when expressing such theoretical views, is likewise to improve the life of the people he is talking to. The very fact that both Plato and Xenophon only ever show Socrates at work on individuals or, at the most, small groups, suggests that they both agree that individuals are Socrates’ concern. Moreover, in Xenophon we find Socrates recommending theoretical studies such as mathematics and astronomy only in so far as they are of practical application (see Memoirs, 4.7, especially).
Fourth, not only does Xenophon’s Socrates never profess ignorance, but also he constantly persuades his interlocutors of views which he himself holds: in fact, for Xenophon this is the whole point of Socrates’ teaching – that he was a good man and taught others the good things he knew. Yet Socrates’ profession of ignorance is central to Plato’s portrayal of Socrates, and leads to the whole Platonic picture of his having not so much a philosophy in the sense of a system of ideas as a valuable philosophical method of inquiry. This difference, therefore, between Xenophon and Plato is striking.
It is true that in Xenophon we find some aspects of Socrates which in Plato we would associate with his profession of ignorance – Socrates invariably asks questions, and stresses the importance of self-knowledge (for example, Memoirs, 4.2.24) and of people acknowledging their own ignorance (for example, Memoirs, 1.7) – but these aspects are not made three-dimensional by being centred on the Socratic profession of ignorance. To take the last aspect: acknowledging ignorance for Xenophon’s Socrates is merely prudential – so that one doesn’t make a fool of oneself and harm those one shouldn’t harm. Plato’s Socrates, however, knows from his own experience that an awareness of ignorance is the only way to make life a quest for moral improvement rather than being content with the notions and attitudes one already has. Knowing the value of this, he uses his profession of ignorance as the excuse for constant questioning; the result is not to arrive at definite conclusions, as it is in Xenophon, but to reduce the interlocutor to the same awareness of ignorance as Socrates. Xenophon’s Socrates merely pays lip-service to the educational value of questioning (Memoirs, 4.6.15; The Estate-manager, 19.15), but the tone and purpose of his questions are entirely different.
Besides those which centre upon the four philosophical issues, there are other differences of emphasis. For instance, Plato’s Socrates devotes whole dialogues to attempting (but failing) to define certain moral terms; Xenophon alludes to this aspect of Socrates’ work only in Memoirs, 3.9, and, more explicitly, in Memoirs, 4.6, where he implies that Socrates was invariably successful in reaching definitions of such terms. Again, Xenophon’s Socrates is rarely as subtle or brilliant in dealing with people as Plato’s Socrates – Memoirs, 4.2, is the closest Xenophon comes to a Platonic episode. There is also less humour, intellectual sparkle and biting irony – though humour does occasionally struggle through his earnestness. Xenophon emphasizes far more Socrates’ personal self-discipline, the differences between slavish-ness and freedom, and the characteristics of a man of virtue.
We must now face the question of how to explain these frequent differences of emphasis and occasional (but important) differences of substance between Plato’s and Xenophon’s portraits of Socrates. Evidently, neither portrait is right, or one is right, or both are right.
A great many scholars choose the middle option – that only one portrait is right – and nowadays invariably choose Plato’s Socrates as the true likeness.1 They do this either explicitly (by arguing that Xenophon is wrong) or implicitly (by ignoring Xenophon when claiming to describe ‘Socrates’ philosophy’). Unfortunately, those who argue explicitly in favour of Plato are rarer than those who simply ignore Xenophon. There are good reasons for this, however: it is difficult to argue objectively that one portrait is preferable, because there is no objective, or even external, evidence to support the claim. The only plausible means of doing so is to argue that Aristotle’s remarks about Socrates side with Plato against Xenophon. The most relevant Aristotelian passages are Nicomachean Ethics, 1145b23–27; Magna Moralia, 1182a15–25; Metaphysics, 987b1–4, and 1078b23–32; De Sophisticis Elenchis, 183b7–8: there is nothing in Aristotle, however, on the important issue of whether Socrates claimed that it was never right to cause harm.
Yet, even if Aristotle’s remarks did support Plato’s picture, this would prove very little. Aristotle may simply have chosen to rely on Plato’s early dialogues for his evidence about Socrates: he never met Socrates and, after all, Plato was his teacher. He might not even have had access to Xenophon’s works.
I believe that, ultimately, the choice of Plato over Xenophon is largely a matter of prejudice. Plato’s Socrates is simply a far more provocative and brilliant character. It is sometimes said that Xenophon’s portrait must be wrong, because his Socrates is so conventional that it is impossible to believe the Athenians could ever have put him to death. Even if this were true, it would not follow that Plato’s portrait is right, because there is equally little reason for the Athenians to have killed Plato’s Socrates: even at their most intolerant, the Athenians never executed anyone simply for being brilliant. Both our authors are avowed followers of Socrates, whose purpose was to defend their mentor posthumously; both succeeded so well that the question of why Socrates was put to death is still an open one (see pp. 32–40).
In short, to prefer Plato’s portrait to Xenophon’s is just to compare Xenophon unfavourably with Plato as both a writer and a thinker. But this is only to say that not everyone is a genius. There is also a fairly obvious sense in which Plato’s greater intellectual stature is likely to make him less slavishly dependent on Socrates and more his own man. The conclusion that Plato’s brilliance leads him to understand Socrates’ philosophy, when Xenophon didn’t, is no more or less plausible than the conclusion that his brilliance makes him more to be mistrusted, since he is more likely to put his own ideas into Socrates’ mouth. We might just as well argue that Xenophon’s is the minimal portrait, and as such is more likely to be true than any exaggerated and larger-than-life portrait.
Others argue, more plausibly, that both portraits are correct. Guthrie puts this point of view well (Socrates, p. 9):
He [Socrates] was a complex character, who did not and could not reveal every side of himself equally to all his acquaintances, since by reason of their own intellectual powers and inclinations they were not all equally capable of observing and appreciating them. If, then, the accounts of, say, Plato and Xenophon seem to present a different type of man, the chances are that each by itself is not so much wrong as incomplete, that it tends to exaggerate certain genuine traits and minimize others equally genuine, and that to get an idea of the whole man we must regard them as complementary.
In other words, the practical, conservative Xenophon, whose professed aim was to defend Socrates against the charges brought against him, highlights the prudential, conservative side of Socrates; the brilliant, philosophical Plato brings out this side of Socrates. Even a great philosopher is not always a philosopher; he will also give more practical advice and homilies to his friends: this is the Socrates Xenophon shows us. We glimpse in Xenophon the side of Socrates that Plato develops; but largely Xenophon deals with aspects of Socrates in which Plato has little interest.
The accuracy of this approach, however, is bound to be a question of degree: both portraits cannot be correct in all their details, because some details are contradictory. Apart from philosophical contradictions (we have already noted one), there are contradictions in the fine detail. A trivial example springs to mind: Plato’s Socrates, like the Taoist sage, has no desire to leave the city and only does so when compelled by military service (Phaedrus, 230d), whereas in The Estate-manager Xenophon’s Socrates sings the praises of a healthy life in the country. Once we start admitting that both portraits cannot be right in all details, it is impossible to know where to draw the line. And once we start dismissing the details, we are left with the view that neither portrait is correct, except at the most general level. This is the view to which I now turn.
For obvious reasons, the possibility that neither Xenophon’s nor Plato’s (nor Aristophanes’, nor Aristotle’s, etc.) portrait is correct has not been highly favoured. Nobody wants Socrates to become more invisible; but if that is the case, then we have to face it. Those who have taken this view, however, have invariably done so from a position of despair; I think, however, that we can be more positive.
We can begin by reminding ourselves of some facts. First, Xenophon certainly put his own military, agricultural and hunting expertise into Socrates’ mouth; similarly, Plato in his later dialogues certainly put his own philosophical notions into Socrates’ mouth. Is there any good reason to think that Plato was not doing the same in his earlier dialogues? On the contrary, there are good reasons for thinking that he was. I have already said that Sokratikoi logoi constituted a genre of literature: since the surviving examples of the genre present us with startlingly different portraits of Socrates, and since the majority of the surviving examples (Xenophon’s work and Plato’s later dialogues) are clearly fictional, or ‘factional’ – to use the modern term for a blend of fact and fiction – then there is good reason for supposing that the remainder of the genre (Plato’s early dialogues) was equally ‘factional’ – that this was the nature of the genre.1 A parallel is provided by Xenophon’s other biographical works – Agesilaus and Cyropaedia – which are so eulogistic that no one denies they are ‘faction’. We mustn’t suppose that our own more scrupulous standards of biographical accuracy apply to the seeds of biography at the start of the fourth century BC.2
We must similarly shed our modern preconceptions before we can understand the next point. Nobody supposes that Plato and Xenophon were actually present at all or even the majority of the Socratic conversations they describe. But Xenophon, at any rate, does claim to have been present at some (see also p. 58). One of them, however, he certainly could not have attended. At the beginning of The Dinner-party, he claims to have been present, but since the dramatic date of this dialogue is 422 BC, when Xenophon was eight years old at the most, he could not have been. The statement ‘I was there’ is often a literary flourish, to reassure the reader of the accuracy of what follows: it is a lie by our modern standards, but not by those of ancient Greece. I am not saying that Plato and Xenophon were not present at any of the conversations they report; but I am saying that the facts make it safer to regard their works as quasi-fictional accounts – ‘What Socrates might have said’ rather than ‘What Socrates actually said’. And as soon as the modality of ‘might’ is allowed to enter, it is clear that we are dealing with subjective portraits rather than hard and true likenesses. In this context it must also not be forgotten that both Plato and Xenophon are partisan followers of Socrates.
We can illustrate the subjective nature of the portraits as follows. We are fortunate to have not only Plato’s and Xenophon’s accounts of what Socrates said on luck, but also that of another writer in the genre, Aeschines of Sphettus. Plato’s occurs at Euthydemus, 279c–280a; Xenophon’s at Memoirs, 3.9.14–15; and Aeschines’ in Fragment 8a. The reader will by now probably not be surprised to learn that there is little immediate unanimity. Plato’s Socrates denies the existence of luck altogether: ‘In every walk of life, then,’ he says, ‘wisdom causes luck.’ Xenophon’s Socrates conventionally describes luck as totally random. Aeschines’ Socrates says that luck comes from the gods, but is not random: it is one of the gods’ ways of rewarding good men.
No doubt one could argue for a reconciliation between these views, but that is precisely the point: the reconciliation would have to be at a higher, more general level than the particular ideas we find expressed in our sources.
To proceed by means of analogy, suppose we assume, for the sake of argument, that the basic function of law is to preserve organized communities. It is evident that a wide variety of secondary rules can fulfil this primary function and that the differences between these rules can range from the trivial to the profound. Some communities choose to drive on the right, some on the left; some choose to execute certain classes of criminal, some do not. Even while communities may agree on the basic function of law (principle), they may disagree over their rules (applied principle).
In order to make sense of the idea that neither Plato’s nor Xenophon’s portrait of Socrates is correct, we need only assume that Socrates taught principle rather than applied principle. This seems to me to make sense of the disagreements that we find between our sources for Socrates’ work. Socrates’ followers took the principles that Socrates taught and applied them; on this level of applied principle there is room for disagreement, and yet any or all of Socrates’ followers, even while disagreeing, may still claim that they are true Socratics. There is some evidence for arguments between Socrates’ followers: we know, for instance, that Antis-thenes wrote an abusive dialogue against Plato. Plato had argued that the denial of the possibility of contradiction was self-defeating (see, for example, Euthydemus, 283e-288a); Antis-thenes, who denied the possibility of contradiction, wrote his dialogue in reply.
This thesis, if correct, would lead to an interesting methodology for recovering Socrates’ ideas. Wherever possible, we would have to consider what his followers said on any issue, and then generalize what they said to discover the underlying principle. Needless to say, the results of such a methodology will always be speculative. Let us consider the subject of pleasure. We have a pretty good idea of what several Socratics said about pleasure, and so, inasmuch as they disagree with one another on this issue, rather than arguing that one of them is right and the others wrong, we might be able to uncover a basic Socratic principle about pleasure.
In brief, Plato presents Socrates as an out-and-out hedonist (Protagoras, 351b–357e): wherever the word ‘good’ is used with human reference, ‘pleasant’ could be substituted, and wherever ‘bad’ is used, ‘distressful’ could be substituted. Xenophon presents Socrates as a modified, moral hedonist (see, for example, Memoirs, 1.3.5–7, 1.6.4–10, 2.1.21–33, 4–5) – Xenophon’s Socrates takes precisely the position which Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue tries to take, but is argued down by Socrates – that some pleasures are good, but some are bad. For Xenophon’s Socrates, good pleasures are those which arise from moral, self-disciplined activity, and bad pleasures are the opposite. It is more difficult to recover the views of other Socratics, but we can be fairly sure of the following. Antisthenes was vehemently anti-hedonistic; he comes close to Xenophon’s Socrates when he says in The Dinner-party (4.39) that his asceticism affords him greater pleasure than indulgence, but he adds a rider that he could wish that this were not so, since so much pleasure cannot be good for one. Later sources report Antisthenes as claiming that the only worthwhile pleasures are those derived from hard work, or even that he would rather go mad than feel pleasure. At any rate, it is clear that not only does Antisthenes not take pleasure to be the goal of life, but it is not even a yardstick of the goal of life, as it is for Xenophon’s Socrates. As for Aristippus, it is difficult to separate his views on pleasure from those of later hedonists who claimed his authority. It is probable that he did not go as far as saying that a life of indulgent luxury was best, but that the views attributed to him at Memoirs, 2.1, are closer: that avoidance of trouble of any kind is pleasant and is the goal of life.
Here then are four opinions on pleasure attributed to Socrates. Can we recover Socrates’ actual views on the matter?
There is little doubt that it was a Socratic principle that the goal of life, whatever it may be, must be beneficial to oneself as a human being. This raises a number of questions, such as what it is to be a human being, and what is beneficial for such a being. Now suppose, as regards the latter, Socrates had suggested that pleasure and its lack are natural or god-given guidelines as to what is beneficial for a person. This principle, or something like it, I believe, is what we are looking for. It is open to interpretation whether pleasure is understood as itself the goal of life, or rather as a concomitant of the goal of life; it is open to interpretation whether all or only some pleasures are worth pursuing; it is even possible to interpret the principle as denying that the goal of life is accompanied by pleasure at all.
This view of Socrates as concerned only with the higher principles runs the risk of making him out to be a pontificating dogmatist. I am not claiming, however, that Socrates spent the whole time teaching in this way. Both Plato and Xenophon show him questioning most of the time, and that no doubt was his main activity. The advantage of questioning is that, if carried out consistently, it encourages others to think for themselves – to make up their minds about their own views. This is one reason, surely, why his followers came up with so many different applications of Socratic principles.
Another reason – less historical, more philosophical – why one need not think that Socrates spent the thirty or forty years of his mission spouting dogma is connected with the general nature of the principles he espoused. Because they are general, they have far more potential: they do not close doors by giving answers, but open them by being capable of being spelled out in many different ways. Hence, the picture of a dogmatic Socrates is wrong even if he did pronounce principles, because principles, as defined here, cannot be dogma. Moreover, such is the power of principle that someone like Socrates need not enunciate very many to generate a lot of philosophical discussion – not only enough for the thirty or forty years of his mission, but also enough for the next two and a half thousand years, so far! Socrates has often been compared with Jesus, but never, as far as I know, in this respect: principle has the power to change the ways in which people think. Both Jesus and Socrates, in their respective ways, used principle to such effect.1 What I am trying to express here is not just the truism that ideas are powerful, but that certain ideas – ‘general principles’ – can be called creative: they open things up and allow the minds of those who are receptive to them to expand into new areas, rather than merely to reformulate old areas.
My view, therefore, is that Socrates taught ‘principles’ and these principles may be recoverable by a judicious abstraction from the extant Socratic texts. I should make it clear how this position differs from that of W. K. C. Guthrie (see p. 19), since it could quite easily collapse into Guthrie’s view. Guthrie argues that details of thought found in the Socratic writings are attributable to the ‘historical’ Socrates. I believe, however, that few, if any, of the details are so attributable; where they are, it is because those details are in fact principles. Guthrie’s methodology is bound to be subjective, especially where there are contradictions between details found in different Socratic writers: ‘This detail strikes me as Socratic, so I’ll accept it; that one does not, so I’ll reject it.’ A methodology which attempts to abstract Socratic principle out of the Socratic writers, however, could be more objective. It could not only provide guidelines for Guthrie’s methodology, but also account for the varying portraits of Socrates we receive in the different Socratics.
As I have already said, however, certainty is impossible – and perhaps there is a sense in which historical certainty is unnecessary with figures like Socrates. To continue the parallel with Jesus, there are contradictions both of detail and of general portrait between the Gospels (consider, for instance, the different accounts of his birth and his last words on the cross); but people who initiate events are what they become. From this point of view, while the argument outlined above has the consequence that the ‘true’ Socrates starts to fade into invisibility, it might still be said that the ‘true’ Socrates is the Socrates we see in Plato and Xenophon, despite and because of all the differences between the two portraits. But my conclusion, and my warning to the reader, is that you are more likely to learn about Xenophon in the following pages than about Socrates.