The chief reason, and sufficient justification, for my wanting to translate Xenophon’s Socratic writings is that there is today a distinct danger of imbalance for English readers of ancient literature. To judge by what is available in bookshops, one would think that Plato was the only person who had ever written about Socrates. This is far from being the case: after Socrates’ death in 399 BC, a number of his followers, and some others, wrote dialogues with Socrates as the protagonist. As it happens, we have only the titles of most of these works and a few fragments of others. But we do possess the complete Socratic works not only of Plato, but also of Xenophon. Socrates was arguably one of the most important people in the history of mankind. In case we think that the portrait we find in Plato is the one and only Socrates – the true Socrates – it makes sense to have available Xenophon’s portrait as well. I say this without prejudging the question of which of these portraits is the more interesting or the more accurate; this is an issue to which I will return.
A less scholarly and more idiosyncratic reason for wanting to make Xenophon’s Socratic work available is somewhat as follows. It will soon become clear to the reader that Xenophon’s moral code is loosely describable as ‘Victorian’: at any rate, he is a staunch advocate of the quest for ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’, to use Juvenal’s phrase. It seems to me that today, in the late 1980s, both the moral and political pendulum in a great many Western countries is swinging away from the flux of earlier years, and back to a desire for a secure way of life. The reader will find in the pages of Xenophon the modern world’s concerns for, among other things, physical fitness, healthy eating, self-restraint, self-responsibility and, of particular relevance given the threat of an AIDS epidemic, sensible sex. What is important in Xenophon, however, and why a new edition of his Socratic work seems to be timely, is not just the apparent contemporaneity of his thought, but the fact that his ideas are not based on unthinking acceptance of a conservative code or due simply to a swing of the pendulum in the collective unconscious; they are based on his own reflection on moral principles, which he derived from his acquaintance with Socrates. Whether or not this particular thesis is true, it is certain that reading Xenophon’s Socratic works can offer a different perspective on moral and political notions which are fast becoming idealized today.
This volume contains the complete Socratic works of Xenophon:1 Socrates’ Defence (traditionally referred to under its Anglicized Greek title as The Apology of Socrates), Memoirs of Socrates (which is traditionally called by its Latin name, Memorabilia), The Dinner-party (Symposium), and The Estate-manager (Oeconomicus). The translations of Memoirs and The Dinner-party are revisions of a version by Hugh Tredennick, which Penguin published in 1970, but which has long been out of print; the other two translations and all the introductions are original to this volume; in Memoirs and The Dinner-party, some of the footnotes are Tredennick’s, but the rest are original. Where Tredennick’s translations are concerned, my policy has been to change as little as possible. I have altered the translation of quite a number of words and sentences, but rarely whole passages; that is, I have not made alterations gratuitously, but only where sentences seemed to me to contain infelicitous or (rarely) inaccurate translations; moreover, Tredennick had sometimes omitted phrases and, in one or two cases, whole sentences. One peculiarity of Tredennick’s version is that despite being published in 1970, he appears to have used the first edition (1901) of E. C. Marchant’s Oxford Classical Text (Xenophontis Opera, vol. 2), although the better second edition (1921) should have been available to him: the second edition is a reprint of the first edition, but with emendations listed in an ‘Addenda et Corrigenda’ section at the beginning of the book. I have taken the second edition of the Oxford Classical Text as my standard (though I have also consulted the relevant texts in the Loeb, Teubner and Budé series), and this too occasioned a number of changes to Tredennick’s version. Where I prefer a different reading to that of Marchant, this has been mentioned in a footnote; this applies not only to the revisions of Tredennick’s work, but also to my translations of Socrates’ Defence and The Estate-manager.
Not for the first time, I must thank Professor Tony Woodman for his patient and prompt checking of the translations: his eye for ‘translationese’ is truly remarkable and I constantly profit from it. Especial thanks are also due to Zorine Roy-Singh, for taking the strain at a critical time, and to Charles Drazin for copy-editing over and above the call of duty. The book is dedicated to Professor Trevor Saunders for debts which go back many years and include benefiting not just from his advice, but from reading his own paradigmatic translations of ancient Greek philosophical texts.
R. W.