XENOPHON
(c. 430 BCE–c. 350 BCE)

Xenophon was an Athenian citizen, soldier, gentleman-farmer, historian, and author of many varied and often graceful prose works. When young he knew Socrates, whom he consulted before joining, in 401, the famous expedition to Persia narrated in his masterpiece, the Anabasis. Xenophon played a part in leading the defeated remnant back to Greece. Meanwhile, in 399, Socrates had been executed on trumped-up charges. In the subsequent pamphleteering, Xenophon wrote in Socrates' defense. His so-called Apology of Socrates is an unconvincing footnote to Plato's; but later he compiled his extensive and valuable Memorabilia (Recollections of Socrates) the work that has given Xenophon, not himself a philosopher, considerable importance to all post-Socratic philosophers. In it Xenophon supplemented his defense of Socrates against specific charges (made in a pamphlet by Polycrates) with a more general description of his character as a man, a friend, and a teacher, strongly emphasizing his beneficial influence on all who knew him and, for illustration, recording many conversations in which Socrates' views or methods were displayed. Xenophon claimed to have heard many of these conversations himself; others were reported to him by friends among the original interlocutors. Some longer sequences of conversations follow up related topics, but individual conversations are never sustained as long as even a short Platonic dialogue.

Undeniably, Xenophon's Socrates is less lively in discussion than Plato's and far less impressive in defending his paradoxes. The difference reveals the gulf between Plato and his contemporaries in literary skill and in philosophical understanding. But there is no need to reject Xenophon's testimony, despite persistent attacks by scholars on his honesty. Xenophon's picture of Socrates is his own, drawn from his own and his friends' memories of Socrates, not plagiarized from other "Socratic" writers any more than from Plato; it is authenticated precisely by its failings. Xenophon saw Socrates as a man of enormously strong moral character and a teacher of moral principles revolutionary for their day in their demand for unselfishness and self-control. Xenophon only half understood the philosophical significance of Socrates's views, and for fuller understanding we must turn to Plato; but Xenophon occasionally added important details, and with allowance for his limitations an impression of Socrates can be obtained from him that helps us to discern very generally the area in which Plato was presenting his own arguments and no longer those of Socrates.

Xenophon's Socrates demonstrates repeatedly the practical importance of knowledge. He advises young men ambitious to be generals and politicians to acquire knowledge, and draws analogies to show that all skills must be learned; he discusses their respective skills with a painter, a sculptor, a breastplate maker, and even, humorously, with a courtesan. He does not try, as Plato's Socrates did, to question the significance of the craftsmen's knowledge, but only to show that their knowledge can be usefully increased by deeper understanding of the purposes of their various crafts. In turn, he is suspicious of the purely theoretical study of astronomy and geometry beyond their practical uses. Xenophon stresses, nevertheless, that Socrates himself was not ignorant of theoretical science.

Xenophon does not quote in so many words the Socratic paradox "no one errs voluntarily," but he does state that Socrates did not distinguish knowledge from self-control and identified justice and all other virtues with knowledge; knowledge of justice or piety is what produces the just or pious man. Characteristically, however, he repeatedly shows Socrates warning against "weakness of will," and forgets that in the Socratic view, strictly speaking, this could not occur; his admiration of Socrates' own self-control leads him to praise self-control as an independent virtue.

Xenophon occasionally reproduces a Socratic elenchus, or interrogation demonstrating an interlocutor's ignorance, and comments that Socrates used this method to stimulate moral improvement in his pupils by inducing them to acquire knowledge. Xenophon shows no grasp of elenchus as a philosophical weapon for testing arguments, nor indeed of the Platonic Socrates' insistence that consciousness of one's ignorance may be the best one can achieve. Xenophon's Socrates uses no "irony," but states positive views quite unreservedly. He is interested in definitions and unlike Plato's Socrates confidently provides them; rather surprisingly, he is willing to define good and beautiful as relative to utility. Perhaps out of many suggestions intended by Socrates to be tentative, or to show the difficulties of definition, Xenophon—in pursuit of certainty—isolated a few solutions as final.

Xenophon at one point describes Socrates' method as "leading the discussion back to its basic premise (hypothesis )" by establishing, for example, an agreed general definition of the good citizen before assessing a particular citizen's goodness; he tells us that Socrates regarded agreement in discussion as the best guarantee against error. This account of hypothesis is much simpler than Plato's in either Meno or Phaedo, but it is abundantly exemplified in Plato's early dialogues. Xenophon nowhere ascribes to Socrates any theory of Forms, but he quotes a suggestion of Socrates that etymologically "to perform dialectic" means "to arrange things in classes."

Xenophon's entertaining Symposium (Banquet) and Oeconomicus (Household management) display Socrates taking part in sustained discussions; but here this is a literary device with no biographical intention, and in any case little is attributed to Socrates. Xenophon's idealizing Cyropaedia (Education of Cyrus) shows very slight Socratic influence.

See also Medieval Philosophy; Plato; Socrates; Universals, A Historical Survey.

Bibliography

Xenophon's complete works may be found in both Greek and English in the seven-volume Loeb Classical Library edition (London and New York, 1914–1925). The Memorabilia in the Loeb edition, translated by E. C. Marchant, appeared in 1923.

For studies on Xenophon's Socrates, see A. Delatte, Le troisième Livre des souvenirs socratiques de Xénophon (Liège: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, 1933), and R. Simeterre, La théorie socratique de la vertuscience selon les "Mémorables" de Xénophon (Paris, 1938).

David B. Robinson (1967)