Xenophon: Conversations of Socrates

Conversations of Socrates
Xenophon
(Penguin Classics, 1990) [c.380 BC]
384 p.

As was noted when I wrote about his Anabasis some months ago, Xenophon knew Socrates personally, and admired him. Among the many works he wrote later in life were several Socratic dialogues. They are the principal historical documents we have about Socrates apart, of course, from Plato’s much more numerous (and much more ambitious) dialogues. Xenophon wasn’t a great philosopher, and he wasn’t the artist that Plato was, but his dialogues still have their interest.

This volume collects most (or all?) of Xenophon’s Socratabilia, including his version of Socrates’ speech at his trial (called, as in Plato’s case, the Apology), and a series of shorter vignettes of Socrates in conversation with a variety of people in Athens. There are also two other dialogues, a Symposium (again, like Plato’s, a drinking party dialogue) and the Oeconomicus, about household management. But, since I didn’t read these latter two, I’ll say nothing further about them.

*

The Apology is a piece of considerable interest, and quite fascinating to set beside Plato’s version of the speech. It is always advantageous to have more than one account of an historical event; comparison and contrast give us some guidance, perhaps, to sift what actually happened from how it was adapted or interpreted by particular authors, especially for a person and an event as central to our tradition as Socrates and his trial. The similarities between Xenophon’s account of the speech and Plato’s are striking. They are in agreement on certain major features: that Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth and of not believing in the gods of Athens, for instance; that Socrates professed to have a “divine sign” that warned him against wrongdoing, and that he believed this lay somewhere in the background of the charges that he was facing; that he entered into dialogue with his accuser during his speech; that he declined to propose a penalty other than death because to do so would be a tacit admission of guilt; that he refused to ingratiate himself with the jury; and that he afterward rejected an offer to help him escape from prison.

Xenophon also corroborates Plato’s account in which Socrates maintained that he had not done anything wrong (“I have consistently done no wrong, and this, I think, is the finest preparation for a defense.”) and argued that those who condemned him were more to blame than himself (“If I am wrongly executed, this may be discreditable to those who wrongly put me to death, because if it is shameful to do wrong, it is surely shameful to do *anything* wrongly; but what disgrace is it to me if other people fail to decide or act rightly with regard to me?”)

Even certain small details are the same: that Socrates, for instance, did not prepare a speech in advance, and that he made reference to the prophetic powers of those who are approaching death.

The two versions of the speech differ in certain respects also, of course. In Plato’s version Socrates devotes considerable time to relating the story of the mysterious statement of the Oracle at Delphi with regard to him, viz. that no-one was wiser, and of his efforts to discover what it meant, whereas in Xenophon’s version of the speech Socrates says that the Oracle said that he was “the most free, upright, and prudent of all people”, which is not quite the same thing, though I suppose it might still be surprising enough to provoke a search for its true meaning. Xenophon’s Socrates claims that he is wise because he “never stopped investigating and learning any good thing”; it is notable that he does not profess ignorance as Plato’s Socrates does; Xenophon’s Socrates teaches, and this indeed is what Xenophon seems most to admire and appreciate about him. I don’t recall seeing in Xenophon’s speech much about the fear of death, whereas Plato analyzes it in some depth, nor does Plato’s claim that Socrates believed that “no evil can happen to a good man” make an appearance in Xenophon’s speech, as I recall.

I’m not sure what to make of these differences. Xenophon’s speech is significantly shorter than Plato’s, and he says outright that he left things out, so I don’t think one would be on a stable footing trying to be decisive about what was really said in the speech.

*

The Memorabilia is a much longer work in which Xenophon compiles short vignettes of Socrates in conversation with a variety of people in Athens. They bear a superficial resemblance to Plato’s dialogues insofar as they feature Socrates conversing with another individual or a small group, but the similarity doesn’t go much deeper than that. For Xenophon, Socrates is mainly a sage who gives advice and moral guidance on all kinds of things: household management, military affairs, friendship, religion. Occasionally these conversations have a certain aphoristic charm:

“He said that it was a poor thing for the gods if they took more pleasure in great sacrifices than in small ones, because then they would often be better pleased with the offerings of the wicked than with those of the good.”

“If you want to be thought good at anything, the shortest, safest and most reputable way is to try to make yourself really good at it.”

But more often than not Xenophon’s version of Socrates is sort of bland and conventional, as are his interlocutors, who rarely emerge from the page with any particular shape. The most startling thing about Xenophon’s portrait of Socrates may be that he’s not much of a philosopher at all — he’s Socratic, in the sense of asking questions of his conversation partners, but not much interested in abstract ideas about ethics or metaphysics.

*

We might wonder if Socrates was really as Xenophon portrays him, or really as Plato does, but ultimately it’s a false dichotomy. It’s possible that Socrates as he comes down to us is largely a creation of the writers who tell us about him, but it’s also possible that Socrates simply calibrated his conversation to his audience; to Xenophon he was as Xenophon recounts, and to Plato as Plato.

In any case, my view is that these little dialogues are inferior to Plato’s in pretty much every respect. But it was just his bad luck that he found himself in competition with a genius; Xenophon admired Socrates, and wrote so that we could admire Socrates too:

If anyone in his search for virtue has encountered a more helpful person than Socrates, then he deserves, in my opinion, to be called the most fortunate of all men.

Would that the same could be said of me, and that there could be someone who would say it.