Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory

PART ONE

Socrates and Plato

CHAPTER ONE

Notes on Xenophon's Socrates

FOR MOST OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY¹ Xenophon's portrait of Socrates has been thoroughly discounted by scholars as an independent source for our knowledge of Socrates' personality, philosophy, and activity as a teacher or mentor to Athenian youth. So much is this so that until very recently people with a philosophical interest in Socrates pretty well ceased altogether to pay attention to Xenophon's Socratic writings.² Karl Joël in his massive and influential book joined a growing chorus of his contemporaries at the end of the nineteenth century in insisting that the Socratic conversations in Xenophon's Memorabilia (the same goes for his Symposium, though Joel's principal focus was on the Memorabilia) were literary productions, just as much so (though different in many other ways) as Plato's dialogues were recognized then to be. They were contributions to a literary genre that grew up almost immediately after Socrates' death,³ in which the author presented Socratic-style dialogues very much of his own construction. Not only Plato and Xenophon wrote such dialogues, but also, perhaps among others, Aeschines of Sphettos and the philosophers Antisthenes, Euclides, and Phaedo, none of whose works have survived apart from isolated quotations and short excerpts.⁴ In all these cases, as with Plato, one might conclude after investigation that such literary invention, at least sometimes, was constructed upon a recoverable basis in genuine Socratic philosophy. But, Joël argued, one certainly cannot start from the assumption in Xenophon's case or any of the others' (especially Plato's) that the author even intends to present a faithful record of some conversation Socrates actually held. Yet that assumption with respect to Xenophon was widespread in nineteenth-century writing about Socrates. Thus Friedrich Schleiermacher had defined the Socratic problem for scholars in 1818 by asking what more one can suppose Socrates to have been, beyond and compatibly with what Xenophon reports of him in his Socratic conversations—and what more he must have been, if Plato was to have had any right at all to present him in conversation in the way he does in his own dialogues.⁵ Thus Schleiermacher began by assuming the accuracy of Xenophon's portrayal, so far as it went; the Socratic problem was the problem what to do, in the light of that, with Plato's account.

One thing that prevented nineteenth-century scholars from recognizing and giving full weight to the literary character of the Memorabilia was that, unlike Plato in presenting his dialogues, Xenophon explicitly claims historical accuracy for the conversations making up the bulk of the work. He was, after all, the author of historical writings of his own (the Hellenica, completing Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, as well as the Anabasis), so it was easy for scholars to attribute to him a concern for historical accuracy in his reports that is more characteristic of modern historians than ancient ones. At the beginning of chapter 3 of book I, Xenophon says that he is going thenceforward to set down from his own recollection evidence of the ways that Socrates benefited those who consorted with him, both through actions revealing his own character (presumably as a model for emulation)⁶ and through his conversation.⁷ In this he is only making explicit the practice he has already followed in the first two chapters of book I. There, by referring to Socrates' actions and conversations, he refutes the charges made against him at his trial and afterward in the Accusation of Socrates written in about 393 by the rhetorician Polycrates. From I 3 onward, he simply continues this apologetic discussion by expanding its scope, so as to provide evidence, with no special reference to the accusations, of the beneficial effects upon the young men of Athens of Socrates' conversations with them. Now one should note right away that, whatever one may ultimately make of Xenophon's claims to historical accuracy, he is not offering in the Memorabilia to give an account of Socrates as a philosopher—of his way of treating philosophical questions as such, of his philosophical theories or opinions, of his conception of what philosophy was and could (or could not) hope to accomplish, and the methods appropriate to philosophy's task. It is with Socrates as an educator in the broadest sense that Xenophon is explicitly concerned—as someone whose company and conversation brought out and strengthened in the young their capacities to be good and useful, god-fearing and family-respecting citizens, both informed and concerned about justice and the public good. To be sure, Xenophon knows Socrates was a philosopher and consistently so presents him. We find frequent indications in the Memorabilia of some of Xenophon's Socrates' philosophical views (I return to these below), but only because, as one could expect, the uplifting character of his conversation must frequently have revealed, and sometimes perhaps actually depended upon, his philosophical commitments. It cannot be overemphasized that for Xenophon's declared purposes Socrates' philosophy lies off to one side. This marks a crucial contrast with Plato, whose dialogues are relentlessly devoted to the exploration of philosophical questions, however much at the same time Plato's purpose is to portray Socrates as an outstandingly good man whose conversation was calculated to bring out the best in his hearers— even if that best does not coincide with Xenophon's conception. In Plato the focus is just the reverse of Xenophon's, as Xenophon explains his interests in the opening chapters of the Memorabilia: Socrates' philosophy is the center of attention, his moral character and moral influence lie off to one side.

Xenophon's claim to be reporting conversations from memory notwithstanding, Joël, Maier in his comprehensive work of 1913, and others had no difficulty in showing how very little basis there is for believing him.⁸ Xenophon does not scruple to begin his dialogue Oeconomicus by saying that he is going to report a conversation he once heard Socrates hold on estate- and household-management, a subject in which we have reason to think Xenophon was himself interested and informed. But the rest of Xenophon's own and the other ancient testimony about Socrates makes this an extremely unlikely topic for anyone to discuss with Socrates. The conversation that follows has indeed many of the external marks of the Socratic conversations Xenophon presents in the Memorabilia, but no one can doubt that the substance of what Socrates says on this topic is provided by Xenophon himself from his own experience or sources of his own. Again, in his Symposium Xenophon professes to be telling of a party at which he was present (1,1)—but he situates it quite clearly and even elaborately at a time (421 B.C.) when he cannot have been as much as 10 years old.⁹ Can one believe that the situation with the Memorabilia is essentially different? No one can have planned to write memoirs of Socratic conversations with the apologetic purpose announced in the Memorabilia until after Socrates' death in 399 (when Xenophon was away in Asia on the march of the 10,000 that he wrote about in his Anabasis). So it does not appear that Xenophon would have had any reason to take notes of conversations he may have heard when he was with Socrates (between about 410 at the earliest and 401, when Xenophon departed for Persia).¹⁰ The evidence drawn from parallels between different conversations within the Memorabilia and between the Memorabilia and Xenophon's other writings is sufficient to cast serious doubt upon the historical actuality of the specific conversations that he presents. The most that could be claimed is that Xenophon is drawing upon his general recollection of conversations he witnessed, and perhaps upon undocumented memories of specifically memorable ones. The actual composition can only be his own creative work.

So far, I believe, one must go in rejecting nineteenth-century scholars' assumptions of the historical veracity of Xenophon's reports. But Maier, and especially Joël, go further, in two directions: First, they argue that a very great deal of what Xenophon has Socrates say, and of his overall picture of him and his outlook on life, is drawn in one way or another from the Socratic writings of Antisthenes. In order to understand this, we need to take account of views prevalent among German scholars at the turn of the twentieth century about the history of the Socratic movement in the first couple of decades after Socrates' death (that is, during the 390s and 380s). It was thought that these decades saw a terrific battle, personal and literary, between Plato and Antisthenes, as the two principal philosophical heirs of Socrates, both teachers of philosophy at Athens and writers of Socratic dialogues.¹¹ They produced these dialogues to display or establish the orthodoxy of their own versions of the Socratic heritage. Allegedly Plato himself went to great lengths in his own polemics against Antisthenes, though lacking Antisthenes' writings we do not easily see this, as of course his contemporaries would have done: for example, Plato's Euthydemus was a sustained attack upon Antisthenean dialectic (in the guise of the logic-chopping of the characters Euthydemus and Dionysodorus); the speeches praising pederasty by Phaedrus and Pausanias in the Symposium are a deliciously wicked—table-turning—attack upon Antisthenes' views on love; and so on. Xenophon, who had spent most of the 390s in military activities in support first of a Persian prince and then of a Spartan king, and who had been formally exiled by the Athenians about 399, was himself no writer or teacher of philosophy. He did not have the same aims in composing his Socratic conversations as Plato and Antisthenes allegedly did in composing theirs; as we have seen, he wanted to defend his friend and teacher's memory and good reputation, while also expressing his admiration for him, explaining its grounds, and claiming Socrates' support for views of his own on important moral and social questions. But, according to Joël and Maier, who neglect these differences between Xenophon's aims in his Socratic writings and Plato's (and presumably Antisthenes'), Xenophon worked largely from the literary record in putting together his own picture of Socrates. Since Xenophon's Socrates allegedly shares a good deal with the Socrates that Antisthenes (later regarded as a forerunner of the Cynic movement that began later in the third century with Diogenes) drew inspiration from for his own philosophy, Joël and Maier think it reasonable to attribute these similarities to Xenophon's extensive borrowings from (and reactions to) Antisthenes' lost writings. In effect, according to them, Xenophon presents a politer and more gentlemanly, less rigidly ascetic Socrates, who like Antisthenes especially champions control of appetities (enkrateia), edification through self-denial (ponos), and the rejection of luxury and pleasurable self-indulgence as harmful to the soul—all or mostly derived from Xenophon's reading of Antisthenes' Socratic dialogues.

Joël and Maier draw support for this supposition from aspects of Xenophon's own personality and experience. In the first place, our evidence does not support the conclusion that he was one of Socrates' closest associates, along with both Plato and Antisthenes and many others of Socrates' more philosophically inclined companions. As his military-political career and his non-Socratic writings show, his tastes and interests were the ones conventionally approved in his aristocratic circles (and quite different from the very unconventional, relentlessly intellectual ones of Socrates and the more philosophical of his companions): he was a family-man devoted to horsebackriding, hunting, sport, physical culture, and life in the country, and at least in youth he was something of an adventurer. According to his own report¹² of the circumstances under which he accepted the invitation to join Cyrus the Younger at Sardis, he consulted Socrates about whether he should go—having however apparently already made up his mind to do it. Socrates had misgivings and advised him to consult the oracle at Delphi, but (disregarding Socrates' misgivings) Xenophon did so only to ask which gods should receive sacrifices in order to ensure good success on the expedition and a safe return. Socrates thereupon told him that he should certainly follow Apollo's advice about the sacrifices! (Any irony in Socrates' last advice was lost on Xenophon.) It is certainly quite plausible that, as Joël and Maier suggest, a lot of what Socrates is made to say in the Memorabilia expresses Xenophon's personal views (whether or not it also expresses those of the historical Socrates), and that Xenophon's views conformed to a certain extent with Antisthenean asceticism. As noted above, Xenophon's intent was to show Socrates inspiring the young men to become proper gentlemen, and for Xenophon, who counted himself one of those, that meant freedom from subjection to one's own desires, the refusal to get money by submitting oneself to anyone else's direction, physical and mental self-discipline, and following one's own trained understanding where it suffices but consulting and following oracles and divinations where it does not. It seems very likely indeed that in much of his composition Xenophon simply draws upon his own conception of what benefits the young in order to portray Socrates and his conversations as beneficial—conventionally aristocratic as that conception was, but tinged with the love of self-discipline, self-denial, and independence, and a devotion to the gods and to their guidance through divination and oracles.

In all this, Joël and Maier tend to minimize the extent of Xenophon's personal knowledge of Socrates. The resulting picture is this: Xenophon, in his desire to defend his friend and teacher's reputation, has drawn upon the existing Socratic literature, especially the writings of Antisthenes, together with his own standards of an upstanding life, to present Socrates as himself a fine gentleman according to the unintellectual, aristocratic standards that Xenophon himself upheld, and a teacher of young men who showed them how, and inspired them, to live in that way. Just as his predecessors in the genre of the Socratic dialogue had attributed to their Socrateses some of their own philosophical views, so he too attributes his 'practical' philosophy to the great man. One can therefore safely ignore Xenophon as an independent source for Socrates' philosophical views. He was not interested in Socrates as a philosopher in any event (and he was not one of his intimates); he was not capable, really, of understanding such philosophy as he may have heard in Socrates' discourses; his portrait is essentially just an amalgam of things he read in other authors together with his own views about what it takes to be a gentleman. In any event, as Maier claims, if Xenophon's Socrates were genuine it would be impossible to understand how the brightest and the best of the youth of Athens came to rally about him and were so deeply affected by him as the evidence of Plato and others shows that they were. By contrast, according to Maier, provided we are careful to segregate Plato's Socratic dialogues from the later ones, we can rely on the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues to be genuine: Plato was one of Socrates' intimates and shows himself perfectly capable of appreciating the philosophical depths that we know from his influence in Athens Socrates must have had.¹³ So, for Maier, Xenophon's testimony has no reliably independent value. Only Plato's counts.¹⁴

I believe Maier's total dismissal of Xenophon as an immediate, independent source is quite unjustified, as are his and Joel's claims that Xenophon depended upon Antisthenes' writings for his information about Socrates' conversations and his interpretation of Socrates' practical outlook and instruction of the young. Maier himself remarks that Joël (and his teacher and forerunner Dümmler) often threatened to spoil their work by exaggerated, implausible and unnecessary efforts to find traces of Antisthenes in Xenophon's works. The same remark also applies to Maier himself, however. If we possessed Antisthenes' writings, or any of them, we might of course find that Xenophon borrowed massively from him. But given only what we do possess, a sane reader will find very little reason to suspect it.¹⁵ The fact that ancient sources attest views of Antisthenes that Xenophon attributes in nearly identical or at any rate closely similar form to Socrates might be due to borrowing from works of Antisthenes now lost; but we are not in a position to know this, if and where it may be true. Our knowledge is insufficient to rule out the possibility that Xenophon attributes these views to Socrates on his own first-hand authority; even where ancient reports of Antisthenes make one most strongly suspect borrowing by Xenophon, the possibility is not excluded that he drew on precisely those formulations, or illustrations, and so on, in Antisthenes because they seemed to him to capture particularly well something he knew on his own that Socrates had said or believed. Either way, the coincidence of Xenophon and Antisthenes would in fact give us grounds for believing that whatever was in question did have a strong basis in fact—whether or not it was confirmed in Plato, and whether or not, indeed, it was actually contradicted by something in Plato.

Here one must bear in mind what I said above, that Xenophon's Socratic writings are decidedly different from those of Plato (and Antisthenes). He is no philosopher, and he does not write in order to expose Socrates' (much less his own) philosophical opinions. He writes the Memorabilia in order to defend Socrates' reputation against charges that he had corrupted the young men who had spent time with him—and, no doubt, to claim support from Socrates for some of his own moral and social opinions. It seems to me that, despite what I said above about the Oeconomicus and despite one's frequent suspicion that Xenophon draws freely upon his own areas of knowledge and his own ethical standards in composing his Socratic conversations, no evidence internal or external to Xenophon justifies dismissing his claim, at least overall and in general, to be describing Socrates' behavior, opinions, and conversation as he actually perceived them. No one will use the Oeconomicus as a serious source for the real Socrates; but that is palpably a special case that should not cast fundamental doubt on the other Socratic writings.

In deciding how seriously to take Socrates in the Memorabilia and Symposium, careful attention should also focus on Xenophon's stated reasons for writing his Apology of Socrates. He begins that work by expressing dissatisfaction on one point with what others before him had written about Socrates' trial. He found that the loftiness of Socrates' speech to the jury (his megalēgoria), on which all concurred, had not yet been properly explained, with the result—damaging to our memory of Socrates—that he appeared to have behaved quite foolishly at his trial—inappropriately for a supposedly wise man to whom a father might entrust his son's education. What Xenophon means is that Socrates' discourse at his trial showed that he did not take the charges seriously; he looked down upon the whole proceeding, without in the least attempting to do what he could have done, and any sensible man would have done, to secure his acquittal.¹⁶ If, as seems at least quite possible, one of the existing accounts that dissatisfied him was in Plato's Apology, Xenophon does, no doubt, show a certain shallowness in feeling the need to offer a new explanation for the way Socrates conducted his defense. But, if so, he was presumably not alone in finding the lofty philosophizing of Plato's Socrates at his trial hard to take—and, indeed, simply out of place. To salve the legitimate concerns of such persons (the normal, solid citizens, one would think), Xenophon retails, in impressive circumstantial detail, reports he had heard from Hermogenes, one of Socrates' close associates who, says Xenophon, was present at the trial and had conversed with Socrates beforehand,¹⁷ about Socrates' state of mind and intentions at the time. Socrates had told Hermogenes that he had been prevented by his divine sign from preparing a defense-speech; that he took that as an indication of divine opinion that it was now time for him to die; that, indeed, the poison administered in the prison gives an easy death without the prolonged distress to one's family and friends that a terminal illness causes, so that if he did defeat the charge, after seeking in every way to find a defense that would win his acquittal, he would only be opening himself to the distressing decline of physical and mental powers (the latter presumably particularly distressing to a philosopher) that comes with age, followed by senility and a final illness. Under these circumstances, and with the support of his divine sign, Socrates told Hermogenes, he was not going to cling to life and lower himself to persuading the jury to acquit him. Thus Xenophon explains the otherwise inappropriate loftiness of Socrates' defense as due to his resolve to let the conviction and condemnation come if, as he interpreted the divine sign's behavior to indicate, it was going to.

Now my point in this review of Xenophon's Apology is not at all to insist that Xenophon (and Hermogenes, his informant) were correct about Socrates' intent at his trial, and that therefore Plato was wrong in having Socrates give a seriously intended, though very unusual and demanding, defense (even for the reader—let alone the poor jurymen). But nothing in Xenophon's writing in the least suggests he is anything but truthful in reporting what (he had been told) Socrates said to Hermogenes. Nor have we any reason to doubt that in writing his short account of Socrates' speeches at the trial (allegedly at second hand from Hermogenes—even if he may also, without acknowledging it, have drawn on previously published accounts), his intention was simply to bring this background information to the attention of the public, for the sake of Socrates' reputation. And in fact, I do not see why we should not suppose that Socrates both told Hermogenes what Xenophon says he did about its being time for him to die, and gave at his trial a stirring, deeply meant defense of himself and of philosophy of at least the general kind that Plato presents. Even on Plato's account, he was not arguing for his life in the latter, which according to Xenophon he told Hermogenes he was not going to do; he was willing (even aggressively so) to let the jurymen reach a guilty verdict, if they were incapable to such an extent of reasoning clearly and dispassionately about the truth of the charges. And Socrates' magnanimity in accepting the jury's verdict is of course one of the high points in Plato's portrait. In any event, real human beings rarely achieve unwavering clarity of motives and views on important personal questions, and even a Socrates, provided we attempt to take him seriously as a real person, may well have thought and spoken in somewhat different ways to different persons, or at different times about what he was doing (and what he was going to do). I return to this point below.

If one does accept Xenophon's report of Hermogenes' evidence about Socrates in the Apology, that is all the more reason why one should similarly believe him (not, of course, as to all the details and the occasions of the conversations he reports) when he says in the Memorabilia that he is drawing upon his own memory in what he writes there about Socrates. He is telling us the sort of thing he heard Socrates say in conversation with his young men that was calculated to improve them, and some of what he reports surely must represent more specific memories. Is it an obstacle that the result of trusting Xenophon to this extent will be that he heard Socrates champion the conventional virtues of the conventional gentleman and the attendant outlook on life? I do not think so. What one hears depends in part upon what one can hear—even when one honestly and successfully reports what was said, and without gap-filling invention or gross interpretation of one's own. It is not difficult to imagine that Socrates' talk about the virtues and their significance for a well-lived life could perfectly reasonably have been interpreted the way that Xenophon did, even if it also had philosophical depths and even revolutionary implications for morality that passed Xenophon by or did not interest him—whether those depths were of the sort that Plato found in it, or more like those found by Antisthenes. Besides, Socrates did not necessarily talk all the time with all his companions at the pitch of philosophical intensity sometimes found in Plato's early dialogues; he might have varied his subjects and his conversation to suit the occasion and the company, thus sometimes talking one way with the more philosophically gifted and another with the more ordinary boy or man, of whom Xenophon was surely not the only example in his entourage (Plato's Crito might strike one as another). What Maier and others have said may not be true, that if Socrates was as Xenophon presents him, it would be impossible to account for the attraction and reverence of Plato and others of the brilliant young men of Athens (and the irritation of the Athenians who put him to death), but it is certainly at least as difficult to imagine Xenophon and others of his kind being attracted to and held by a Socrates who wore them out with nonstop philosophical analysis. Indeed, Socrates should be regarded as all the more remarkable a person, if he was able to be both (more or less) what Xenophon shows us and (more or less) what Plato does. So I do not see any serious difficulty with accepting Xenophon's Socrates as genuine in his broad outlines.

Of course, the matter of greatest moment to me and most others interested in Socrates is what we can learn from Xenophon (or anyone else) about Socrates' philosophy: his specific philosophical opinions (if he had any); his arguments for them; the character and (so far as one can learn them) the details of his way of philosophizing; what someone with philosophical inclinations of his own might have learned about philosophy and how to pursue it from consorting with him—as well, of course, as how in Socrates' view and practice philosophical principles were to be lived. I have already emphasized that nowhere in his Socratic writings does Xenophon even set out to tell us about these matters. Still, as I have also said, his Socrates does have philosophical ideas (even though Xenophon makes nothing special of any link between his specifically philosophical ideas and his life), and he is sometimes seen engaging in philosophical argument. The question then is: What, if anything of substance, can we learn from Xenophon about Socrates as a philosopher? How does what we might learn from him compare with what we seem to find in the Socrates of Plato's Socratic dialogues? Can we rely on the genuineness of what we find in Xenophon about Socrates as a philosopher? Where Plato and Xenophon diverge, what are we to conclude about the genuine Socrates?

I have already indicated my general answer to these questions, which I hope to confirm in what follows: we have reason to believe that Xenophon's reports not only in his Apology but also in the Symposium and Memorabilia are based in part on his personal knowledge of Socrates, in particular on his knowledge of Socrates' moral views and Socrates' conversational practices with his young friends and others. Moreover, where they depart from that personal knowledge by showing some dependence on other Socratics' writings (Plato, or Antisthenes, for example), Xenophon's reports are controlled by his personally acquired sense of who Socrates was and what he stood for. To be sure, Xenophon is not a philosopher himself and his purpose in writing his Socratic works is not in the least to display, reflect upon, or celebrate Socrates' specifically philosophical opinions. So his testimony is inevitably of limited value for anyone whose principal interest is in Socrates the philosopher. On the other hand, the much richer account that we get in the works of Plato, precisely because Plato is a philosopher himself writing his own works of philosophy, is of limited value, too. I believe that the character Socrates of Plato's Socratic dialogues does represent in part Plato's own understanding of the historical Socrates' philosophical commitments, including his modes of argument and the philosophical reasons for adopting them. But Plato's own very complex engagement, as he writes these works, not only with the philosopher Socrates but also with philosophy itself, means that the issues his character Socrates faces, and even the ways he responds to them, can be expected, in ways that we cannot easily or always control, to go well beyond anything we could reasonably count as a historically accurate portrayal of Socrates' philosophical beliefs.¹⁸ I do not suggest that the truth about the historical Socrates can be recovered by mechanically mapping Xenophon's Socratic writings onto Plato's, or vice versa. I do urge that an appropriately critical reading of Xenophon can teach us things about Socrates that we could not have learned from Plato alone.

Consider, to begin with, Xenophon's Symposium. Toward the end of this work (ch. 8) Xenophon has Socrates give a long and elaborate discourse upon eros, in the course of which (8, 32-35) he refers to and severely criticizes some views about boy-love that he attributes to Pausanias, the lover of the poet Agathon. Characteristically, Xenophon introduces this discourse quite abruptly (8,1): Socrates now opened up another new topic for discussion; he does not attempt any thematically unifying transition.¹⁹ The main after-dinner talk has consisted of a serial presentation and discussion by the men at the feast of whatever knowledge or expertise, or other personal possession, they most pride themselves on, for its extraordinary value to themselves and to others with whom they are associated (chs. 3-4). There follows a playful dispute between Socrates and Crito's son Critobulus (who had prided himself most on his good looks) over which is the more handsome (ch. 5). Next the not-so-playful dancing-master intervenes to begin a rather impolite attack on Socrates, holding him responsible for the feasters' inattention to his performers; only through Socrates' tact and suavity does the company manage to preserve the tone of friendship and good-will proper to the occasion (chs. 6-7). Despite his abruptness in introducing it, however, Socrates' discourse on eros is very well integrated into the work as a whole, and Xenophon has prepared the way for it quite well. The host for the evening is Socrates' very rich friend Callias,²⁰ who is celebrating the victory at the Panathenaic games of the young man he is in love with, Autolycus; Autolycus' father is among the company. In addition, Critobulus' claims for his own beauty and Socrates' playful counterclaims had naturally brought eros and the behavior of lovers into the earlier discussion.²¹ Socrates' speech carries forward these earlier allusions to lovers' behavior, and concludes with a seriously intended and gracious compliment to his host Callias on the delicacy and propriety of his attachment to Autolycus, which according to Socrates exemplifies the highest and best form of eros in an older man for an adolescent boy. On this note the banquet ends, after an erotically arousing performance from the dancers, which sends the other married men home to their wives, but Socrates and Callias out to join Autolycus, whom Xenophon had discreetly sent off with his father for his evening walk, missing the sexually explicit final pantomime (ch. 9).

As I hope this brief summary has shown, eros in Xenophon's Symposium occupies as prominent, thought not formally so central, a place as in Plato's. Xenophon's work more immediately invites comparison with Plato's, however, through Socrates' detailed references in his discourse on eros to Pausanias's views on this subject. For, of course, Pausanias is one of the speakers on eros in Plato's Symposium, where he appears among the other guests of Agathon, his former beloved.²² I turn below to this comparison. However, Joël and Maier firmly deny that the reference in Xenophon (8, 32) to "what Pausanias the lover of the poet Agathon has said in his defense of people who wallow in licentiousness (huper tōn akrasia(i) enkalindoumenōri)" can possibly be to the speech of the Pausanias of Plato's Symposium. They quickly infer that Xenophon can only be referring to a writing of Antisthenes.²³ In fact, they say, Antisthenes must have written a dialogue (doubtless the work we hear of under the title Protrepticus or Exhortation to Philosophy) in which he himself spoke in favor of a high-minded, sex-free sort of love of a man for a boy (in fact, exactly as Xenophon's Socrates does), in opposition to the views of an allegedly effeminate Pausanias brought on the scene to speak in praise of a sexually consummated union. According to Joël and Maier, it is to Pausanias' speech in Antisthenes that Xenophon's Socrates is reacting so strongly—not to Pausanias's speech in Plato. In fact, according to them, in his Symposium Plato himself was deliciously parodying Antisthenes' own account of eros by putting it in the mouth of the effeminate Pausanias, while twisting it so that it did involve having sex off the boy. In that case, there would be no close direct association between Xenophon's and Plato's writings, and no grounds for finding in Xenophon's Socrates' remarks against Pausanias any such implied criticism of Plato, the author of Pausanias's speech, as one might otherwise be tempted to find.

Now for all we can know, it may be as Joël and Maier say. Maybe Antisthenes wrote such a work, and maybe both Plato and Xenophon, in their different ways, were drawing on and reacting to it in their Symposiums. However, the question for us is whether the two writings that we do possess require, or at all suggest, reference to any now lost work, whether by Antisthenes or someone else. In particular, must the reference in Xenophon to a defense by Pausanias of sexually consummated unions of men with boys be understood in that way? I think not; when the texts of Xenophon and Plato are correctly compared, it seems perfectly possible that Xenophon's reference is, after all, to Pausanias the character in Plato's Symposium. The main reasons of Joël and Maier for denying it are two: First, in describing what Pausanias objectionably said, Xenophon attributes to him one point that in Plato is made not by Pausanias but instead by Phaedrus (178e-179b): that the strongest army would be one made up of man-boy sexually active couples. Second, they claim, it is not even true that Pausanias in Plato does defend those who wallow in licentiousness by having sex with boys; on the contrary, he distinguishes just as Xenophon's Socrates does between a heavenly eros (love for the boy's soul) and an earthly one (lust for gratification from his body), condemning the latter while approving the former alone. They conclude that if we seek a writing in which Pausanias did defend sex between man and boy and in the course of that defense made the claim that the strongest army would be one made up of sexually active man-boy couples, we must look elsewhere than in Plato.

Let us take the second of these arguments first. It is crucial for understanding Plato's Pausanias' point of view to realize that he really is praising sexual relations between man and boy as a central part of the heavenly eros that he favors. His point is that it is disgraceful and abusive for a man to get a boy to gratify his sexual demands if he is motivated only by lascivious thoughts about the boy's body and not in part by an admiration for his mind, his talents, and his manly character, and if he is not offering a long-term commitment to use their relationship for the boy's manly, ethical growth and improvement.²⁴ So despite Pausanias's misleadingly high-minded distinction between a heavenly love directed in part to the boy's mind and his moral improvement, and an earthly one restricted only to enjoying his body for the sake of physical pleasure, Socrates in Xenophon is entitled to describe Plato's Pausanias as having defended licentiousness— if, as is in fact the case, he thinks that any copulation of an older man with a younger one is licentious. And (referring now to Joël and Maier's first argument) it is quite clear in Plato²⁵ that Pausanias intends his speech as a supplement to Phaedrus's, in which he corrects what Phaedrus had said in praise of eros by limiting its application to only one form of erotic attachment between a man and a boy, the one he calls heavenly. The point about a lovers' army, while not actually stated by him, is therefore clearly part of the overall case in favor of these erotic attachments that he is making, and Xenophon does not misuse his source, if it is indeed Plato's Symposium, by including this as part of Pausanias' defense of licentiousness. It is true that according to Xenophon's Socrates Pausanias brought the Thebans and Eleans in as witnesses to support his claims about lovers' armies (8, 34), and Phaedrus does not do that in his remarks in the Plato text on such armies (178e-179a). Pausanias himself does in fact mention the customs in Elis and Boeotia (without overt reference to their armies), but only to contrast them unfavorably with those at Athens. Athenian customs, he says, are based implicitly on a recognition of the exclusive value of the heavenly kind of eros, whereas the Eleans and Boeotians, not being good at making and articulating distinctions, approve indiscriminatingly of boys' gratifying the sexual demands of the men who are in love with them, whichever type of love it may be (182b). Nonetheless, Xenophon's divergence from Plato at this point does not exclude the possibility that he is talking about Plato's Pausanias. The practices in the Elean and especially the Theban (Boeotian) army were well known at the time, so that anyone reading Phaedrus's endorsement of lovers' armies would very naturally think he had in mind these Dorian practices as tending to support him. Furthermore, it is quite believable that Xenophon, remembering Pausanias's reference a little later to the Eleans' and Boeotians' erotic customs in general (in which, moreover, he rejected only the lack of discrimination in their approval of men's sexual use of boys, not the approval in itself), ran the two passages together either from faulty memory or because he thought it was in fact a fair summary of the import of Pausanias-Phaedrus's speech.²⁶

Xenophon's fundamental aim in this section of his Symposium is to express clearly and forcefully what is presumably his personal view, which he also wishes to inform his reader had been shared fully by his teacher Socrates, that a man's use of free-born boys for his sexual gratification degrades and disgraces them (8, 19) and is therefore not permissible behavior—even if, as Pausanias tries to do, one dresses it up in high-sounding moral and educational intentions. In his views on pederasty, Socrates in Xenophon rejects all sexual use by a man of the boy he is in love with, because that subjects the boy to something disgraceful (letting his body be used to give the man an orgasm, or, more generally, being made to play the woman to him) and damages him by getting him used to the idea of favoring and promoting pleasurable indulgence, in cases where resistance and strength of mind are called for. Anyone who subjects a boy to this treatment will be preparing him to adopt later in life a lax attitude toward his own pleasurable indulgence, and lessening his strength of mind and capacity to resist the blandishments of pleasure where that is ethically required. Thus, in Xenophon, Socrates' conception of the behavior proper for a man in relation to a young man or boy he is in love with identifies two grounds on which having sex with him is bad: it abuses him disgracefully and it damages his character.

Thus Xenophon's Socrates holds a decidedly different view of what is permissible in an erotic relationship between a man and a boy from Plato's Socrates, either in Symposium or Phaedrus: Plato's Socrates is not as outspoken in his approval of sexual indulgence within the sort of relationship he approves as Pausanias is, but no Greek could fail to see that, whatever his own personal practices may have been, Plato's Socrates was not excluding it in what he says through Diotima's voice in the Symposium.²⁷ And in the Phaedrus, although the most perfect divinely possessed lovers will not indulge themselves in this way (because they are fully aware of the philosophical sources and mission of their mutual infatuation), other divinely possessed pairs will—and their relationship will win for them high rewards in the afterlife (Phdr. 256b7-e2). It is noteworthy that nowhere in Plato is there any sense that whatever the other characteristics of the lover's attitudes and behavior to his young man may be, the lover's sexual consummation with him harms the boy, as Xenophon's Socrates maintains and many Athenians must have believed, by treating him disgracefully, as well as by encouraging in him wrong attitudes to pleasure. Plato seems to agree with his Pausanias that when the motives are sufficiently high-minded, there will be no disgrace (Symp. 182a, 183d); about the effects on the boy's attitudes to pleasure Plato is oddly silent. It would go too far to suggest that when Xenophon attacks the views of Pausanias, the latter stands in for Plato's fancy theory set out in Diotima's speech later in the Symposium. But it is surely true²⁸ that here and in Socrates' speech overall Xenophon is firmly rejecting Plato's own (as he thought essentially similar) views on permissible erotic relationships between men and boys, and firmly denying that Socrates himself ever shared them.²⁹

I should add that, taken altogether, Socrates' account of good and morally acceptable eros in Xenophon's Symposium does clearly differentiate it from ordinary friendship, despite what has sometimes been maintained.³⁰ In his speech Socrates addresses an implicit objection that on his view of permissible eros it would really have nothing to do with Aphrodite (8, 15-18)—so that it would not really differ from a strong and long-lasting friendship. Admittedly, the argument Socrates gives in defence of the Aphroditic character of his lovers' behavior to one another is unhelpfully imprecise, since it might be interpreted as making any morally upright behavior of a morally good person have Aphroditic grace. He refers to the lovers' care for one another when ill, concern for one another's good, and so on, as ways they are marked by the goddess's presence, but he does not emphasize that in their case the relationship, and these behaviors, are motivated by an empassioned attachment. Socrates does, however, say that his lovers take pleasure in looking into each other's faces, trust and are trusted, spend their time together and share a common joy and distress at one another's prosperity or ill-fortune, and are constantly solicitous of one another (8, 18). It is clear at a number of places in his discussion of these love-reactions that Socrates presupposes that, as the Greek word eros itself clearly implies, the senior lover is passionately attached to his young friend in a way that certainly is not characteristic of ordinary friendship, and that the junior one has responded to his attentions with a passionate response of his own. The fact that there is not supposed to be any desire at all on either side for actual sexual contact obviously does not eliminate all implicitly sexual (and so truly erotic) basis for the relationship. If what Socrates is praising is a particularly high form of true friendship, it is not correct on that ground to maintain that it eliminates from it the special characteristics of eros³¹

A second topic on which Xenophon's account adds interestingly and helpfully to Plato's picture of Socrates as a philosopher concerns his views on the teachability of virtue, and on himself as a teacher.³² Xenophon does not hesitate to describe Socrates as teaching (didaskein) the young men who came to him (or were sent by their fathers) how to be good men.³³ And Socrates himself in Xenophon does not hesitate to describe his work with his young men as teaching.³⁴ According to Xenophon Socrates did his teaching in his daily talks with his young men,³⁵ and not in his cross-examinations of people who thought they knew everything already, such as many of Plato's early dialogues show Socrates engaged in. On the other hand, he did this also through making them skilled in discussion (dialektikoi), since he held that those who know what any given thing is can expound upon it to others;³⁶ Xenophon proceeds to exhibit Socrates using the question-and-answer method to take pupils step-by-step through definitions of some virtues (piety, justice, wisdom, and courage), obviously on the assumption that if they are to be virtuous they necessarily must come to know what is and is not required by that virtue, and that such instruction in dialectic is needed as a means of learning that. But Xenophon is careful to report also (Mem. I 2, 2-3) that Socrates never formally professed to teach virtue to his young men, by either of these two sorts of verbal instruction. Rather, he offered himself to them as a model for their emulation, and in that way he encouraged them in virtue and improved them. At Symposium 2, 5-7 the topic of the teachability of virtue, familiar to us from Plato's Meno and Protagoras, comes up briefly, before it is abandoned at Socrates' suggestion, because it is a disputed and disputable subject, not suitable for a drinking party. And it arises again in Memorabilia III 9, in connection with whether courage is teachable, or instead comes by nature; Socrates' view there is the commonsensical one that some people have souls that are by their natures better able to handle fear in battle than others, but that anyone who gets appropriate instruction (mathēsis) and practice (meletē) will improve in respect of courage, whatever his natural endowments may be. He does not tell us what such practice, and especially what such instruction, would consist in.

Thus Xenophon's Socrates, like Plato's, denies that he teaches anyone virtue, but there is no hint in Xenophon of the depths and complexities of Socrates' thought on this subject such as we find in Plato. And, whatever Xenophon thought Socrates' grounds were for not professing to be a teacher of virtue (he does not say a word about that), it is evident that he did not suppose Socrates made a big point of not addressing his young men as their teacher; on the contrary, in Xenophon Socrates accommodates himself readily to their and their parents' expectations that they will be taught by him, and he speaks at least informally to them about his instruction of them. Clearly, Xenophon has no idea that Socrates had any deep reason for denying that he was a teacher of virtue, and if that term should be understood appropriately in an ordinary and undemanding sense of giving good advice and encouragement about how to live, what to prefer and what to value less, and so on, he is content to be regarded as a teacher of virtue. Perhaps, as I mentioned before, the real Socrates spoke in some contexts and to some of his young men in accordance with a more elevated and more philosophical understanding of what virtue is and therefore how one might come to acquire it, than he did in others, where he was content to speak in accordance with more usual and less demanding conceptions of these matters. Or, conceivably, it was only Plato, not the historical Socrates at all, who, reflecting upon Socrates' conversations and building on what he himself made of them, came to see so much of philosophical importance in the denial that virtue could be taught.

What, however, did Xenophon's Socrates think virtue is? Is it an intellectual understanding of how best to live, or (instead or in addition) some sort of affective state? When Xenophon distinguishes between Socrates' instruction of his pupils, on the one hand, and their emulation of him and the inspiration of his example, on the other, and claims that Socrates actually imparted the virtues to them by means only of the latter, one might infer that Xenophon's Socrates did not consider the virtues as purely intellectual conditions.³⁷ On the other hand, someone might think that virtue was in fact a purely intellectual condition, but not one that could be taught the ways that other, ordinary, intellectual competences can be: perhaps it requires personal insight of some sort that each one has to work up for himself, and maybe that will only come about through the emulation of a mentor such as Xenophon's Socrates.³⁸ Given, as I have emphasized, that Xenophon's interests are not in detailed points of philosophical theory, we should not expect to find him in the Memorabilia addressing these issues directly. However, two extended discussions in particular, in III 9 and IV 6, contain especially relevant information about the nature of virtue in general, according to Socrates, and about the specific virtues and their interrelationships, and related matters. It is noteworthy that Xenophon's account is congruent on these points with that of Plato's Socratic dialogues. It is quite possible that it shows some effects of Xenophon's reading of Plato, as well of course, quite possibly, of other writers whose works are lost to us (Antisthenes, for example)—though comparison of the relevant texts seems to me to show that at any rate Xenophon did not lean heavily on Plato's work. If at some points Xenophon follows Plato, his manner of doing so tends to confirm what I said above about his alleged reliance on Antisthenes: Xenophon seems to be exercising his firsthand knowledge of Socrates in selecting from other, more philosophically competent authors only what fits in appropriately with his own recollections of the man. So such resemblances of philosophical doctrine and perspective as we do see should count in favor of the historicity of the common account. In these matters then, Xenophon's reports provide valuable confirmation for Plato's much more elaborate and philosophically focused presentation of Socrates.³⁹ (Apart from noting some parallels, I will not go further into the question of borrowings.)

In Memorabilia III 9 Xenophon reports (mostly in his own voice) Socrates' views on various points to do with courage, wisdom, sōphrosunē (temperance or self-control or soundness), justice, and some of their opposites. He goes on to describe Socrates' accounts of the natures of envy and leisure, then presents his ideas on kings, magistrates, and tyrants, and concludes with a presentation of Socrates' view about eupraxia or acting well as the best pursuit for a man (distinguishing that from eutuchia or good fortune).⁴⁰ Xenophon tells us (9, 4) that Socrates did not separate sophia (wisdom) from sōphrosunē.⁴¹ In confirmation, he adds that because Socrates thought that, among their options, all men choose to do (always, Xenophon apparently means to say) whatever they think is most for their own advantage or good (sumphorōtata), no one can be both wise (so that they understand that virtuous action is always best for them) and yet also not self-controlled (akratēs).⁴² Here the context shows that not self-controlled means "not having sōphrosunē," but Xenophon's further explication of Socrates' view makes it clear that he thought Socrates actually denied, not only for the temperate or sōphrones and wise ones, but for all people that anyone does what he ought not to do while knowing that he ought to do the contrary. He says that when asked about people who know what they ought to do but do the opposite, Socrates replied (in effect rejecting the questioner's assumption that such people are possible at all) that such people are both unwise and not self-controlled (akrateis), because all men choose to do whatever they think is most advantageous or good for them. In effect, then, Socrates is clearly denying here not only that wise people can be uncontrolled or vice versa, but also that anyone can do what is bad for them while believing that it is bad.⁴³

Xenophon goes on to report that Socrates held that justice and every other virtue is wisdom (9, 5). Socrates argues as follows: anyone who knows ta kala te kai agatha, things that are fine or noble or beautiful, and good— i.e., who is wise—always chooses to do them, and no one who does not know them (who lacks wisdom) can even do them at all,⁴⁴ but just acts and all actions coming from any virtue are kala te kai agatha, fine and good; therefore all virtues are wisdom. He adds (9, 6) that Socrates distinguished between madness, mania (the opposite of wisdom), and ignorance (anepistēmosunē), mimicking ordinary usage. Ordinary people (though not understanding these words as Socrates himself did) distinguish between these two conditions—for them, ignorance is getting something wrong in an area outside common knowledge, whereas madness is, for example, thinking you have to stoop when going through city gates because you are so vastly tall. For Socrates ignorance of oneself (thinking you know what you do not) is next to sheer madness, but is not the same thing: madness, apparently, includes making mistakes about what sort of thing is fine and good, rather than making mere factual mistakes about what to do in pursuit of those goals. He held that a true king or magistrate (archōn) is not whoever by the conventional rules occupies those offices, but only whoever knows how to rule, how ruling ought to be done (9, 10-11).⁴⁵ It is agreed, he argued, that it belongs to a king or magistrate to give orders and to be obeyed, but people in fact do obey (freely, Xenophon apparently means) (only) those who know what they are giving orders about, so it can only belong to one who knows what they are giving orders about to give orders and to be obeyed.

In IV 6, as noted above, Socrates is presented working out in question-and-answer discussion definitions of several virtues. Piety is knowledge of what is lawful (nomimon) in connection with the gods (i.e., in doing honor to them): the one who knows what is lawful thinks he ought to honor them, and so he does that (since everyone does what he thinks he ought) (6, 2-4). Justice is knowledge of what is lawful in connection with men (i.e., in their dealings with one another): again, everyone does what he thinks he ought, and what is just is what is lawful, so the one who knows what is lawful, thinking that he ought to do that, does it, and so is a just person (6, 5-6).⁴⁶ The discussion of wisdom which follows (6, 7-9) seems incomplete, being run together confusingly with a discussion of courage (6, 10-11). But it looks as if the idea is as follows. The wise are wise by wisdom, but also by knowledge; so wisdom is to be identified with knowledge—not, however, with knowledge of everything (for a human being that is an impossibility), but rather with knowledge of what is good (i.e., what is useful) and what is fine or noble (kalon) for oneself (these are all the same things). Courage is a fine or noble thing, and it is also useful; in fact, it is useful in dealing with terrors and dangers. But since all persons always do in any situation whatever they think they ought, those and only those who know terrors and dangers (i.e., know how to deal with them, how they ought to act in relation to them) will act well and not badly toward terrors and dangers. So courage is the knowledge how to deal well with terrors and dangers, and cowardice is not knowing that.⁴⁷

Thus we find Xenophon's Socrates maintaining that virtue is knowledge of what is good and fine or noble or beautiful, and maintaining that akrasia is in fact lack of wisdom, i.e., lack of knowledge of what one ought to do. And he maintains that all the (other) virtues are wisdom. These are, of course, central components of the moral theory that we associate with Socrates in Plato's Socratic dialogues. But, as my summaries make clear, Xenophon's arguments are not precisely the same as Plato's, and at two points they go beyond anything in Plato's Socratic dialogues—in the distinction between ignorance and madness, and in Socrates' argument that a true king or magistrate is not whoever by the conventional rules occupies those offices, but only whoever knows how to rule.

I mentioned above, and scholars have often noticed and emphasized, that Xenophon's Socrates endorses many attitudes and practices that were later on prominently advocated by those in the tradition of Greek cynicism. Near the beginning of the Memorabilia (I 3, 5-15), Xenophon gives us an extended description of Socrates' way of organizing his own life: he trained his body and his mind so that he did not have desires that he could not confidently expect to be able easily to satisfy, and to afford; he took pleasure in the very acts of eating and drinking themselves (when hungry or thirsty), and he disregarded the pleasures to be gotten from eating or drinking beyond what satisfies hunger or removes thirst, or from special and rare tastes one might get from specific food or drink. He was particularly concerned in this connection (and others) with maintaining his freedom, with not becoming a slave to his own appetites, or to anyone else's demands on him. And he advocated more than any other virtue the virtue of enkrateia, or self-control: the first thing Xenophon says in rejecting the charge against him of corrupting the youth is that he was pantōn anthrōpōn enkratestatos, the strictest of humans in controlling himself (I 2, 1). Xenophon devotes a whole chapter (I 5) to a discourse on enkrateia, where Socrates is made to say (5, 4) that this is the very foundation of virtue and the first thing one ought to establish in one's soul, since unless one is first free to disregard pleasure and pain one will never learn anything good or practice it sufficiently so as to benefit from it. The long discussion with Aristippus on pleasure (II 1), in which he blithely adopts for himself Prodicus's praise of virtue in his Choice of Heracles, begins as another example of how Socrates exhorted his companions to train themselves to self-control in eating, drinking, and sex, and in facing cold and heat and bodily exertion and pain (ponos). And there is yet another chapter on enkrateia (IV 5), including a conversation between Socrates and Euthydemus, where Xenophon again emphasizes that Socrates was the most practised in self-denial of all people (ēskēkōs hauton malista pantōn anthrōpōn, 5, 1) and says that he presented himself as self-denying to his young men, whom he moreover exhorted more than anything else to become self-controlled themselves. Freedom depends upon it (5, 2). Indeed, those who are prey to their own pleasures are enslaved with the worst kind of slavery (5, 5). Wisdom depends upon it too, because those who are not master of their pleasures choose them instead of better things because they do not see the better ones for what they are (5, 6 )—only those who have self-control can consider what is best and think through logically the various types of good thing so as to choose the ones that really are best and leave aside the ones that are bad (6, 11). In sum, enkrateia is the best possible possession (6, 8). In fact, self-control, which makes one able to endure hunger and thirst, resist sleep, and so on, is the best and necessary means of obtaining the types of pleasure that are actually greatest and worth any mention (6,9), Besides that, it allows one to get pleasures of other types (knowledge of household and state affairs, e.g.) that the person prey to his immediate pleasures will never taste (6, 10).⁴⁸

Xenophon's Socrates' thoughts about the key position among the virtues of self-control, philosophically undeveloped though Xenophon characteristically leaves them, are potentially of