The Socratic Way of Life
Xenophon’s “Memorabilia”
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Part One: Socrates’s Innocence of the Injustices for Which He Was Executed
1. Socrates Was Not Guilty of Impiety or Disbelief as Regards the Gods of Athens
His Piety Proven by His Worship
His Belief Proven by His Daimonion
His Belief Proven by His Teaching on Divination
His Belief Proven by His Attitude toward Natural Science
His Belief Proven by His Fidelity to His Sacred Oath
Concluding the Defense against the Charge of Impiety or Disbelief
2. Socrates Was Not Guilty of Corrupting the Young
Answering a Nameless Accuser’s Charge That Socrates Promoted Contempt for the Athenian Regime and Laws
Starting to Explain His Association with Critias and Alcibiades
In What Sense Virtue Is Knowledge
The Big Differences between Critias and Alcibiades
Alcibiades
Transition to Part 2 of the Memorabilia
Part Two: Socrates’s Active Justice, as Benefiter of Others
3. How Socrates Benefited through His Piety and His Self-Mastery
His Teaching on Praying and Sacrificing
Socrates’s Self-Mastery vs. Xenophon’s Sexual Indulgence
Socrates’s Teaching on Divine Providence
Socratic Self-Mastery vs. Conventional Self-Mastery
The Virtue That Socratic Self-Mastery Serves
Socrates’s Discouragement of Boasting
His Teaching of Self-Mastery for the Sake of a Life Dedicated to Politics
Self-Discipline as Crucial to Education for Ruling
Why One Must Seek to Be One of Those Who Rule
Why the Active Political Life Is the Good Life
Heracles’s Choice
4. How Socrates Benefited in Regard to Family and Friends
Attending to His Son and Wife
Attempting to Reconcile Feuding Brothers
Socrates on the Value of Extrafamilial Friendship
Promoting Reflection on One’s Own Worth as a Friend
Socrates on the Power and Problem of Friendship among Gentlemen
How Socrates Helped Friends in Serious Economic Difficulties
Socrates’s Advice to a Fellow Economic Misfit
A Glimpse of Socrates’s Own Economic Art
Extending His Economic Art
5. How Socrates Benefited Those Reaching for the Noble/Beautiful (Kalon)
His Playful Teaching of Noble Generalship
Interpreting Homer on the Virtue of a Good Leader
On the Goal Aimed at by a Noble Commander
Assimilating Military-Political Rule to Household Management (“Oeconomics”)
His Earnest Teaching of Noble Generalship
On What a Statesman Needs to Know
Socrates Exhorting to a Career as a Democratic Leader
How Is the Beautiful/Noble Related to the Good?
The Virtues as Noble/Beautiful
Socrates as Arbiter of the Beautiful/Noble in Art
The Profitable Beauty of Socrates’s Soul, Reflected in Comic Allegory
Exhorting to the Cultivation of Beauty of Physique
Promoting Everyday Self-Mastery and “Living Decorously”
6. Socrates as Beneficial Tutor
The Seduction of Euthydemus
The Centrality of Justice, as a Virtue of Speech and Deed
The Refutation of Euthydemus’s Convictions Regarding Justice
The Refutation of Euthydemus’s Convictions Regarding the Good
The Refutation of Euthydemus’s Conception of Democracy
Making Euthydemus Moderate as Regards Divinity
Socrates Teaching Justice
Teaching His Companions Self-Mastery
Making His Companions More Dialectical
Teaching His Associates Self-Sufficiency in Deeds
Xenophon’s Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Thomas L. Pangle’s book on this single work of Xenophon draws on long familiarity with it that has to be respected. It enables him in his introduction to relate Xenophon and his Socrates to more recent figures who loom large in political discourse. It helps him to see the importance of things that Xenophon does not say in Socrates’ defense (pp. 37-41) or elsewhere, trying to tease out Xenophon’s own views from some of his silences. He finds relevant not only what Xenophon (unlike Plato) chooses not to mention (p. 80) but also what he mislabels (monologue as ‘dialogue’, p. 92). He notices many twists that are unusual in this work and therefore invite us to notice them that much more, while also drawing attention to some expression that is used for the first time in it (e.g. an exclamation with Zeus’s name at 2.2.13, 84). Pangle is an experienced and observant reader of Xenophon.
With this rich monograph on Xenophon’s Memorabilia —equally remarkable for its loyalty to Strauss and its originality—Pangle has definitively established himself as Strauss’s greatest living student. . . . Pangle’s reading of Hercules’ choice between Virtue and Vice (Memorabilia ii 1) leads to a revealing contrast between ‘Heroic and Socratic Virtue’, one that valorizes ‘his joyful study, together with friends, of great old books.' The attention Pangle gives to pictorial representations of this famous passage in the notes (241, 253-254) points to another excellence of his book: it is filled with reliable erudition. Particularly interesting is Pangle’s attention to Shaftesbury (116, 196, 203, 218, 238-241, 253, and 256), but useful references to Telemann (229 and 241), Handel (229 and 241), Proust (245), Benjamin Franklin (219n22), and John Adams (241n97), constitute a welcome step . . ... Unusual too is Pangle’s attention to philology; he has inspected the manuscript tradition and it shows (220, 221, 226, 229-230, 232- 235). But what shows even more is his attention to what he calls ‘conventional’ (233n29 and 237n63), i.e., non-Straussian, scholars. More charitable than he could otherwise have been, Pangle is in dialogue throughout with Xenophon’s non-Straussian expositors, including currently active scholars like Louis-André Dorion and Vivienne Gray (see Index entry on 283). . . . I will be hoping that the new orthodoxy will follow Pangle’s example by illuminating, even if only by contrast, the kind of ‘noble generosity’ (111) that made Xenophon’s Socrates intent on benefiting others, even if that meant dying καλῶς.
Pangle’s book is especially impressive in its portrayal of the Xenophontic Socrates’ understanding of the divine and the role of the gods in the city. It is difficult to overstate the importance to philosophy’s understanding of itself of the differences here between Plato’s Socrates and Xenophon’s. Pangle is to be applauded for grappling with this subject. May Zeus grant us more edifying commentaries from Pangle in this vein—and more work on Xenophon by any and all newcomers wishing to read him not just as a statesman but as a philosopher.
Philosophy: Political Philosophy
Political Science: Classic Political Thought
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