Clinton St. Quarterly, Vol. 1 No. 2 | Summer 1979 /// Issue 2 of 41 /// Master#2 of 73

Illustrations by David Celsi Where do you find the political issue in Xenophon? In his “Memorabilia,” Xenophon reports that "the accuser" said Socrates "taught his pupils to look down upon the established laws” by deriding the egalitarian method of filling many minor offices in Athens by lot, and by teaching them that government should be left to experts instead of being determined by popular debate and vote in the assembly. 1'he “accuser" said Socrates thus led the young "to despise the established constitution and made them violent." It is significant, but not often noticed, that Xenophon denies only the last part of this indictment. He could hardly deny the first two counts, since elsewhere in his memoirs of Socrates he frequently qirotes the old philosopher's contempt for the assembly and for election by lot. Xenophon passes over these accusations in silence. But he does deny that Socrates taught his pupils to use violence against established institutions. Xenophon insists he taught them it was wiser to proceed by persuasion. Hut Critias in power was hardly a model o f persuasion. Xenophon does not deny it. After all. our main source of knowledge about the misdeeds of Critias is Xenophon’s own history of his time, the “Hellenica." Xenophon quotes the accuser as declaring that "none wrought so many evils" to the city of Athens as Critias and Alcibiades, the two most famous pupils of Socrates. The accuser said that in the terrible days of the Thirty Tyrants, Critias "bore the palm for . greed and violence,” while Alcibiades “exceeded all in licentiousness and insolence” under the democracy. What defense did Xenophon offer? “ I have no intention,” Xenophon replies in the “Memorabilia,” “of excusing the wrong these two men wrought the state.” But he claims they sought out Socrates as their teacher "only to attain the utmost proficiency in speech and action.” And “ as soon as they thought themselves superior to their fellow disciples, they sprang away from Socrates and took to politics.” With that answer most Socratic scholars have been satisfied. But you are not? No. The question left open is what kind of politics Socrates taught them. Clearly from everything we learn elsewhere in Plato and Xenophon, it was an antidemocratic politics. Xenophon's silence on the point admits what he cannot deny. Does the “accuser" in Xenophon link the Socratic teachings with aristocratic attempts at tyranny, as in 411 and 404 B.C.? Yes, but in a curious, indirect way. He alleged “ that Socrates, selecting the worst passages of the most celebrated poets, and using them as arguments, taught those who kept him company (i.e., his pupils), to be unprincipled and tyrannical.” Just what exactly did those terms mean? A tyrant was someone who used violent and lawless methods to seize and maintain power. The term “unprincipled” is one translation of the adjectival form of the Greek word kakourgos, which means, literally, an evil-doer. An Athenian would of course apply both terms to such men as Critias and the Thirty Tyrants. Does Xenophon deny that Socrates used quotations from the poets that might encourage such behavior? He does enter an explicit denial. Instead Xenophon, who is ordinarily such a clear writer, gets fuzzy. This provoked my curiosity. In trying to find out why, I stumbled on some fresh material. I found that Xenophon made some striking omissions in discussing this accusation, and the omissions obscured its significarlce. What were the omissions? First of all, in giving us examples from the poets to show what the accuser meant. Xenophon limits himself to two poets. We know from another source, the “Apology” of Libanius, a fourth-century A.D. orator, that the “accuser” of Socrates cited four poets, not two, in this accusation. The two Xenophon omits are Theognis and Pindar. Both were aristocratic poets, notorious for their contempt, not only of the common people but of the new middle class of merchants and traders who had begun to rival the old landed aristocracy. Pindar wrote his lovely odes to celebrate some of the outstanding tyrants of his time. By omitting Theognis and Pindar, Xenophon was omitting the most obvious examples of what the accuser meant. Who are the two poets Xenophon does quote? Homer and Hesiod. But the quotations he gives seem to bear little, if any, relationship to the charge. What do the quotations say? The one from Hesiod says, “Work is no disgrace, but idleness is a disgrace.” Hesiod was a farmer poet, and this is from his “Works and Days.” a kind of farmer’s almanac. That line is his expression of the work ethic. I will ndt bore you with my fruitless efforts to find any sense in which this trite but wholesome homily could possibly be interpreted as teaching tyrannical conduct. Hesiod was no aristocrat but a hard-working Boetian peasant who hated tyranny. I think the Hesiod quote has been screwed up for evasive purposes. What o f the quotation from Homer? Here we come to pay dirt. At first, the quotation from Homer, as given by Xenophon in the “Memorabilia,” also seems to bear little relationship to the accusation. It long puzzled me. I went to the commentators on the “Memorabilia” without finding any enlightenment. Then I did what none of the commentators I read had done: I went back to Homer and took a look at the context of the quotation. 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