The Socratic Way of Life

Xenophon’s “Memorabilia”

Thomas L. Pangle

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226754260, 9780226516899
• eBook ISBN: 9780226516929
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Socratic Way of Life is the first English-language book-length study of the philosopher Xenophon's masterwork. In it, Thomas L. Pangle shows that Xenophon depicts more authentically than does Plato the true teachings and way of life of the citizen philosopher Socrates, founder of political philosophy.
In the first part of the book, Pangle analyzes Xenophon's defense of Socrates against the two charges of injustice upon which he was convicted by democratic Athens: impiety and corruption of the youth. In the second part, Pangle analyzes Xenophon's account of how Socrates's life as a whole was just, in the sense of helping through his teaching a wide range of people. Socrates taught by never ceasing to raise, and to progress in answering, the fundamental and enduring civic questions: what is pious and impious, noble and ignoble, just and unjust, genuine statesmanship and genuine citizenship. Inspired by Hegel's and Nietzsche's assessments of Xenophon as the true voice of Socrates, The Socratic Way of Life establishes the Memorabilia as the groundwork of all subsequent political philosophy.

PART 1

Socrates’s Innocence of the Injustices for Which He Was Executed

CHAPTER ONE

Socrates Was Not Guilty of Impiety or Disbelief as Regards the Gods of Athens

Xenophon commences his Recollections1 by expressing his frequently recurring wonder at what could ever have been the arguments of the prosecutors by which the Athenians were persuaded that Socrates was deserving of the death penalty. Xenophon’s first sentence does not declare any amazement at the bringing of the charges, nor even at the fact that the Athenians were persuaded to convict Socrates on those charges. It is the death penalty that he says makes him marvel (see also 1.2.63–64). The “whiff of Attic irony”2 in this opening sentence becomes apparent when we read our author’s Apology of Socrates to the Jury, and there find that it was the trial speeches and strategy of Socrates himself that, in the words of I. F. Stone (1988, 187), “according to Xenophon, left the jury no alternative to the death penalty.”3

But the second sentence, beginning with a “For” (gar), shifts the focus from the death penalty to the official indictment (which, as quoted here, omits the mention of that penalty4). Xenophon now gives the impression that it is rather the formal charges that have incited his amazement: he speaks as if the citizen-jury must have been bamboozled by cleverly deceitful prosecution speeches in order for them to have swallowed such nonsense as is stated in the indictment. Among other things, Xenophon thus helps to prepare the ground for the Athenian public to absolve itself of its sense of guilt by blaming the prosecutors, if and when the public mood should morph into regret about the conviction and execution of Socrates.5

Xenophon does not, however, proceed to give any critical analysis, or even indication, of the content of the speeches and arguments of the prosecutors. He lets us gather that he was not present at the trial;6 but did his wonder never prompt him to find out what the prosecution’s arguments actually were, and in what consisted their rhetorical power—if for no other reason than so that he could respond to them, and expose their hollowness and trickery? Eventually Xenophon does report, in direct quotation, impassioned arguments by someone accusing Socrates of corrupting the young (1.2.9, 12, 49, 51). Yet these do not seem to be quotations from the prosecution speeches at the trial (pace Taylor 1911, 4). Having highlighted the amazing persuasiveness of the prosecution speeches, Xenophon avoids contending with them.

His Piety Proven by His Worship

Responding to the first and most fully elaborated of the two charges in the indictment7—“Socrates commits injustice, in that those whom the city believes in (nomizei) as gods he does not believe in (nomizōn), but he carries in other strange/novel, divine things (kaina daimonia)”—Xenophon proceeds, in the fashion of a good defense lawyer, to exploit an ambiguity in this wording. The verb nomizō, when applied to humans in their posture toward divinities, can mean either “believing, according to lawful custom” or “worshipping, according to lawful custom”—or both.8 Xenophon rejoins as if “not worshipping” were the gravamen. This allows him to dismiss the charge as absurd: what possible evidence could be used to suggest that Socrates failed to worship the gods in a lawful manner? For Socrates “manifestly performed sacrifices often at home,9 and often on the public altars of the city; and his employment of divination was not un-evident!” In this way Xenophon begins by eclipsing the much more serious issue that was doubtless uppermost in the intention of the prosecutors, and in the minds of the jury: whether Socrates believed in the gods in whom the citizenry believed—the gods, such as Zeus and Athena and Apollo, whose customary ritual worship he conspicuously, but perhaps disingenuously, performed.10

His Belief Proven by His Daimonion

Our advocate does not, however, entirely duck the truly serious question of his mentor’s religious beliefs (see also 1.1.19). For he next confronts the fact that as regards Socrates’s employment of divination, “there was much talk” about Socrates’s unorthodoxy, as expressed in his “asserting that the divine thing (daimonion) gave signs to him.”11 Indeed, Xenophon opines that it was on this basis especially that “they charged him with carrying in strange/novel divine things (daimonia)” (1.2.2). Xenophon proceeds to show that by Socrates’s asserting his power of divination through the private daimonion, he made himself stand out—first and foremost to his companions—in the idiosyncrasy of his piety, as regards both his practice and his proclaimed belief.12 We can see that Socrates thus provoked especially his companions13 to ponder, in all seriousness, and with wonder, how Socrates understood, and how they were to understand, his and other people’s (perhaps the companions’ own) unique and powerful religious experiences of prophetic revelations from providential and monitory divinity. Socrates certainly did not present himself in a way calculated to attract atheists, or those casual about religious belief and purported religious experience. Socrates seems rather to have wished to attract those who were seriously perplexed, or capable of becoming seriously perplexed, about divine revelation and (personal) religious experience. And Xenophon in his Memorabilia continues, or resuscitates, this Socratic allure. Xenophon both begins and ends the work (see 4.8) by spotlighting Socrates’s controversially unorthodox claim to have received prophetic, guiding revelations from a private daimonion.

By such a self-presentation Socrates broadcasted through the city his deviation from customary piety, and gave considerable purchase to those suspiciously hostile to him and his companions on religious grounds. Socrates incurred grave risks—for himself but also for his followers—in headlining his claim to unique experiences of divine revelation (so this aspect of his self-presentation must have been of great importance to him: Guthrie 1971a, 81–84). As a result, in the wake of his conviction and execution, his companions now are in need of a defense that goes beyond what Socrates himself offered—a defense of their hero’s proclaimed, extraordinary, prophetic experiences. Xenophon takes it upon himself to deliver that defense. He does so in a way that continues and enhances Socrates’s own provocation to ponder and to puzzle over the character and meaningfulness of divine revelation and religious experience.

Xenophon begins by insisting that, in relying on the prophetic power of “the divine thing,” Socrates “carried in nothing stranger than others—as many as, believing in an art of divination, have recourse to (chrōntai) birds and voices and symbolic portents and sacrifices.” For “they don’t conceive that it is the birds and other things they encounter that possess knowledge of what is beneficial for those having recourse to divination”; rather, they conceive that “the gods signal through these.” And Socrates “believed thus” (1.1.3). Xenophon initially makes Socrates’s belief sound perfectly traditional.

“But,” Xenophon continues (in an apparently slight, but significant, qualification), whereas most “declare” that they are admonished “by birds and other things they encounter,” Socrates “spoke even as he judged, namely that it was the daimonion that signaled.”14 Xenophon implicitly indicates that Socrates did not, like others, rely on divination through birds or other omens and portents—or through sacrificial victims (Socrates’s sacrificing was in this crucial respect very different in spirit or belief from the customary, lawful, performance of sacrifices). What is more, Xenophon’s formulation leaves open the following pregnant questions:15 Did Socrates believe, as is believed by the rest who employ divination, that his daimonion was the intermediary of “the gods”? Or did Socrates believe that his daimonion was, in itself, the (single, ultimate, unmediated) source of beneficial prophetic knowledge? And how would this latter not then be a major departure from the city’s belief about the gods?16 On the other hand, if Socrates believed that his daimonion was merely an intermediary, then the question is mooted: Was it “the gods whom the city believes in and worships” that Socrates believed were communicating with him through the daimonion? Or could he have believed, as charged, that the divinities communicating with him through the daimonion were “strange/novel daimonia”?

These crux questions continue to loom unanswered in what follows. In fact, on close inspection we see that (pace Vlastos 1991, 166n41) nowhere in his defense against the indictment does Xenophon actually ever even deny, let alone argue against, the accusation that Socrates did not believe in the gods in whom the city believes.17 Nor does Xenophon in his defense of Socrates ever refer (except in two profane expletives quoted from an accuser) to “Zeus and Hera and the gods associated with them” (to quote Socrates as reported in Apology 24). Xenophon bends his efforts to proving that Socrates was not an atheist—as if that were the real issue; as if that were the question the thoughtful reader needs seriously to ponder.18

That Socrates must have believed in “gods” follows, Xenophon contends, from the fact that Socrates had an excellent record in benefiting his companions through accurate practical predictions, which Socrates declared came from the daimonion. Xenophon’s argument is formulated in the logically weak but forensically effective device of anaphoric questions.19 The crucial questions in the sequence are based on the dubious premise that no one could ever “trust in” anything except “a god” (sing.) to be able to “trust” that his practical predictions about and for his friends were true.20 Xenophon then jumps to the concluding question: “And if he trusted in gods [pl.], how could he not believe that gods exist?”21 Xenophon reproduces the thought-provoking Socratic combination: intense seriousness about the experience of divine revelation interwoven with subtly ironic questioning of the official, traditional belief about the source of such experience.

His Belief Proven by His Teaching on Divination

Xenophon turns, from Socrates’s daimonic-divinatory guidance of his “companions” (tōn sunontōn), to “the things he did in regard to” his “serviceable associates” (tous epitēdeious) (1.1.6). These latter Socrates counseled, concerning matters whose outcome his reason disclosed to be evidently necessary, “also to do what he believed would be best done.” But, concerning contingent matters whose outcomes were not rationally evident, Socrates sent these “serviceable associates” off to consult divination of the normal sort, to learn what needed to be done. (The eccentric prophetic power of Socrates’s daimonion—whom, we later learn, Socrates may not have needed to consult22—was limited, in its application, to Socrates himself and his “companions.”) Xenophon does not explain what counsel Socrates gave to his “serviceable associates” as regards that vast intermediate range of practical matters whose outcome his reason disclosed to be, not “necessary,” but only more or less probable. But Socrates’s view in this regard becomes clear, by implication, from what follows next.

Xenophon segues to Socrates’s general doctrine on the sound employment of conventional divination (1.1.7–9). This “art of divination is needed in addition,” Socrates declared, by all those who are “undertaking to manage households and cities in noble fashion.”23 Socrates taught, however, an uncustomarily restricted, rationalized recourse to such divination (Kronenberg 2009, 50–51). He insisted that to ask for divinatory advice in practical matters that the gods have granted to humans to know or to learn through their own artful, rational expertise is not only crazy, or “to be possessed by the divinely uncanny” (daimonān—the verbal form corresponding to the adjectival substantive daimonion) but can be “grave violation of divine law” (athemista). According to Socrates’s gospel, in order to conform to divine law, piety must take care to exhaust fully the capacities of practical human reasoning before seeking guidance from conventional prophecy—which is a needed supplement, but never a replacement, for rational art. On the other hand, Socrates also taught that to suppose that everything in practical affairs belongs to human judgment, and that there is not anything “divinely uncanny” (daimonion) in these matters, is also crazy, or “to be possessed by the divinely uncanny” (daimonān).24 For although Xenophon reports Socrates going rather far in assessing the power of rational artfulness, he has Socrates insisting that “the greatest things”—namely, whether or to whom successfully expert human practice will turn out to prove beneficial or harmful—are matters that remain, in the final analysis, unknowable by human judgment.

This theological doctrine of Socrates, as reproduced by Xenophon, stresses the need for ordinary divination specifically in the artful practice or employment of farming, house building and other crafts, generalship, statesmanship, marrying a beautiful woman for the sake of delight, and securing (through marriage) kin who are powerful in the city (1.1.8). The doctrine seems to take for granted the goodness of all these endeavors. One is goaded to question why, then, Socrates engaged so little in these gentlemanly pursuits (Xenophon does not have Socrates refer to fathering children). If Socrates had been asked this question, one suspects that he would have said—perhaps with a barely visible twinkle in his eye—that his daimonion forbade him (cf. Plato, Apology 31c). This response would enable Socrates to dispense entirely with seeking guidance from conventional divination, without contradicting his own doctrine concerning the (qualified) need for such guidance.

We now see that Socrates not only was widely known to employ, for his companions and himself, an unorthodox mode of divination; in addition, he taught, for the benefit of other associates, a far-reaching and untraditional, rationalistic, theological doctrine regarding the divine law that governs recourse to conventional divination. Xenophon’s account leaves unclear whether or to what extent Socrates himself publicly promulgated this innovative creed. What is clear is that Xenophon, by writing these pages, does make the novel theological doctrine more widely and permanently known. This is a somewhat assertive aspect of Xenophon’s own “apology of Socrates” (1.2.13). The assertiveness becomes more evident if we stop to consider what is pointed to by Xenophon’s use of the verb “to be possessed by the divinely uncanny”—as meaning to be crazed by divinity, in a self-destructive way. This reminds us of a dark element in traditional piety, made vivid by the great tragedians: the conception of divinity as being capable of manifesting itself by driving humans to self-destructive madness and infatuation. Xenophon incites his readers to wonder on what basis Socrates was so confident that divinity does not intervene in human existence in such ways that are radically mysterious, alien to reason, only ambiguously friendly, and even apparently envious or capricious.25 In other words, Xenophon points to all that is at stake in the controversial, new, Socratic doctrine of divine law (themis). How do Socrates and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Socrates’s Innocence of the Injustices for Which He Was Executed
• Part Two: Socrates’s Active Justice, as Benefiter of Others
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index of Names