Strauss on Xenophon's Socrates Xenophon's Socratic Discourse: An ...

STRAUSS ON XENOPHON 113
not equally serviceable for proving that the king devotes himself
vigorously to the arts of smithing or shoemaking" (116). And he
stresses Lysander's incredulity at the suggestion "that Cyrus, most
beautifully and splendidly attired as he was, could have planted
anything with his almost royal hands," i.e., he points to the inherent
implausibility of Cyrus' assertion (118; cf. 120). Moreover, as the
full Lysander story shows, the praise of Persia implies the rejection
of the authority of the most respected Greek city and the abandonment
of gentlemanship (cf. VI.12). "We conclude that Socrates' first
attempt to make a case for farming was not altogether satisfactory.
Let us then turn to his second attempt" (119).
The second attempt (that , of Chapter V) is presumably free from
these defects of the first. "The pursuit of farming" is now praised as
"some soft pleasure" and "a training of the bodies so that they can do
whatever befits a free man" as well as for being "an increase of the
household" (120). The substitution of concern with pleasure for concern
with nobility is intelligible insofar as concern with nobility had
led away from the city and gentlemanship without leading toward
farming (though <strong>Strauss</strong> goes out of his way here to indicate an interest
of Socrates himself in that substitution, 121). "Yet it is obvious
that a man striving for pleasure without any qualification whatever
would not choose farming; the central argument in Socrates' long
speech indicates the price one . has to pay for the pleasures derived
from farming . . ." (121-122). "The concern with nobility as
distinguished from pleasure is to some extent preserved," <strong>Strauss</strong>
suggests, "in the concern with the `training of the bodies so that they
can do whatever befits a free man' " (122). This chapter accordingly
extols the farmer-soldier or the citizen-soldier but "the reasonable
praise of peasant soldiers must not make us oblivious of the
[superior] virtues of professional soldiers" (123).
The second attempt to make a case for farming is then in itself not
much more successful than the first. Yet it manages, as the first
(which went "beyond the cities' toward the king of Persia" 122) did
not, to remain within and thus sketch or outline a certain horizon,
the horizon to which we have already been introduced in Chapter II
as that of the free man or gentleman (see especially 102 and
104-105). Whereas Socrates now speaks of freedom, "he had not
even mentioned freedom or free human beings, let alone free men,"
in the Persian chapter (122). "The free man as presented in the present
chapter is both a farmer and a warrior" (122); in accord with
his praise of this farmer-soldier or citizen-soldier, Socrates now
speaks of justice, "whereas he had been completely silent on justice