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

STRAUSS ON XENOPHON 115
"the noble" (122). Or, what he does in Chapter IV is no more than
to spell out the sort of thing that is implied if "one looks at things
from the point of view of the noble, in the sense of the resplendent,
vulgarly famous or of high repute or the pompous" (116). And, as
<strong>Strauss</strong> points out in his discusssion of Chapter V, the "concern with
nobility . . . is to some extent preserved" in the concern with
freedom, i.e., it is an element of the horizon of the free man which
<strong>Strauss</strong> sketches there (122). In other words, the seed of the
transcendence of the city and its opinions, of its justice and piety, is
contained within those opinions; or the civic horizon is constituted
by elements which contradict one another. For this reason, the critique
of Sparta, the most impressive city known to the Greeks, can
be largely entrusted or ascribed to the Spartan Lysander. (Sparta
was the only Greek city which made the virtue or gentlemanship of
its citizens a matter of public concern [201; cf. Constitution of the
Lacedaimonians x, 4, and 7. <strong>Strauss</strong> speaks on 119 of Lykourgos].
Yet the most outstanding contemporary Spartan was so far from be -
ing fully devoted to virtue and gentlemanship that he implied that
one can be happy without being a gentleman and even without being
good [119; cf. 160: the story of Cyrus is characteristic of
Lysander].) And for this reason, Socrates' transcending of the city's
justice, based as it is on an initial bowing to or conformity with that
justice, can be said to be authorized by it, or to be itself just.
Socrates seems to point to this aspect of the procedure being described
by his comic attempt to prove his assertion about the king's
devotion to farming "by starting from the universally held view according
to which the king devotes himself vigorously to actions connected
with war," i.e., by suggesting that from a universally held
view one may be led to a highly paradoxical one (116; cf. 128 with
105; cf. What Is Political Philosophy? 90-91). Still, this explanation
of what <strong>Strauss</strong> means by "dialogical" seems to me incomplete: the
significance of what <strong>Strauss</strong> himself stresses in so describing Chapter
IV, its conversational character, remains to be accounted for.
In speaking of Lysander's concious or unconsious critique of Sparta,
<strong>Strauss</strong> refers to "the critique of Sparta that is implicit in the
Oeconomicus as a whole" (119) without spelling out what he understands
this critique to be. He seems to distinguish it from Lysander's
critique, though the Lysander critique would seem to be a significant
part of it. To begin with what <strong>Strauss</strong> mentions in this context,
the Oeconomicus as a whole raises money-making generally (not just
farming), while "the authority of original Sparta or of Sparta as a