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

100 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
his speech and his thought, is nothing but playful." Why did <strong>Strauss</strong>
choose to place, right after this sentence, the one-sentence
paragraph which concerns us rather than to convey elsewhere the
information it contains, as he easily could have done? As it turns out,
the connection is explained in his article "Xenophon's Anabasis" (Interpretation,
Volume 4, Number 3, 117-147), which may have been
intended as a sort of appendix to the two books on Xenophon's
presentation of Socrates. There <strong>Strauss</strong> says, referring to the very
page of Xenophon's Socrates that we have been considering, "Surely,
Xenophon (does not equal Plato) presents himself in his difference
from Socrates" (140; cf. 124: "Xenophon was a man of action:
he did the political things in the common sense of the term,
whereas Socrates did not . ."). In other words, Xenophon's
presence at the banquet which is described in the Symposium is
meant as a silent suggestion of an alternative to the Socrates who is
celebrated there. Now, not to mention the many difficulties which
are not thus explained, <strong>Strauss</strong> could not have known, when he
wrote Xenophōn's Socrates, that he would live to write "Xenophon's
Anabasis." It is true that the explanation supplied in the Anabasis
article is confirmed by hints occurring in Xenophon ' s Socrates, hints
which may begin on the very page in question. But, for the moment
at least, the enigmatic sentence-paragraph is allowed to stand. From
this, we draw the following conclusion regarding <strong>Strauss</strong>'s manner
of writing in the two books on Xenophon's presentation of Socrates:
if point A, considered together with point B, yields conclusion C,
<strong>Strauss</strong> does not always regard it as necessary or appropriate for him
to state conclusion C, or even to acknowledge that points A and B
are related; he leaves it in these cases at mentioning points A and B
in the same vicinity and relies on the reader to do the rest.
This places of course a very great burden on <strong>Strauss</strong>'s reader or interpreter
and makes it unlikely that an interpretation will carry conviction
or be of much use unless it makes clear the tracks, so to
speak, that it has followed. Now it would be impossible, within the
limits of the present review, to do this for both of the books before
us; and, given the necessity to choose one book to concentrate on, it
is easy to show that the first, that on the Oeconomicus, is the more
fundamental one. Not only is this acknowledged in the preface to
the second book; but the second book (as well as the article on the
Anabasis) is preoccupied with the theme of the defense of Socrates
before the city and the characteristics or limitations of Socrates
which rendered that defense so difficult, and this theme is a secon-