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

118 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
Part of Chapter VI is devoted to summarizing the results of the
previous conversation. <strong>Strauss</strong> points out that "the recapitulation
... differs strikingly from the conversation it is meant to summarize"
(125). For example, Socrates "restates the case for farming
with scrupulous omission of anything reminding one of the Persian
king . . . Above all-and this in a way compensates for the silence
on Persia-he claims that they had agreed about farming being a
work and a science very fit for a perfect gentleman . . . . In a word,
in the recapitulation, Socrates . . . introduces the theme `the perfect
gentleman' . . ." (127). The connection between "Persia" and
"perfect gentleman" (which permits the introduction of the latter to
compensate for silence on the former) is clarified in <strong>Strauss</strong>'s remark
that the shift from "household management" to "perfect gentlemanship"
"was prepared by Kritoboulos's desire to hear [only] of the
lucrative science which is reputed to be most noble or beautiful"
(128-129), i.e., by the same desire which had led Socrates in
Chapter IV to speak of the Persian king. That is, the concerns or
opinions belonging to the horizon of the perfect gentleman (free
man, farmer-soldier, citizen-soldier: cf. 161) and those who aspire
to gentlemanship which, when properly followed up, lead to "Persia"
or to what that stood for according to <strong>Strauss</strong>'s suggestion in his
discussion of Chapters IV-V.
As a result of what Socrates had said in Chapters IV, V, and VI,
Kritoboulos had become "eager to hear the causes why some farmers
are highly successful and others fail altogether . . ." (127). Socrates
had promised him something of this sort in Chapter III: "That
promise was the only one accompanied by Socrates' rebuke of
Kritoboulos for his deplorable propensity to prefer comedies to
farming" (128). Now, however, instead of providing the promised
economic demonstration, Socrates narrates for Kritoboulos (and the
others present) his first encounter with a perfect gentleman, only a
smallish part of which involves a discussion of farming. Socrates'
narration, or his treatment of the perfect gentleman Ischomachos, is
"not altogether without comical traits" (112; cf., e.g., 158, 161;
even in the present chapter farming is recommended as "a science
most easy to learn" 127). In view of this, <strong>Strauss</strong> seems to suggest, we
are free to regard Socrates' substitution of this narration for the promised
economic demonstration as a further indulgence of
Kritoboulos's "propensity to prefer comedies to farming" (cf. 109).
Perhaps Socrates doubted whether Kritoboulos was likely to improve
much as a money-maker in any case (126; cf. 130).