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

STRAUSS ON XENOPHON
On Chapters Seven Through Ten (Part One)
The remainder of the Oeconomicus consists of Socrates' narration,
to Kritoboulos and the others, of his meeting with the perfect
gentleman Ischomachos. Socrates had sought such a meeting apparently
in order to find out what a perfect gentleman is, but it is
not until the fifth chapter of this section that we hear Ischomachos
tell of his own activity. (<strong>Strauss</strong> gives to this chapter or his discussion
of it the title "Andrologia.") The first four chapters, VII-X, are
devoted at Socrates' request to Ischomachos's account of his
educating his wife, That account by itself would justify the advance
billing of the Ischomachos section as a comedy.° But it is difficult to
see why Socrates should have found this subject so compelling as to
have brought it about that, in <strong>Strauss</strong>'s words, "in the Oeconomicus
the gynaikologia preceds the andrologia" (147). <strong>Strauss</strong> raises this
difficulty early in his discussion of the section on the wife (132-133)
without providing an acceptable answer to it in that place.
The high point of his discussion appears to be his treatment of
Chapters VIII-IX, which are devoted to the theme "order," and
above all his statement (in the discussion of Chapter IX) on dialectics,
Socrates' " `method' " or "the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing"
(148). What occasions this statement is Xenophon's or
Ischomachos's description of the latter's "separating his indoor
things according to tribes in order to establish order within his
house" (147). This "reminds us" according to <strong>Strauss</strong>, "of Socrates'
separating the beings according to races or kinds in order to discover
the order of the whole. According to Xenophon, Socrates `never
ceased considering with his companions what each of the beings is,'
i.e., what each kind of the beings is. He called this activity or art
`dialectics,' which means literally the art of conversation. He
asserted that the activity is called dialegesthai with a view to the fact
that men coming together for joint deliberation pick or select
(dialegein) things according to races or kinds" (147-148). The statement
on dialectics (from which the quoted portion is drawn) is
unusually full and helpful. It is not what we were led to expect
however by <strong>Strauss</strong>'s singular use of "dialogical" in his discusssion of
Chapters IV-V (121), a usage which he resumes most conspicuously
in his discussion of the section on the wife (138,140, 153; cf. also 129
9. See <strong>Strauss</strong>'s reference to comedy on 132, as well as, among other places, 133,
136, 137-9, 144, 155, and above all 156-158, which was prepared by 131, 134 and 151
in particular.
119