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

STRAUSS ON XENOPHON
it is useful for him to say the untruth" (166); he forgoes for a day
supervision of his estate (163) in order to keep his part of an appointment
in town "with strangers who stood him up" (131; 145;
XII.1-2). Yet, as has been suggested, the intrinsic choiceworthiness
of the noble as he understands it is not beyond question; if it were,
the noble would not be in need of support. Lurking beside the noble
but also somehow within it, as roots or ingredients, are two other
ends: utility and splendor. The role, for example, which
Ischomachos finds noble for his wife to fill is certainly also not
without utility for them both-to say nothing of the arrangement of
their pots and pans which he find beautiful (144). And the noble
life, as he understands it, seeks honor in the city and culminates in
adornment of the city (162-163). Utility and splendor do not appear
to be open to question to the same extent or in the same way as the
noble. (The relationship of pleasure to the noble is considered on
121-cf. 162-and, in Xenophon's Socrates, especially on 77).
Given this state of affairs, it is difficult to avoid the question
whether it would not be better to pursue exclusively either or both of
these ends and to forget about the noble insofar as it is not reducible
to them. One may object that, as the Phoenician and Cyrus stories
suggest, the radical pursuit of these ends amounts to barbarism; that
Greekness, or cultivated freedom, depends upon the resistance to
such a course, on the refusal to see the noble as no more than such
roots. Hence the appropriateness of Socrates coming upon
Ischomachos as he is "sitting in the colonnade of Zeus the
Deliverer-the deliverer of the Greeks in particular from the Persian
danger." (131; cf. Xenophon's Socrates 167-"what is good for the
city, is frequently noble rather than good for the individual ...") .
But, not to mention the possibility that a certain case might be made
for "barbarism" ("Xenophon's Anabasis" 134), if the choiceworthiness
of the noble as Ischomachos understands it is questionable
and he cannot give an account of its superiority to utility and/or
splendor pursued by themselves, he will be vulnerable to their temptation-as
Chapter XX, especially, shows (200-201; cf. 208). This
alone would show the need, the legitimacy of searching for the true
nobility ōr beauty which would be truly choiceworthy for its own
sake and our own sake. And, according to <strong>Strauss</strong>, "true human vir-
seems to have had a richer or more symbolic meaning in the earlier discussion than it
does here or in Chapter XI (181)-it was twice put in quotation marks on 123. <strong>Strauss</strong>
does remark here however that, "The Persian story is silent on the gods ... " (144).
129