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

138 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
human beings-to do so even for a time, he would have to cease for
that time to be a philosopher. Partly for this reason, i.e., partly
because the rule over free men in this sense is no different from the
rule over slaves (171, 174), he has no wish to rule (cf. 97). But this
means that he must accept the rule of others, who can be expected to
be unalterably opposed to what he stands for; and the necessary accommodation
to those others will also require that he modify in
some way his philosophic activity, i.e., cease to that extent to be a
philosopher. To judge from remarks he makes elsewhere, <strong>Strauss</strong>
seems to have suspected that Xenophon was critical of Socrates for
not complying sufficiently with this necessity.' 5
On Chapters Fifteen Through Nineteen
<strong>Strauss</strong> begins his discussion of "the section on farming " (197) by
observing of the chapter which introduces it that it is, apart from
Chapter VI, "the only one devoted to the transition from one part of
the work to another" (178). He goes on to suggest that "the division
of the Ischomachos section into a part devoted to gentlemanship and
a part devoted to farming is as incisive as the division of the work as
a whole into the Kritoboulos section and the Ischomachos section"
(178). This suggestion is tacitly modified however toward the end of
the discussion of the farming section, when <strong>Strauss</strong> raises the question
"whether Chapter XII is not the beginning, and Chapter XIX
the end, of one and the same section, the section on stewards. After
all, the art of farming is practiced and taught, by the stewards
rather than by the master himself . . . " (195). The difference
which had impressed <strong>Strauss</strong> between the Ischomachos chapters
prior to Chapter XV and those including and after it was that only
the latter are devoted to an art, "a kind of knowledge" (179).
"Diligence and the other qualities discussed in the three preceding
chapters are not arts" (179; cf. 195). The chapters prior to Chapter
VI, too, were devoted to an art, "the knowledge of how to manage
one's household" (179), an art which was, at least in one of its forms,
possessed by Socrates (113) . Farming, on the other hand, whether or
not he leaves its teaching and practice to his stewards, is the art
possessed by Ischomachos (cf. XII.4); indeed, it is "the apparently
most important cognitive ingredient of his whole life" (180; cf. 204).
15. See "Xenophon's Anabasis" 124, 131, 138, 139-140, 146, and Xenophon's
Socrates 50, 126,140 (cf. 144, 177, 178, 3, 21).