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

STRAUSS ON XENOPHON
uncertain whether Ischomachos is equally aware of Socrates' ignorance
or takes it sufficiently to heart when he speaks of "reminding"
Socrates of farming (184) or ascribes to Socrates knowledge of
farming. <strong>Strauss</strong> puts great emphasis here on the spurious character
of this knowledge:
Is not the 'knowledge' of the art of farming that he acquires through his conversation
with Ischomachos shot through with ignorance (189)?
Ischomachos leads him to understand the reason ... by appealing partly to
facts Socrates knows and partly to plausibilities. Socrates comes into possession
of the correct answer through 'hearing' . . . rather than through having seen.
He knows the whole art of farming partly from having seen . . . and partly
from having heard explanations . . . . But, as we have seen, this knowledge is
not genuine knowledge of the art of farming (190).
The third of these paragraphs speaks also of Socrates' interest in the
art of rhetoric. "Socrates exercised that art not only prior to his
meeting with Ischomachos but also after it . . ." (191). For example,
"His teaching of the art of farming, his exhorting Kritoboulos to
exercise that art, is an act of rhetoric" (190-191). This use of
rhetoric, in particular, is traceable to Socrates' meeting with
Ischomachos: "after this fateful meeting his rhetoric serves the purpose,
for instance, of making a gentleman farmer out of a gentleman
farmer's son" (191). Yet Socrates' teaching Kritoboulos farming is
"not altogether serious" (191; cf. 182), i.e., in this respect at least,
the change ascribed to his meeting with Ischomachos is not so great
as first appears." Beyond that, rhetoric itself is not "altogether
serious" (192). What is serious, as we are told here, indeed "the most
serious of all arts or sciences," is "theology" (192) . The theme casting
its shadow on this chapter and the whole treatment of this section is
Socrates' approach to "theology," an approach which, we take it,
was based on his strictness regarding what is and what is not
knowledge. This strictness made him aware of what he did not know
and enabled him to remedy that ignorance where possible (cf. 165).
At the same time, it made him aware of others not yet possessing
such awareness or of the looseness in their view of what constitutes
knowledge, and thus of the potential (if the looseness should be
17. As the discussion of the section on farming confirms, <strong>Strauss</strong> views the pursuits of
the younger and older Socrates in other respects, too, as essentially continuous (Consider
especially 196). In the passage discussed above in the text, Socrates' reputation as
an "idle chatterer" is ascribed to his post-Ischomachos activity (191); earlier, it had
been ascribed to his pre-Ischomachos pursuit (164).
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