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

148 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
father whose practice he continues, "proves to be love of gain"
(201). Since the motive of a perfect gentleman "is not so much gain
as what is noble, what is becoming, what is conducive to the common
good" (201), Ischomachos thus "comes close to abandoning
perfect gentlemanship" (201). 21 Yet Socrates does not for this reason
disapprove of him. One may even say "that he goes further than
Ischomachos or his father" in this direction (202). It was in this context
that <strong>Strauss</strong> offered his first and deeper statement of the relation
between the Oeconomicus and "the parallel work, the Hiero,"
which is at the same time an explanation of why Chapter XXI exaggerates
the tension between the two works: "in both works
Xenophon experiments with extreme possibilities . . . . It goes
without saying that Xenophon did not wish to experiment with both
extreme possibilities in one and the same work. If any proof for this
were needed, it would be supplied by the last chapter of the
Oeconomicus" (203-204). Chapter XXI then is meant to compensate
for the approval which Socrates has given, most recently in Chapter
XX, to love of gain.
<strong>Strauss</strong> may have intended to indicate the perspective from which
that approval is given by referrring to a passage in the Eudemian
Ethics (203 n.18). (He does so after he has likened Ischomachos's
quasi-abandonment of perfect gentlemanship to the "change effected
by Xenophon's Cyrus" when he persuaded the Persian nobility
"that virtue ought not to be practiced as it was hitherto practiced
in Persia, for its own sake, but for the sake of great wealth, great
happiness, and great honors" 203.) The continuation of that
passage, at any rate, speaks of "the contemplation of god" as the
goal or target which ought to govern our actions. Someone who
made all of his actions serve "the contemplation of god" would look
upon some of them-those which a gentleman would view as
choiceworthy in themselves-differently than the gentleman; in this
respect, he would be closer to the Ischomachos of Chapter XX or to
the Persians "corrupted" by Cyrus than to such a gentleman. An
uncertainty remains as to whether this means that the theoretical
man abandons altogether the concern for the noble as such.
It may help to look briefly at some of the many places in
Xenophon's Socrates, the sequel to Xenophon's Socratic Discourse,
where <strong>Strauss</strong> appears to take up this question.
21. The mention of Sparta in this context reminds us of Lysander ' s earlier step in the
same direction (119).