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

106 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
management which is given in Chapter I. Or rather, his serious
reservation as to the "abstraction . . . from justice or legality" seems
to be only that it leads to the silence on piety. Piety is "an indispensable
ingredient of the management of the household" (99), as
Socrates later grants to Kritoboulos, insofar as success in that enterprise
depends on the gods. Socrates' silence on piety in Chapter I is
manifested in his appearing "too eager to maintain by hook or by
crook that possession of a household, knowledge of how to increase
it, and willingness to work hard and shrewdly to this effect are the
complete conditions for the increase of one's household" (98). 3
<strong>Strauss</strong> does not explain why Socrates temporarily adopts this
untenable position, as he easily could have explained it, by referring
here to Socrates' need in the circumstances to leave the lazy
Kritoboulos no excuse for failing to get down to learning how to
manage his own affairs (cf. 100-102). He explains the silence on
piety "provisionally . . . as a consequence of the abstraction .
from justice or legality, for piety depends on law" (99). What makes
it necessary to take piety seriously, <strong>Strauss</strong> seems to suggest, is the
weakness of our knowledge (which only a dogmatic faith in the
omnipotence or completeness, actual or potential, of our knowledge
can blind us to) 4 ; and what makes it possible for us to be pious is our
respect for justice or law, which leads to and sanctions worship. But
where does this leave us if the law itself, in accord with <strong>Strauss</strong>'s
earlier suggestion (never, explicitly at least, withdrawn), proves to
be less than completely respectable? The importance of this issue for
<strong>Strauss</strong> may be confirmed by reference to his two earlier studies of
Xenophon. In "The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon," in
speaking of "the ultimate reason why political life and philosophic
life . . . are incompatible in the last analysis," he says, "philosophy
is the denial of the gods of the city" (532). And in On Tyranny
(where he is already somewhat more reticent), in the last paragraph
of the last chapter of the original study, a chapter entitled "Piety
and Law," he suggests that, "One's manner of understanding and
evaluating the man-made law depends ... on one's mannner of
understanding the order which is not man-made . . "and vice
versa; and he raises the question, as one to be determined by "a com-
3. Even this position would be a step back from a suggestion "that virtue is
knowledge and nothing but knowledge, or that knowledge overcomes everything
obstructing it" (97).
4. See Memorabilia I.1.15 as well as Xenophon's Socrates 83.