Fall 2015

3 2 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 1
because his activity as a philosopher was believed to be harmful to the city.
Socrates’s unusual defense mitigated the public’s hostility toward him by
making the audience believe in his virtue. Through this tactic, he was aiming
to preserve philosophy’s position in Athens after his death. The present
study aims to clarify the notion of virtue that Socrates claimed to possess. It
further explains how he employed a rhetorical technique called megalēgoria
(literally, “big talk” or boasting) to attain a good reputation for himself and
for philosophy via his death sentence.
In recent scholarship on Socrates, the value of Xenophon’s works has
often been underestimated. 1 The root of the popular neglect of Xenophon’s
works is his alleged lack of comprehension for and appreciation of Socrates’s
philosophy. It is commonly thought that Xenophon’s limited understanding—owed
to the fact that he was, at most, a country gentleman—trivialized
the teachings of Socrates. His Socrates is regarded as a banal moralist who
merely repeats commonplace sermons. 2
This view is reflected in the common interpretation of the Apology,
according to which Xenophon’s Socrates preferred death to life before the
trial began, because he was anticipating the burdens of old age. Hence, he
intentionally brought about capital punishment by provoking the jury. 3 Here
Xenophon’s account seems to focus on corporeal pleasure and pain, missing
the core of Socratic philosophy. John Burnet attributes this misapprehension
to the shallowness of Xenophon, who could not accept the forensic failure of
his teacher or understand the philosophical depth of Socrates’s conduct. Burnet
argues that Xenophon could not comprehend the loftiness of the Socratic
1
Robert C. Bartlett, editor’s introduction to Xenophon: The Shorter Socratic Writings (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1996), 1–8.
2
John Burnet, Plato’s Phaedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), xii–xxxviii; Coleman Phillipson,
The Trial of Socrates (London: Stevens, 1928), 26, 31; Anton-Hermann Chroust, Socrates,
Man and Myth: The Two Socratic Apologies of Xenophon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1957), 1–16; W. K. C. Guthrie, Socrates (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 14–15;
Victorino Tejera, “Ideology and Literature: Xenophon’s Defense of Socrates and Plato’s Apology,” in
New Essays on Socrates, ed. Eugene Kelly (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 156;
John M. Cooper, “Notes on Xenophon’s Socrates,” in Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral
Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4–9, 22; C. D. C. Reeve,
ed., The Trials of Socrates (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 177. Cf. Luis E. Navia, “A Reappraisal of
Xenophon’s Apology,” in New Essays on Socrates, ed. Kelly, 47–48; Donald Morrison, “On Professor
Vlastos’ Xenophon,” Ancient Philosophy 7 (1987): 9.
3
R. E. Allen, Socrates and Legal Obligation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 35;
Navia, “A Reappraisal of Xenophon’s Apology,” 59–62; Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith,
Socrates on Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 60–61; Cooper, “Notes on Xenophon’s
Socrates,” 12.