philosopher
Athenian soldier, historian and student of Socrates — author of the Anabasis, the Hellenica, the Cyropaedia and the Socratic works that sit alongside Plato's as our second main witness to Socrates.
philosopher
Athenian philosopher of the fifth century BCE — teacher of Plato and Xenophon, examined life on trial, and the central figure of the Socratic dialogues he himself never wrote.
philosopher
Athenian philosopher, founder of the Academy, and author of the dialogues that organise the philosophical tradition around the question of the well-ordered soul and the well-ordered city.
theme
The classical inquiry into excellence of character — what it is, how it is acquired, and how it shapes a life.
theme
The classical inquiry into sōphrosynē — the well-ordered command of one's own desires and the steady governance of the self.
theme
Xenophon's portrait of a Socrates concerned less with metaphysics than with the conduct of life — household, friendship, self-control, public duty — the practical, useful Socrates we read alongside, and against, Plato's.
theme
Xenophon's conviction that self-mastery — enkrateia, the control of one's own appetites, fear and impulse — is the foundation of every other virtue and the precondition of leading or governing anything beyond oneself.
theme
The bonds of trust, obligation and affection that Xenophon places at the centre of both private life and political order — friendship as a working force in command, household and state, not merely a private good.
book
Xenophon's Socratic dialogue on the management of a household and estate — the foundational text of the Greek art of household economy, and a study of order, leadership and partnership that scales from the farm to the polity.
book
Xenophon's short account of Socrates' defence and the spirit in which he met his death — a portrait that explains his apparent arrogance at trial as the deliberate choice of a man who judged death preferable to the decline of old age.
book
Xenophon's account of a dinner party at which Socrates and his companions discuss what each is most proud of — a lighter, more genial Socratic work that reads beside Plato's Symposium as a second window on Socrates among his friends.
comparison
Two students of Socrates, two very different portraits of their teacher — and the standard scholarly check on reading any one of them alone.
comparison
The two main witnesses to the historical Socrates — Plato's metaphysical, aporetic master and Xenophon's practical, useful counsellor — and the problem of reconstructing one man from two very different portraits.
essay
An interpretive reading of Xenophon's Socrates as an independent and valuable witness to the historical figure, his practical ethics, and what the two-witnesses problem teaches about reconstructing a man who wrote nothing.
civilization
The civilization that invented political argument as a public practice — and whose city-states, sanctuaries and texts gave the European tradition its founding vocabulary for thinking about constitution, virtue, justice, war and the well-ordered life.
comparison
Two students of Socrates who took his teaching in opposite directions — the practical soldier-historian and the metaphysical philosopher — and the contrast between a philosophy of conduct and a philosophy of being.
essay
An interpretive reading of the elenchus across Plato's early dialogues — what the questioning is doing, why aporia counts as progress, and how the Xenophontic Socrates uses the same method to different ends.
guide
A short practical guide to Xenophon — where to start, what to expect, why the corpus is broader than the Socratic works, and why he is the standard scholarly counterweight to reading Plato alone.