Philosophers

When studying Socrates should I read Plato or Xenophon or both?

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This is an excellent question. My answer will be controversial; so will any other answer people give you.

But first let's back up. What does "studying Socrates" mean to you? If you are curious about the historical person of Socrates, then you'll want to look into all the historical sources available. More on that in a minute. But if you are interested in the philosophy we mainly associate with Socrates, certain methods of defining vague terms and of understanding the virtues, then it might be enough to read Plato's dialogues for the version of Socrates found in them.

From the point of view of understanding the Socratic philosophy, a lot depends on what one thinks of Xenophon as a philosopher. There are many scholars, and more today than a generation ago, who consider him a subtle, intelligent commentator on political thought and ethics. Many others, however, still find him relatively short on philosophical insight. This is what makes the question controversial. If Xenophon is, as one image of him holds, a simple Athenian aristocrat who missed the deep significance of Socrates (though he did manage to have a lucid, engaging prose style), then he is not the source to consult for Socratic philosophy.

If on the other hand Xenophon possesses hidden depths, and comments on the Athenian intellectual scene more obliquely than people had ever noticed, then the thorough study of Socratic philosophy should bring him together with Plato for a complete picture.

It won't hurt to read through some of the dialogues collected in the "Memorabilia." See if they amplify your understanding of Socrates. If you think there's something going on in the Xenophon, then by all means read further. His dialogues never contain the explicit and detailed philosophical theorizing to be found in such Platonic works as the Phaedo, the Republic, or the Sophist; but they are always worth a look.

Now, suppose your interest is not merely philosophical. You want to know something about Socrates the historical person. All our sources are limited, of course; both Xenophon and Plato give us specific images of Socrates, as produced by sympathetic authors. They are the same age as one another, both of them having been only in their late twenties when Socrates was executed (at the age of seventy), so they also share the same limitation in access to information. To put it simply, Socrates must have been around sixty before either Xenophon or Plato could have met him. Anything about his earlier life they must have learned of secondhand.

There is one source from before them both, but it's a very tricky one: Aristophanes' play "Clouds." Written around 423, when Xenophon and Plato were both children, this is the earliest written reference to Socrates. (It is worth noting that Thucydides, whose "History of the Peloponnesian War" looks exhaustively at Athens from around 430 to 411, two decades of Socrates' maturity, never mentions his name, even though he has much to say about figures like Alcibiades, who was a close friend.) Out of the blue, in 423, Socrates was well known enough to be made the main character of a comedy. In "Clouds" Aristophanes presents a Socrates quite different from the respectable thinker we find in Xenophon or the dialectician in Plato. In the comedy he is something of a trickster, a wily sophist offering atheistical theories of the universe and shrewd tricks for getting out of one's debts.

The "Clouds" is undoubtedly a slander. But it can't be ignored, above all because it is the first appearance of Socrates in the historical record. When you read Aristophanes on Socrates, you must not think this is how he really was; but you should ask yourself what he might have been like to inspire such a caricature.

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