The Memorabilia

Xenophon wrote this defense of Socrates around 2,400 years ago, but it reads like it was composed yesterday by someone still raw with grief and injustice. After Athens executed his teacher for impiety and corrupting the youth, Xenophon set out to prove the charges false. What emerges is not merely a legal argument but a portrait of a man who spent his life asking uncomfortable questions in the marketplace, in the gymnasium, anywhere people gathered to think. The Socrates we meet here is relentlessly practical: he wanted his students to become better farmers, better soldiers, better citizens. He believed virtue could be taught, that nobody did wrong knowingly, that the unexamined life was not worth living. Alongside the Apology (Socrates' defense at trial) and extended dialogues on ethics, Xenophon includes surprising pieces: a treatise on estate management and a dinner party exploring love. These ground the philosopher in the physical world. This is the only surviving alternative to Plato's Socrates, and the differences between them are as illuminating as the similarities.