Memorabilia
Apomnemoneumata
Socrates was a pious, morally serious teacher of practical virtue rather than the impious corrupter of youth his accusers claimed, and recalling his ordinary conversations on courage, friendship, and self-control is the best available defense of his character.
- a direct defense against the charges at Socrates's trial
- practical ethics over abstract metaphysics
- Socrates as teacher of ordinary virtue
- a counterweight to Plato's portrait
- eyewitness testimony from a former student
The Memorabilia collects Xenophon's own recollections of Socrates's conversations, organized loosely around a direct rebuttal of the charges, impiety and corrupting the young, that led to Socrates's execution in 399 BC. Where Plato's Socrates pursues abstract metaphysical questions through relentless dialectic, Xenophon's Socrates appears mainly as a practical ethical teacher, discussing household management, military leadership, friendship, and self-discipline in plain, largely non-technical conversation with a range of interlocutors, presented as evidence of a man who made those around him better rather than worse. Composed decades after Socrates's death by a former student writing as both eyewitness and apologist, the work offers a valuable, if clearly partisan, counterweight to Plato's more philosophically ambitious portrait.
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