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Updated: June 4, 2025
Properly, therefore, the prize for valour belonged to Sokrates; but when the generals appeared anxious to bestow it upon Alkibiades because of his great reputation, Sokrates, who wished to encourage his love for glory, was the first to give his testimony in his favour, and to call upon them to crown him as victor and to give him the suit of armour which was the prize.
Sokrates, in opposition, undertakes to prove that Justice is good in itself, ensuring the happiness of the doer by its intrinsic effect on his mind; and irrespective of exemption from the penalties of injustice. He reaches this result by assimilating an individual to a state. Justice is shown to be good in the entire city, and by analogy it is also good in the individual.
He considered that the conversation of Sokrates was really a divine instrument for the discipline and education of youth; and thus learning to despise himself, and to admire his friend, charmed with his good nature, and full of reverence for his virtues, he became insensibly in love with him, though not as the world loveth; so that all men were astonished to see him dining with Sokrates, wrestling with him, and sharing his tent, while he treated all his other admirers with harshness and some even with insolence, as in the case of Anytus the son of Anthemion.
Yet, with all these flatterers about him, trying to prevent his ever hearing a word of wholesome advice or reproof, he was led by his own goodness of heart to pay special attention to Sokrates, to whom he attached himself in preference to all his rich and fashionable admirers.
Sokrates in this dialogue maintains, in opposition to the thesis of Protagoras, that pleasure is not the same as good, that there are bad pleasures and good pains; and a skilful adviser, one versed in the science of good and evil, must discriminate between them.
At the age of twenty-nine, after witnessing the downfall of Athens, he had to witness the judicial murder of Sokrates the greatest man of the older generation, who had been appreciated and loved by Plato and his friends. Plato's own most promising pupil, whom he had marked out for his successor, was killed in action in a particularly aimless recrudescence of the war.
His conversations with Sokrates form one of the most interesting chapters of Xenophon's Memorabilia, and are the key to the plan of life ultimately elaborated by him. Sokrates finding out his disposition, repeats all the arguments in favour of the severe and ascetic system.
He takes Sokrates as the model of all great qualities; and he reproduces, in his own manner, the speech this sage, who was fearless of death, made before his judges. First of all, he makes him say that the qualities of death are unknown to him, as he has never seen anybody who could instruct him in them.
The poetry and philosophy and social life and political institutions of Ancient Greece and the Modern West may conceivably constitute a single species when contrasted with the institutions of other civilizations. A modern West European or American may have a greater innate appreciation for Homer than for the Old Testament or for Sokrates than for Buddha or Confucius.
How much grief and indignation it excited in his mind, we may see by his collection of memoranda respecting the life and conversations of Sokratês, known by the name of Memorabilia, and probably put together shortly after his arrival.
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