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How to be good according to Socrates
Temperance as the foundation of virtue and friendship
Most of us, I assume, want to be good people and make good friends. But how do we go about doing both? It turns out that Socrates had some advice to give on these matters, as explained by Xenophon in his book, Memorabilia.
Xenophon was an Athenian general as well as a friend and discipline of Socrates, and he wrote a number of books about the Athenian sage, which together constitute the second largest source of contemporary accounts about Socrates, other than those of Plato.
Xenophon’s Socrates is less of a sophisticated philosopher than Plato’s counterpart, but he is in a sense more immediately recognizable as a live human being, Xenophon’s friend rather than Plato’s mouthpiece. The Memorabilia, in particular, is a historically crucial work because it is the one that inspired Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, to turn to philosophy as a way of life.
The dialogue that interests us appears in Memorabilia 2.6, and I’m using the excellent translation by Amy L. Bonnette, Cornell University Press, 2001. The exchange features Socrates and Critobulus, the son of the businessman Crito of Alopece. Critobulus appears in several books by both Xenophon (other than in memorabilia, also in Oeconomicus and Symposium) and…
