The young Nietzsche found Xenophon’s recollections of Socrates to be “spiritually rich” and conducive to “happiness” itself. Not unconnected with his admiration, surely, Nietzsche later reveals in the Wanderer and His Shadow that Xenophon’s Socrates manifests a “wisdom full of roguish trickery.” Nietzsche, as is his wont, does not stop there. He proclaims, “If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the Memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as guide to morals and reason.” Xenophon’s broader corpus saw several periods of influence from antiquity to the nineteenth century. If Nietzsche is right, they will not be the last. Xenophon’s star will rise again and yet still higher.

Thomas Pangle begins his book on Xenophon’s Memorabilia with these assessments by Nietzsche. Pangle takes Nietzsche seriously and, thereby, Nietzsche’s Xenophon. Thus, Pangle invites his readers to take Xenophon seriously and, thereby, Xenophon’s Socrates. Throughout his works, Nietzsche emphasizes Socrates’s central concern: the future kaloi k’agathoi, the elite young men of Athens, beautiful and good. The Socratic intervention in Greek political thought targets such “gentlemen,” in Pangle’s translation, following his teacher Leo Strauss in this as in many respects. Throughout, Pangle’s book manifests the virtues and vices of holding to a clear Straussian line.

Aristocratic masculinity, the masculine code of elite men, finds a sophisticated theorist in Xenophon. As Pangle points out, Xenophon was the first to coin and conceptualize kalokagathia, “gentlemanliness.” In American English, gentleman and gentlemanliness are infelicitous translations of kalos k’agathos and kalokagathia, which are far more robust concepts than their desiccated contemporary iterations imply. This is unfortunate, because a key to understanding Xenophon’s project is to be found here. Ultimately, Pangle (following Strauss) shows us how Xenophon, even as he defends his friend and teacher, hints at Socrates’s limitations as a potential kalos k’agathos and teacher thereof: for one, he lacks manliness, andreia, as conventionally conceived. Manliness is the foundation of kalokagathia. In this and many other respects, Pangle’s book admirably spurs attention to classical codes of masculinity, including Socrates’s own masculinity and its unconventionality—despite Pangle nowhere naming the concept of masculinity nor availing himself of the scholarship in masculinity studies developed in recent decades.

Aristocratic masculinity is not the overt subject of Pangle’s book. Instead the subject of Pangle’s book is Xenophon’s book. Like many others written by the Straussian school, it functions as a close commentary. The Straussian approach has strengths and weaknesses. The latter have been often commented on, the former much defended—both, on occasion, with great vehemence, even animus—so little needs be added on that score. Strengths include a devotion to reading and interpreting classical texts, in their entirety (both what is exoteric or said, and what is esoteric or unsaid), as highly multilayered works of philosophic art that demand from the reader an alertness to subtleties in and across them, including potential irony, intentional contradiction and ambiguity, and even humor—in Xenophon’s case, “Aristophanean proclivities.” The virtues of the Straussian approach shine all the brighter in the milieu in which it emerged: an American culture in which such close reading, especially with attention to discovering potentially esoteric meaning, had yet to take strong root. Reading Pangle’s main text, one feels the sureness of a master teacher guiding an undergraduate (a feeling heightened also by curious colloquialisms: we hear of a “nerdy-looking student” and of the “chutzpah” and “sugar daddies” of Socrates). The footnotes are another matter. There we find a graduate education and more.

Subtle and multilayered, Pangle’s book mirrors Xenophon’s own. Both point, allusively, beyond themselves. In one footnote, Pangle notes Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel on the relation between art and divinity. In others, we meet the statesman and philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, a “Socratic-Xenophontic” thinker. Aside from contextualist concerns about potential anachronisms, it would be helpful to hear how this classification is defined and how the earl’s work merits it. As in the book as a whole, tantalizing hints are given; few overt theses are advanced. But for the curious and diligent reader, Pangle’s footnotes open a rich underworld ripe for exploring. Reverential references to Strauss (especially to his footnotes), caustic critiques of non-Straussians, punctilious pugilism with lexicographers—all await the brave spelunker. We also meet here the secondary scholarly literature and hints of how the present approach differs. Strauss, at least in his later books, did not do his reader the same courtesy. Rarely do we learn why other scholars are wrong, however, save for the suggestion they are stuffy, moralistic bores—and rather obtuse ones at that. While entertaining, such assessments would be clearer were the methodological disagreements (and points of agreement) more sharply posed. For example, although Pangle helpfully emphasizes the meaning of the Panathenaic euandria as a “male beauty contest,” unlike several earlier scholars, he then (puzzlingly) deems it lacking in “gravity”—but did the Greeks, of all peoples, think so? At other times, he points out Socrates’s odd preference for invoking the name of Hera as a “profane oath,” as opposed to the more typically masculine oaths invoking Zeus or Heracles. But why not take the next steps of naming and theorizing these and other signs of the male femininity and even transversal queerness of Socrates? What is at stake methodologically and substantively in failing to properly contextualize these gendered utterances and actions?

Ascending from the footnotes, we find the commentary format of the main text. Xenophon structured his Memorabilia into two unequal parts, Pangle argues, so he mirrors that structure in the commentary, devoting two chapters to the first part and four to the second. In the first part, Xenophon mounts a defense of Socrates on the specific charges brought against him: corrupting the youth and introducing new gods. Xenophon stretches his defensive representation of Socrates, but is always up to more, hinting at a truer Socrates. The second part of the Memorabilia, Pangle avers, explores the benefits Socrates brought to his interlocutors: friends and family, fellow citizens, those “reaching for the noble/beautiful (kalon),” and his own students. In practice, such benefits almost wholly accrue to elite young men outstanding in physical beauty, political ambition, philosophical promise, or some combination thereof. Notable exceptions include Socrates’s son Lamprocles, the painter Parrhasius, and the courtesan Theodote.

More than a decade after his youthful praise of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Nietzsche will warn that Plato was a “seducer of nobility” who was himself seduced by the “roturier Socrates” (The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans., Vintage, 1968, §435). Was Xenophon seduced by Socrates? Among many masterful points of interpretation, Pangle shows how Xenophon’s Socrates speaks of beauty as a form of seduction culminating in a bite like that of a spider. Later, in conversation with Theodote, he speaks about his knowledge of “web-like traps” and other means of capturing “friends” when one lacks physical beauty, as of course he does. Does such ensnarement also end with the spider’s bite? If so, and if such a bite makes one sick, we recall that Nietzsche claims sickness can be of great value. The healthier an organism, the greater the sickness it can incorporate and overcome. Such was the great health of the Greeks that they could and did, with respect to Socrates. Roguishness of the sort seen in Xenophon’s writing evinces such healthfulness. How better to incorporate Socrates? No doubt they learned a great deal from him. But Pangle’s book helps us see that, in this subtle aristocratic ethic, great learning and high humor go hand in hand.