What was Socrates’s syllabus for training the elite of classical Athens? And what kind of people benefited from being taught by him? Dustin Sebell’s new book devotes his analysis of the Socratic program of education outlined in the fourth book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia to these questions, the first time that this part of the work has received the focused attention of a monograph.

How Socrates taught is a question of continuing interest. What is known as the “Socratic method” is revered as a tool for advanced teaching, but there is surprisingly little evidence for what or how the historical Socrates taught, and whether he regarded what he was doing in asking questions and provoking self-reflection as teaching in any formal sense, comparable to the other educators he criticized. We might even doubt whether the different characters presented by Plato and Xenophon (and other sources such as Aristophanes, and other Socratics whose work survives in fragments) owe much to the historical person, a doubt that does not trouble Sebell unduly. When Plato depicts concerned fathers and ambitious young men consulting with Socrates for advice on education providers (for example, in the Laches, Protagoras, and Euthydemus), the answer is never that the youths should just stay around and talk with him. Sebell runs through both this ancient evidence and the existing scholarship on it in his introduction, which sets the tone for the body of the work, opening with an anecdote concerning Rawls and religion, and perhaps explaining the book’s subtitle. He then goes on to examine each chapter of Memorabilia IV and what it tells us about Socrates’s teaching and ideas. All of this is framed around his overarching perspective that what Xenophon presents is a form of antieducation given to people of “bad” character, from which we can infer the alternative education for “good” natures.

Xenophon’s Memorabilia, with its lively dialogues and famous retelling of Prodicus’s fable of the Choice of Heracles, was a hugely popular text in the early modern period. Sebell notes Benjamin Franklin’s reading of it and writing of pastiche Socratic dialogue. But after Plato’s star rose in the nineteenth century, Xenophon was treated as less reliable and less interesting both as a historical source and as a philosopher. That changed, not least through Leo Strauss’s long-standing interesting in Xenophon as a source for Socrates. Sebell’s analysis owes much to the Straussian tradition, including his use of extended paraphrase instead of direct quotation of translated passages from Xenophon’s classical Greek text.

One can read this book as an expansion of Thomas Pangle’s 2018 The Socratic Way of Life, itself an expansion of Leo Strauss’s 1972 Xenophon’s Socrates. Sebell also draws on the scholarship on Xenophon that has flourished in recent decades, and in particular, on the magisterial commentary by Louis-André Dorion, in which Memorabilia IV takes up the entire third and final volume. Occasionally, he notes his differences with non-Straussian scholars in rather dismissive terms. One philosopher, for example, “has no grasp of the terms of the debate between creationism and its critics” (p. 200, n. 5). In another lengthy and informative endnote (pp. 186–187, n. 57), Sebell analyzes what he presents as a contest between Straussians and “classicists” over Xenophon and the appropriate method for reading his work—a task that he believes is not always carried out in “good faith” by classicists.

Memorabilia IV, in which Xenophon explicitly sets out to describe Socrates’s teaching method, poses challenges to the model of Socratic conversation contained in Plato’s dialogues. Whereas Plato mostly depicts Socrates as proceeding by asking questions and requiring answers of his interlocutors, Xenophon suggests that this process of elenchus was not, in fact, Socrates’s usual method with continuing students, but that he more usually made use of protreptic—exhorting and encouraging students to follow examples. In the conversations with the young Euthydemus before and after his recruitment as a student, Xenophon’s Socrates uses both methods.

Sebell aims to leave no possible ambiguity in his own writing, which occasionally makes for tortuous sentences of hieratic import. Introducing a discussion of what Socrates intended to teach Euthydemus, he writes, “Socrates could not possibly teach Euthydemos, even assuming that he was a teacher about, if not of, what a good citizen or gentleman should know above all, if Euthydemos had little or no desire to learn, much less a desire not to” (p. 41). The sentence, with its artificial order and subclauses, requires some thought to decode, and the matrix of possibilities it creates are left to be filled with implied rather than explicit Xenophontic content. For Sebell, there is no doubt about the content of that implied space, and his detailed account builds on and cements a Straussian orthodoxy.

The second chapter of Memorabilia IV, in which Socrates entices the young Athenian Euthydemus into conversation by challenging his conventional views on what is just and unjust, provides a good example of Xenophon’s text resisting this approach. Sebell constructs a matrix from Socrates’s speech in which Socrates first exposes Euthydemus’s inability to establish what is just and unjust, and then the conventionality of what is regarded as just or unjust in relation to interactions with friends and enemies, such as deceiving a friend for their own or the communal benefit. But Sebell finds the third part of the discussion—that is, exploring whether it is just to deceive deliberately or involuntarily—at first sight, a perplexing failure in this structure, which can only be explained by the need to prevent what he regards as the proper third part of the argument being set down in writing. Sebell brings in Strauss as an authority for the absence of the “peak” of the argument and suggests that “for some reason, Xenophon was deliberately writing incorrectly,” before going on to elaborate the reasons why he might “conceal his teacher’s wisdom” in a way that, once it has been carefully read, reveals it (pp. 60–63).

This is a different line of reasoning from that which most commentators would give, which is that Xenophon is not the most careful reporter of philosophical conversation, particularly when it comes to sharp instances of the Socratic elenchus. So can we reliably find Socrates’s actual teaching method and thought in Xenophon’s text? Another difficulty is that Euthydemus might not be the best of students, as both Strauss and Thomas Pangle have argued. Pangle more recently elaborated on this as the idea that Euthydemus had a “bad nature.” Sebell, in turn, expands on Pangle’s verdict of a “bad nature,” considering what Xenophon’s depiction of the education of such a youth might suggest about the Socratic education of youths with “good” natures. This seems to place too much emphasis on the introductions to these chapters, with their very brief character sketches treated as setting out a comprehensive model of Socratic thought and method—an example of Quentin Skinner’s mythologies of doctrine and coherence, perhaps. Was Euthydemus really a “bad” person, or just a naïve youth in need of further education?

Sharp observations are scattered through the book, and they reward persistence with the author’s prose. Readers who find the Straussian substructure to Xenophon implausible may still gain helpful insights from these. Straussian interpreters of Xenophon themselves will enjoy this further elaboration of their standard reading.