Xenophon’s Glaucon and Plato’s Alcibiades: A Strange Coincidence?

• In Event: The Socratics: Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, and Aristotle

Abstract

Though much has been written about Socrates’ critique of the democracy he was living in, not enough has been said about his similarly harsh critique of would-be tyrants, including Plato’s own kinsmen. Except a lot has been said about Plato’s attempt to link democracy and tyranny, one leads to the other.
In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, he gives many examples of Socrates’ beneficial effects on the young to counter the charge that he corrupted them. Three in particular, his conversations with Pericles (son of the earlier statesman), Glaucon, and Charmides are worth noting. Though Xenophon doesn’t say so, none of those young men ended up well. The younger Pericles was one of the generals executed for not rescuing the poorer and lower-class sailors after the battle of Arginusae, Charmides ended up in the company of Critias (both Plato’s kin) in the rule of the Thirty Tyrants and dying along with him, and Glaucon (Plato’s brother) we are not positive about. But at least one scholar has argued he died in the battle of Munychia, also fighting for the Thirty Tyrants (Jacob Howland’s Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic, 2018, Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, Pa).
Interestingly though, Socrates’ conversation with Glaucon as recounted by Xenophon parallels Plato’s version of Socrates’ conversation with Alcibiades, when he was also an ambitious young man. Both conversations focus on the relative ignorance and incompetence of Glaucon and Alcibiades and their mutual desires to lead the state. But the focus of each is different. Glaucon seems deficient in knowledge of the capabilities of the city, Alcibiades seems ignorant of himself. Glaucon and his brother Adeimantus play very important roles in Plato’s Republic seeming to defend injustice. Plato had Glaucon reframe the story of Gyges from Herodotus in his Republic. It is worth investigating how and why he reframes Alcibiades’s tyrannical ambitions when his own brother seemed similarly inclined. Is it a case of masterful misdirection or rather an attempt to situate Socrates between the shortcomings of both democracy and tyranny? Along the way, we might want to discern, if that is possible, the motives of Xenophon, as well (when he was often more interested in what makes a good leader rather than a good citizen).

Author

• Joyce Marie Mullan, Stevens Institute of Technology