Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/345

 XENOPHON'S SOCRATIC WRITINGS 321 to allow his own imagination more play. When Plato wrote the Apologv, Xenophon found some gaps which it did not fill. He made inquiries, and published a little note of his own On the Apology of Socrates> When Plato wrote the Symposiuui, Xenophon was not entirely satisfied with the imaginative impression left by that stupendous masterpiece. He corrected it by a Symposium of his own, equally imaginary — for he was a child when the supposed banquet took place — but far more matter-of-fact, an entertaining work of high antiquarian value. Another appendix to Xenophon's Socratic writings, the Oikonomikos, where Socrates gives advice about the management of a household and the duties of husband and wife, makes a certain special appeal to modern sym- pathies. The wife is charming — rather like Thackeray's heroines, though more capable of education — and the little dialogue, taken together with the corresponding parts of the Memorabilia and Cyropcedeia, forms almost the only instance in this period of Attic thought of the modern ' bourgeois ' ideal of good ordinary women and commonplace happy marriages. Antiphon the sophist, who seems at first sight to write in the same spirit, is really more consciously philosophical. The Hiei'o is a non-Socratic dialogue on government between the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides. The Agesildus is an eulogy on Xenophon's royal friend, made up largely of fragments of the Hellenica, and showing a certain Isocratean tendency in language. Xenophon's longest work, the He/lenica, falls into two parts, separated by date and by style. Books I. and II. are obviously a continuation of Thucydides to the end of ^ On its genuineness, see Schanz, Introduction to Plato's Apology.