Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/118

108 be successful in producing the impression they aimed at. With regard to some of these, it is impossible to help suspecting that they have been eked out by Xenophon, and spoilt in the process. A notable instance of this kind occurs in a long conversation between Socrates and his associate Aristippus, afterwards the famous leader of the school of pleasure. Socrates observing in this young man a too great tendency to self-indulgence, set himself to counteract this tendency, and he did so by establishing the incompatibility of a soft and self-indulgent life with the career of a statesman and the government of others. Aristippus replied that he had not the faintest desire to govern any. Socrates then asked, whether it was happiest to be governed or to govern? Aristippus said that he meant to avoid both the one and the other; and that, in order to prevent being placed in either position, he proposed to himself to be a cosmopolite, and to travel about from state to state. Now on this announcement of the views of Aristippus we can have no doubt that the Socrates of Plato would have made an effective attack, in some way or other, by wit and raillery—perhaps by drawing a ridiculous picture of the cosmopolite mode of life. But the Socrates of Xenophon does nothing of the kind. He maintains a rather pedantic earnestness, and lectures away on the superior happiness of higher aims. He quotes Hesiod and Epicharmus to prove that virtue and exertion are good things, and finally gives at full length the allegory of Prodicus, known as "the choice of Hercules." Hercules, when a young