Abstract

For more than 150 years, scholarship has largely discounted one of the main sources of evidence concerning the trial of Socrates. Scholars have held that most of the discussion of the charge of corrupting the youth in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Book 1, ch. 2) is not in fact a response to the arguments made at trial by the prosecution. Instead, they have thought, Xenophon’s text rebuts an anti-Socratic tract by the rhetorician Polycrates, who was otherwise best known for his playfully contrarian works. Scholars have also presumed that a late text, Libanius’ Apology of Socrates, likewise responds to Polycrates and provides a resource for the reconstruction of his work. This paper examines the considerations that have been used since the 1850s to support those judgments, and it argues that the considerations are uniformly unreliable. The upshot as regards Mem. 1.2 is that Xenophon’s work provides us with precious information as to how the prosecution sought to fill out its indictment of Socrates with evidence of his corrupting influence.