BOOK REVIEWSGreek Tragedy & Political Philosophy: Rationalism and Religion in Sophocles’ Theban Plays. By Peter

J. Ahrensdorf. Pp. x, 192, Cambridge University Press, 2009, d45.00/$80.00.

Ahrensdorf belongs to a revisionist school ofclassical thinkers who question whether Sophoclescelebrated the heroic greatness of the protagonistscoming down to him from the Homeric epictradition – claiming instead that Sophocles viewedthem as displaying an eccentric one-sidedness,specifically an uncontrolled egoism, trying tobreak the human limitation to mortality, selfishlyseeking a godlike status like Hercules, trying toseize immortality for themselves. They pursuedthis in an obsessional, unbalanced fashion, bring-ing destruction on themselves, their families, andthe city as well. In each Theban play Ahrensdorffinds Sophocles’ sympathy lies with a secondarycharacter who tries unsuccessfully to caution theprotagonist away from his heroic outsizedness:Teiresias in Oedipus the Tyrant, Theseus inOedipus at Colonus, and Ismene in Antigone.Ahrensdorf discusses Socrates, Aristotle, andNietzsche, but his position is closer to Hume’s:man is beset by two powers: reason and thepassions (conventional pieties). The two areopposed to one another, but to follow either oneexclusively is a recipe for disaster; each is best usedto accommodate, moderate, and temper the other.It is as though we were driving a wagon pulled bytwo unmatched horses or a car with a loosesteering column, so that we constantly over-correct and have difficulty keeping the vehicle inthe proper lane. We are in constant danger ofgoing off the road into a ditch on either side.Reason is no more noble here than the otherfaculties; in a pure or unmixed indulgence, it isequally dangerous. Reason is understood by

Ahrensdorf in the modern Enlightenment senseas a sceptical astringent - undercutting, sterile, andprophylactic - rather than performing a purgationof the myths to produce a speculative philosophi-cal replacement, as in Diotima’s vision of thehuman vocation as one of rising to love the Sourceof Beauty beyond sense beauties, as related inSocrates’s speech in the Symposium that is notdiscussed here. Ahrensdorf makes reductionist useof Aristotle’s thesis that all creatures have alonging to imitate immortal substance as comple-tely as they can, thereby to attain a species ofimmortality; he uses this to argue that the hero’sapparent willingness to sacrifice his or her selfconstitutes no unselfish, courageous or nobleexception to this general norm, but rather is onlya cleverly disguised and self-deluding form of thesame that unfortunately achieves the opposite forthe protagonists and all those about them. Ratherthan celebrating tragedy as the first occasion in thedevelopment of Western man where an opportu-nity was found to contemplate dispassionately thearguments pro and con for theodicy, thereby toadvance to Plato’s and Aristotle’s comparativelyoptimistic theologies without feeling that one hadleft out or under-appreciated significant counter-data, Ahrensdorf sees tragedy as cautioning awayfrom a culminating, speculative phase of thehuman project to knowedge, as unfortunatelyfilling the would-be knower with a set of principlesand expectations hopelessly at variance with whatthe human condition concretely has to offer.

Heythrop College Patrick Madigan

Apologizing for Socrates: How Plato and Xenophon Created Our Socrates. By Gabriel Danzig. Pp. v, 280,Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010, $75.00.

This is a clever book, and pleasingly wide-ranging,but it ultimately failed to convince this reviewer inall respects. Danzig has hold of an interestingthesis, which he has pursued over a number ofrecent articles, now revised and put together, alongwith additional material, as a single book. Thethesis is, essentially, that in all of Xenophon’sworks, and a significant number of Plato’s, the

authors were not, or not only, addressing thetopics they seem to be addressing, but were alsodefending Socrates’ memory. The idea that Platoand Xenophon (especially the latter) had anapologetic purpose is not new, but Danzigelaborates it in new and interesting ways.A large part of his thesis is negative: alternative

interpretations fail to take account of all the details

r 2011 The Authors. The Heythrop Journalr 2011 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

HeyJ LII (2011), pp. 1032–1084

of a dialogue. Only by seeing the unique ‘focus’that explains all the features of a work can we hopeto understand its purpose. And the purpose thatDanzig finds informing a number of relevantworks is that Plato and Xenophon were trying toaddress ‘the post-trial controversy’. The chief post-trial question, according to Danzig, was: why wasSocrates so incompetent and arrogant in court?The thesis works well for Plato’s and Xeno-

phon’s Apologies. Both are notoriously deficient,in their respective ways, as defence speeches. It is agood idea to see the purpose of these works asdefending Socrates against the charge of incompe-tence, and Danzig argues the thesis well in Chapter1 (19- 68). It follows, of course, that if these worksare pursuing theses of which Socrates himselfcannot have been aware, their value as evidence forthe historical Socrates is radically diminished.In Chapter 2 (69–113), Danzig applies the thesis

also to Plato’s Crito. He suggests that part of thepost-trial controversy was the question whySocrates chose not to escape (or, which comes tothe same thing, why he was abandoned by hisfriends), and that the purpose of this dialogue is toaddress this question, rather than the morephilosophical issue of the rights and wrongs ofescaping. Socrates emerges as upright, competent,and obedient to the laws. In order to maintain thisthesis, Danzig has to downplay the philosophy ofthe dialogue as jejune and muddled. This seemstoo extreme. There are serious philosophicalpoints raised in the dialogue, and some of themare echoed in other dialogues. It seems hard tomaintain that Plato had no interest in thephilosophical issues except as rhetorical devicesfor convincing the broad range of audiences thatDanzig envisages for the dialogue.Chapter 3 (115–49), on Plato’s Euthyphro, applies

the same method of exaggerating the weaknesses ofthe philosophical argumentation to claim thatEuthyphro is meant to be an image of Socrates’prosecutor Meletus. It’s not easy to see, however,how any reader, now or in the past, would havemade this connection. Even the clues that Danzigunearths are far from immediately transparent, not

least because we know hardly anything about eitherof these men as historical entities.The next two chapters (151–237) argue that in a

number of works both Plato and Xenophon wereconcerned to defend Socrates’ memory against thecharge of corrupting the youth. Whereas the actualcharge involved a kind of political/religiouscorruption, Danzig claims that it would have beennatural to read it as implying sexual corruption,and that this was a charge his followers wereconcerned to rebut. It is true, of course, that bothPlato and Xenophon portrayed Socrates as toohigh-minded to give in to lust, and really thesechapters do no more than display the evidence forthis in excessive detail; the point could have beenmade in a far shorter compass, just by referring tothe relevant passages. But I doubt that this chargewas very important at the time, either at an explicitor implicit level.The final Chapter 6 (239–63) is on Xenophon’s

Oeconomicus. This, on Danzig’s reading, addressesnot any specifics of the ‘post-trial controversy’, buta more general controversy: isn’t philosophy justan indolent and impractical waste of time?Socrates emerges, according to Danzig, as moreentitled to the honorific description ‘truly good’(kalos k’agathos) than Ischomachus (or anyoneelse in Athens).There is a lot of worthwhile detail in each of the

chapters, and students of any of the main worksexamined in the book will certainly want to readthe book for its insights. But the overall thesesseem to me to be somewhat tenuous. There is acertain circularity in that the evidence for thepost-trial controversy that Danzig claims Platoand Xenophon are addressing is only to be foundwithin the pages of Plato and Xenophon in thefirst place. Danzig’s point is to develop a readingof the dialogues as determined by audience andcharacter rather than philosophical interests assuch – a thesis that runs the risk of ignoring boththinkers’ evident interest in philosophical topicsand argumentation.

Lakonia, Greece Robin Waterfield

Socratica 2008: Studies in Ancient Socratic Literature. Edited by Livio Rossetti and Alessandro Stavru. Pp.vii, 353, Bari: Levante Editore, 2010, h32.00.

This reasonably priced collection of essays is thesecond in a projected series. Rossetti has longspecialized in the immediate followers of Socrates– what can be salvaged of their writings andthought. The present volume is the fruit of asecond international conference on the topic. Thethirteen essays are in Italian (7), English (2),

Spanish (2), and French (2). They are grouped asrelevant to: ‘The First Generation’ (4 essays);‘Plato’ (4 essays); ‘Xenophon’ (2 essays); and‘Nachleben’ (3 essays).Rossetti begins with an essay arguing that the

terms philosophia and philosophos were first usedprolifically by the first generation of Socratic

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