A Classicist’s Comments

Sebell’s book provides an intense and insightful commentary on Memorabilia 4, built around the thesis that Xenophon’s central goal is to point good readers toward the theological solution to the problem of politics. That thesis is not overt in the Memorabilia itself, so the bulk of Sebell’s book is devoted to showing how better sorts of readers benefit from thinking through arguments originally addressed to a decidedly limited Socratic interlocutor, Euthydemos. But Sebell’s book is not easy. His sentences are sometimes labyrinthine in their complexity. And as someone Sebell would call, reasonably enough, a conventional classicist, my difficulties in following his argument are larger.