In fifth-century BC Greece, one figure has cast a longer shadow than almost anyone else — a man widely seen as the philosopher’s philosopher. Socrates, famously unkempt and unruly, wandered the squares of Athens picking apart the confident opinions of anyone who’d engage with him. His method was disarmingly simple: ask questions until the other person realised they didn’t actually know what they thought they knew. That habit, endearing to some and infuriating to others, eventually got him killed.
Most Icelanders have encountered Socrates through Plato, his most celebrated student. But a new angle is opening up. This fall sees the first Icelandic publication of Memoirs of Socrates, written by the ancient Greek historian Xenophon. Translator Kristján Guðjónsson sat down with Hjalti Snæ Ægisson on Rás 1 to talk through what this means.
Hjalti considers the publication a landmark of sorts — it may well be the first Icelandic book about Socrates that isn’t by Plato, at least among writers who actually knew the man.
“Plato and Xenophon are the two main figures from Socrates’ own time whose work has survived,” Hjalti explains. “A great deal was lost, but what these two left behind has always held a particular status.”
Socrates himself wrote nothing — a fact that has fuelled centuries of argument about whose account is trustworthy. Every portrait of him is filtered through someone else’s pen, and things get lost, shaded, or quietly reshaped along the way.
“The heart of what he did was spoken,” Hjalti observes. “When Socrates was talking in the streets of Athens, there may have been texts nearby, but it was the voice that carried the weight.”
While this is Xenophon’s first appearance in Icelandic as a standalone work, he has turned up in anthologies before. Hjalti is quick to flag the difference in tone between the two writers: “Xenophon is more of a storyteller. Plato works through philosophical dialogue, and often keeps himself out of the frame entirely.”
Plato was present in Socrates’ final days and wrote about them with a certain cool remove. Xenophon steps into the conversation himself, which gives his account a different texture — and says something about how differently the two men thought.
There’s a complication, though. Xenophon had left Athens to fight in Persia by the time Socrates stood trial, so he was piecing his account together from what others told him. “That’s drawn criticism,” Hjalti notes, “but it also gives his Socrates a distinct character — someone quite different from the figure Plato draws.”
Xenophon’s Socrates reads as more down-to-earth, practical, and perhaps a shade more conservative. “He speaks with more conviction,” Hjalti remarks.
Where Plato’s Socrates dances through contradictions, drawing interlocutors into a kind of intellectual trap that exposes what they don’t know, Xenophon’s version is more straightforward. “His Socrates makes clear statements about how things should be done,” Hjalti explains. “Plato’s Socrates questions and probes without ever claiming to have the answers himself.”
Plato’s writing reaches for grand abstractions — beauty, virtue, the ideal. Xenophon stays closer to the ground: war, politics, ethics, the texture of daily life.
So which one gives us the real Socrates? That’s the crux of what scholars call the “Socrates problem” — the difficulty of reconstructing a historical figure from records that are partial, biased, and written by people with their own agendas.
For a long time, some scholars preferred Xenophon precisely because he seemed less invested in making Socrates into something extraordinary. “He captures lived experience,” Hjalti suggests. “There’s a groundedness to it that lends his account a kind of believability.”
Plato, on the other hand, was such a gifted writer that readers have tended to forgive — or simply not notice — where his portrait might have drifted from reality.
“Plato wrote for an audience already primed to see Socrates as exceptional,” Hjalti puts it. “They came ready to engage with something weighty. Picking up a book by Plato carries that expectation with it.”
Xenophon pitches to a broader crowd. “He brings Socrates to people who might not yet know why he matters,” Hjalti says.
With Memoirs of Socrates now available in Icelandic for the first time, readers have a chance to meet a Socrates they may not have encountered before — and to weigh, for themselves, what kind of man he actually was.
