Your complimentary articles You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month. You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please Brief Lives Hilarius Bogbinder looks at the life of the other biographer of Socrates. “Well, Xenophon, I have been told that you are an Athenian, and that was all I knew about you” ( Anabasis , III,I,45). The philosopher, biographer, economist, horseman, and soldier Xenophon (430-355 BC) wrote these lines about himself in his perhaps most famous book Anabasis ( The Expedition ) – an eye-witness account of an ill-fated military operation. His apparently effortless ease of writing earned him the sobriquet ‘the Attic muse’; but poor Xenophon was always destined to play second fiddle to his compatriot Plato (428-348 BC), who according to the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius (180-240 AD) was jealous of ‘the sweetness of his style’ ( The Lives of Eminent Philosophers ).…