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Socrates delivers a funeral oration which he says was written by Aspasia who, he adds, had taught rhetoric to many, including Pericles, and had written the famous funeral speech reported by Thucydides in book 2 of his history. The topic of marriage guidance provides an interesting link with Xenophon, for the recipients of Aspasia’s wise advice described by Socrates are none other than Xenophon and his wife. (The style of the advice is characteristically Socratic, since Aspasia proceeds by a series of instances in which both husband and wife want to have the best of any kind of thing, dress, horse, etc., to the conclusion that they both want the best spouse, from which she infers that each of them has to make their partnership perfect.) It can hardly be coincidence that Xenophon twice refers to Aspasia’s expertise in matchmaking and the training of wives ( Mem . 2.6.36, Oec . 3.14). We should not, of course, suppose that Xenophon had actually benefited personally from Aspasia’s expertise, as Aeschines depicts; the point is that this was a common theme in the Socratic literary circle, and that whoever treated it later (a question which the evidence seems to leave open) probably did so with the earlier treatment in mind. We must remain equally agnostic about the relative priority of Plato’s Menexenus and the Aspasias of Aeschines and Antisthenes, and of that of the various Alcibiadeses . In general, there seems little if any ground for the attempt to assign relative priority among Socratic works, with the exception of a few cases where Xenophon seems fairly clearly to refer to works of Plato.
    The Socratic writings of Xenophon and Plato’s Socratic dialogues are the only bodies of Socratic literature to have survived complete. Inaddition to Xenophon’s version of Socrates’ defence, we have his Memorabilia , four books of reports, mostly in direct speech, of Socrates’ conversations; Symposium , a lively account of a dinner-party at which Socrates is a guest, similar to and certainly containing references to Plato’s Symposium ; and Oeconomicus , a moralizing treatise on estate-management in the form of a Socratic dialogue. The opening of the Memorabilia makes it clear that its purpose is primarily apologetic. Xenophon begins by citing the accusation against Socrates and introduces the conversations by elaborating in the first two chapters the themes of his Apology , that Socrates was exceptionally pious, of exemplary virtue, and a good influence on his younger associates, some of whom, unfortunately, went to the bad through neglecting his advice. In the rest of the book these themes are developed in a series of conversations, normally between Socrates and one other person, though sometimes it is said that others were present; the interlocutors are mostly familiar figures from the Socratic circle, such as Aristippus, Crito and his son Critobulus, and Xenophon himself, but also including others, such as one of the sons of Pericles, the sophists Antiphon and Hippias, and a high-class prostitute named Theodote. The final chapter returns to the theme which opens the Apology , that Socrates did not prepare a defence because his divine sign had indicated to him that it was better for him to die then than to decline into senility, concluding with a eulogy of Socrates as the best and happiest of men, who not only excelled in all the virtues but also promoted them in others.
    The work is then essentially a fuller, illustrated version of the Apology . In keeping with the character of the latter, the content of the conversations is heavily slanted towards piety, moral uplift, and good practical advice. For example Socrates gives an irreligious acquaintance called Aristodemus a little lecture on the providential ordering of the world, pointing out among other things how the eyelashes are designed to screen the eyes from the wind (1.4), and he encourages the hedonist Aristippus to self-control by telling him a story from