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which he was cut off from personal contact with Athens and must therefore have relied on the writings of other Socratics, including Plato, to refresh his memory and deepen his knowledge of Socrates. Since the philosophical overlaps mentioned above could all be explained by Platonic influence, and since we must assume that Xenophon made some use of Plato’s writings in his absence from Athens, the most prudent strategy is to acknowledge that the philosophical elements in the Memorabilia should not be treated as an independent source for the philosophy of the historical Socrates. Equally, we have no reason to suppose that either Xenophon’s portrayal of Socrates’ personality or his presentation of the content of his conversations is any morehistorically authentic than that of any other Socratic writer. He is indeed himself the interlocutor in one conversation (1.3.8–15), and in some other cases he says that he was present (e.g. 1.4, 2.4–5, 4.3), but in most cases he makes no such claim, and in any case the claim to have been present may itself be part of literary convention; he says that he attended the dinner-party depicted in his Symposium ( Symp . 1.1), whose dramatic date is 422, when he was at most eight years old. Some of the conversations are clear instances of types current in Socratic literature, such as discussions with sophists (1.6, 2.1, 4.4) and cross-examinations of ambitious young men (3.1–6, 4.2–3). The presentation of Socrates’ conversations in the Memorabilia may indeed owe something to memory of actual Socratic conversations, either Xenophon’s own or the memory of others, but ( a ) we have no way of identifying which elements in the work have that source, and ( b ) it is clear that any such elements contribute to a work which is shaped by its general apologetic aim and by the literary conventions of the Socratic genre.
    I conclude this section by considering another writer who, though not a writer of Socratic dialogues, has been held to be a source of independent information on the historical Socrates, namely Aristotle. (Aristotle did write dialogues, now lost, but there is nothing to suggest that they were Socratic in the sense of representing conversations of Socrates.) Unlike the others whom we have discussed, Aristotle had no personal acquaintance with Socrates, who died fifteen years before Aristotle was born. He joined Plato’s Academy as a seventeen-year-old student in 367 and remained there for twenty years until Plato’s death in 347. It is assumed that in that period he had personal association with Plato. There are numerous references to Socrates in his works; frequently the context makes it clear that he is referring to the character of Socrates portrayed in some Platonic work, for example, Politics 1261 a 5–8, where he refers to Plato’s Republic by name, saying ‘There Socrates says that wives and children and possessions should be held in common’. Sometimes, however, the context indicates thatAristotle’s intention is to refer to the historical Socrates, and it is with regard to some of these passages that we have to consider whether his presentation of Socrates may plausibly be thought to be independent of Plato’s portrayal.
    The crucial passage is Metaphysics 1078 b 27–32, where Aristotle, discussing the antecedents of Plato’s theory of Forms, says the following:
There are two things which may justly be ascribed to Socrates, inductive arguments and general definitions, for both are concerned with the starting-point of knowledge; Socrates did not, however, separate the universal or the definitions, but they [i.e. Plato and his followers ] did, calling them the Forms of things.
    Since Plato represents Socrates as maintaining the theory of separately existing Forms in several dialogues, notably Phaedo and Republic , and referring to it as something which is familiar to everyone taking part in the discussion ( Ph . 76d, Rep . 507a–b), the information that Socrates