A certain tradition wanted to limit Xenophon to the role of a secondary chronicler and memoirist; in reality, he was a philosopher and man of action, one of Socrates' most devoted students, and he developed original thoughts on ethics and the management of political affairs, on economy and war (he was the hero of Cyrus' ascent, mainly the descent of the Myriads). He did not hesitate to reconstruct, in his "Symposium," Plato's famous dialogue, developing there another discourse on love. Montesquieu himself seems to have succumbed to the charms of this text, to the point of repeating a part of it in "The Spirit of the Laws"; "The Apology of Socrates" presents his teacher before his judges, but introduces so many differences compared to Plato's "Apology" that one must take both dialogues into account to approach more closely the figure of the founder of philosophy. The texts are published with introductions by the great thinker Leo Strauss.