Plato · Xenophon
Two witnesses, one teacher
Plato and Xenophon were near-contemporaries and both, in their youth, students of Socrates. Both went on to write substantial Socratic literature: Plato across the dialogues, Xenophon across the Memorabilia, the Apology, the Symposium and the Oeconomicus. They are our two principal sources for Socrates and they are recognisably different — different enough that reconstructing the historical Socrates from them is the classical scholarly difficulty known as the Socratic problem.
Where they differ
The Socrates of Plato is more philosophical in the ordinary sense: he asks after the Forms, he presses the question of definition, he argues for the immortality of the soul, he proposes the philosopher-king. The Socrates of Xenophon is more practical: he advises generals on the duties of office, householders on the management of property, the young on self-control and friendship. His conversations are concerned, throughout, with how to handle the ordinary materials of a life well.
The two Socrateses are not contradictory but they are differently weighted. Some of the difference reflects the genres each writer chose; some reflects the philosophical interests of each author working on the same source material; some, plausibly, reflects what each writer found most worth keeping of a teacher they had both known.
Where they are also different writers
Plato spent his adult life inside the Academy; Xenophon spent his on campaign and on a country estate. Their interests show this clearly. The same year Plato is teaching dialectic in Athens, Xenophon is writing manuals on hunting and cavalry command. The Cyropaedia and the Republic are written by men who had read the same teacher and gone on to think about leadership in recognisably different ways.
Why it matters for Virtue & Power
The standard scholarly counterweight to reading Plato alone is to read Xenophon alongside him. The platform follows that practice: our entry on Socrates uses both, the entries on Republic and Cyropaedia are deliberately paired in the cross-reference graph, and the comparison itself sits here as the natural starting point.