Meno

 When first I read the Meno and The Anabasis, the identity of Socrates's interlocutor in the first and the mercenary general in the latter escaped me. However, this summer I reread the Meno , and this time paid attention to the editor's foreword, where Meno's subsequent adventures and death are mentioned.

Having done so, I took a look at The Anabasis. The picture of Meno that Plato paints is not especially flattering, somewhere around the average for Socrates's second bananas. The picture that Xenophon paints is considerably nastier:

As to Menon the Thessalian, the mainspring of his action was obvious; what he sought after insatiably was wealth. Rule he sought after only as a stepping-stone to larger spoils. Honours and high estate he craved for simply that he might extend the area of his gains; and if he studied to be on friendly terms with the powerful, it was in order that he might commit wrong with impunity. The shortest road to the achievement of his desires lay, he thought, through false swearing, lying, and cheating; for in his vocabulary simplicity and truth were synonyms of folly. Natural affection he clearly entertained for nobody. If he called a man his friend it might be looked upon as certain that he was bent on ensnaring him. Laughter at an enemy he considered out of place, but his whole conversation turned upon the ridicule of his associates. In like manner, the possessions of his foes were secure from his designs, since it was no easy task, he thought, to steal from people on their guard; but it was his particular good fortune to have discovered how easy it is to rob a friend in the midst of his security. If it were a perjured person or a wrongdoer, he dreaded him as well armed and intrenched; but the honourable and the truth-loving he tried to practise on, regarding them as weaklings devoid of manhood. And as other men pride themselves on piety and truth and righteousness, so Menon prided himself on a capacity for fraud, on the fabrication of lies, on the mockery and scorn of friends. The man who was not a rogue he ever looked upon as only half educated. Did he aspire to the first place in another man's friendship, he set about his object by slandering those who stood nearest to him in affection. He contrived to secure the obedience of his solders by making himself an accomplice in their misdeeds, and the fluency with which he vaunted his own capacity and readiness for enormous guilt was a sufficient title to be honoured and courted by them. Or if any one stood aloof from him, he set it down as a meritorious act of kindness on his part that during their intercourse he had not robbed him of existence.

In the Meno (70e), Meno suggests that being good includes

 ... having what it takes to handle your city's affairs, and, in doing so, to help out your friends and hurt your enemies (while making sure they don't do the same to you)...

Xenophon says of Cyrus that

The prayer has been attributed to him, "God grant I may live along enough to recompense my friends and requite my foes with a strong arm."

Cyrus might well have lived long enough to recompense Meno, but he died of a head wound at Cunaxa. Meno seems to have intrigued with Artaxerxes's agents. Whether for this reason or not, he was not immediately beheaded with the rest of the Greek leaders at Canae; for his pains he got another year of life and maltreatment.