In addition to teaching positions at Harvard, Brandeis, St. John's College, Annapolis and NYU, Benardete taught Greek and Latin at the CUNY Latin/Greek Institute, and was a fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich.
His publications range over the spectrum of classical texts and include works on Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, the Attic tragedians, and most especially Plato and Aristotle.
Benardete's method of reading is described by his posture as a reader, following Strauss, in this way: the great writers in a tradition are to be treated as powerful thinkers who have complete control over what they say, how and when they said it, and what they omit.
Further, each successive "great" writer in a tradition must be assumed to be fully aware and in control of the elements of the philosophical and artistic conversation that arises in the foundational texts.
In the spirit of the continuing engagement of moderns with the classical authors, Benardete showed great respect for the various traditions of commentary (the Alexandrians, the Byzantine editors, and the German tradition of Altertumswissenschaft) in contrast to more recent trends in scholarship which sometimes tend to homogenize the thought of great writers into their cultures and to adduce bits of textual evidence to prove a point without due regard to the entirety of the text from which it is excerpted.