The Philosophical Rhetoric Of Socrates' Mission
by Robert Metcalf, published by Philosophy and Rhetoric, Penn State University Press
Socrates' account of his "mission" on behalf of the god at Delphi is one of the most memorable parts of his most famous memorial in Plato's Apology. But it is also controversial as to what it means to Socrates and what it should mean to readers of Plato's text. First, there is the curious fact that the story occurs nowhere outside the competing versions of Socrates' defense speech in Plato and Xenophon, and in the latter version the oracular report differs significantly in content and import: there the Pythia proclaims, not that no one is wiser than Socrates, but that no one is more generous or more just or more "soundminded" (sophron), and Xenophon's Socrates uses this as evidence that he "outshone the rest of mankind" and "deserves congratulations from gods and men alike" (Apology 14-18). Furthermore, the sequence of events that make up Socrates' "mission" is itself difficult to discern, from its apparent prompting by the oracular message to Chaerephon, to Socrates' initial effort to refute it, to his ultimate practice of elenchos in order that the oracle (or, at least, his interpretation of the oracle) might remain unrefuted. Not surprisingly, it was already a matter of controversy in the third century BC, as we read in the above quotation from Plutarch's Moralia...