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Xenophon was actually made or used by Socrates seems to meunanswerable. Looked at in a wider perspective, it seems to me that Plato’s version may well capture the atmosphere of the trial and of Socrates’ defence more authentically than Xenophon’s, for two reasons. First, the prominence which Plato gives to Aristophanes’ caricature and its effects (entirely absent from Xenophon’s version) sets the accusation in its historical background and gives much more point to the accusations of religious nonconformity and innovation than does Xenophon. Secondly, the presentation of Socrates’ elenctic mission as service to the god and benefit to the city expresses much better than Xenophon’s bland presentation the unconventional character of Socrates’ defence, and, ironically enough, displays much more forcefully than his own version the arrogance which he says all writers have remarked on and which he sets out to explain.

Chapter 3
Socratic Literature and the Socratic Problem
    The account of Socrates’ life and death attempted in the previous chapter has already involved us in grappling with the so-called ‘Socratic problem’, that is, the question of what access our sources give us to the life and character of the historical Socrates. Every statement in that chapter has involved some assumptions, explicit or implicit, about the character and reliability of the source on which it relies. In particular, the account of Socrates’ trial emphasizes the different apologetic stances which shape the presentations of Socrates’ defence by Plato and Xenophon, concluding that, while we can identify with some plausibility the main lines of the attack on Socrates, our sources merely suggest to us the general tenor of his defence, while leaving us agnostic about the detail. It is the task of this chapter to put that result into context by giving a brief sketch of the extant ancient literature dealing with Socrates and of the genres to which it belongs.
    Authors Other Than Plato
    On the first kind of Socratic literature, the depiction of Socrates in fifth-century comedy, I have nothing to add to the previous chapter. It is the only Socratic literature known to have been written before Socrates’ death, and its depiction of Socrates cannot have been influenced by Plato. It gives us a contemporary caricature, which associates Socrates with some important aspects of contemporary intellectual life, andwhich we have every reason to believe contributed substantially to the climate of suspicion and hostility which led eventually to his death.
    In the opening chapter of his Poetics Aristotle refers to ‘Socratic conversations’ ( Sōkratikoi logoi ) as belonging to an as yet nameless genre of representation together with the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus, two fifth-century Sicilian writers (apparently father and son). The ‘mimes’ were dramatic representations of scenes from everyday life (we have a few titles such as Mother-in-Law and The Tuna Fishers ), fictional and apparently comic, classified into those with male and those with female characters; there is no suggestion that the characters portrayed included actual historical individuals. Though Aristotle counts them as belonging to the same genre as Socratic conversations, and Plato was said to have introduced them to Athens and to have been influenced by them in his depictions of character, we should not exaggerate the degree of resemblance, which consists essentially in the fact that both are representations in prose of conversations from (roughly) contemporary life. In particular, we should not jump to the conclusion that because the mimes are wholly fictional, and because Socratic conversations belong to the same genre as the mimes, therefore Socratic conversations are wholly fictional. There is at least one respect in which they are not wholly fictional, in that their characters are mostly taken from real life. The extent to which the depiction of those characters is