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although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have the slight advantage of him. Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions to wisdom, and my conclusion was exactly the same. Whereupon I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him. (
Apology,
Jowett trans.)
    Socrates went to the poets. To his astonishment he found “that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.” When he consulted the artisans he found that they did know many fine things of which he was ignorant. But they fell into the same error as the poets: “because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.” So his inquisitions multiplied his enemies.
    But even some of his devoted disciples questioned the effectiveness of his educational technique. An ardent admirer, Antisthenes (c. 445-360 B.C.), founder of the Cynic school of philosophy, embarrassed Socrates. He asked why, if Socrates really believed women to be just as educable as men, he was unable to improve the temperament of his wife, Xanthippe, reputedly “the most troublesome woman of all time.” By this woman whose name would become a byword for the shrew, Socrates had had three sons. Through the wine haze of the symposium, Socrates good-naturedly retorted that it was precisely because of her reputation that he had married her—to test his educative talents. Just as a horse trainer shows his mettle not by handling a docile animal, so, he said, if he could tame Xanthippe he would have proved there was no one he could not mollify.
    These interviews persuaded Socrates that he had found the true meaning of the Delphic oracle: “He [the Delphic oracle] is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing” (
Apology
). So it became his vocation to vindicate the oracle by quizzing people of all sorts, and showing them that they were not as wise as they thought they were. And he explained that he had no time for public affairs or for any concern of his own, and remained in poverty by his devotion to the god. Aristotle, perhaps deliberately to discredit Plato’s dramatic tale in the
Apology,
was reported to offer a much simpler explanation. He suggested it was Socrates’ own visit to Delphi, where he was impressed by the inscription “Know Thyself” carved on the temple there, that inspired him to pursue his studies of the nature of man.
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    Whatever may have been the impulse, Socrates’ historic mission was the discovery of ignorance. As a young man he seems to have shared the physicists’ interest in nature. But this interest dimmed as he saw that their cosmologies spawned a chaos of contradictory oversimplifications. And meanwhile the Sophists—like Protagoras and Gorgias and others—prospered not as a school of philosophy but as teachers of the arts of persuasion and the way to success. Protagoras said he taught “virtue,” by which he meant the arts of succeeding in his conventional world.