For if this is what they mean, I would agree that I am an orator, though not one of their kind. These men, as I say, have said little or nothing true, but from me you will hear the whole truth.

In the first sentence he said they spoke "nothing true." Now it is "little or nothing," a small correction that sounds like care rather than retreat. The promise that follows, "you will hear the whole truth," is still how witnesses are sworn in, and it is one of the oldest appearances of the phrase. Rhētōr was close to a job title in Athens: the men who spoke in the assembly and the courts. Socrates had avoided public life for most of his seventy years. Accepting the word "on his own terms" is a polite way of saying he is nothing like them.