If He Can Face the Cross-Examination
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Socrates — … εἰ μὲν εἰδὼς ᾗ τὸ ἀληθὲς ἔχει συνέθηκε ταῦτα, καὶ ἔχων βοηθεῖν, εἰς ἔλεγχον ἰὼν περὶ ὧν ἔγραψε, καὶ λέγων αὐτὸς δυνατὸς τὰ γεγραμμένα φαῦλα ἀποδεῖξαι…
The message from the shrine of the Nymphs is a single test, applied to three kinds of writer at once — Lysias and the speech-composers, Homer and the poets, Solon and the lawgivers. It is not about the writing. It asks whether the writer 'composed these things knowing how the truth stands' (eidōs hē to alēthes echei), and whether he is 'able to defend them' (echōn boēthein), 'going into cross-examination (eis elenchon iōn) about what he wrote,' and is 'himself able, by speaking, to show that his written things are paltry' (ta gegrammena phaula apodeixai). The apodosis waits until the next line — such a man should be named not after his writings but after what he is serious about — but the criterion is complete here, and it is entirely a spoken one: everything turns on what the writer can do when questioned, out loud, in person, with the book set aside.
Socrates gives the message the Nymphs' shrine charged him to deliver — to Lysias and every speech-writer, to Homer and every poet, to Solon and every lawgiver. The test of them all is one thing: not whether they wrote, but whether the writer knows the truth of what he wrote and can defend it in living examination, even showing his own words to be slight beside it.
The word on which the whole test hangs is <em>elenchos</em>, and it is the most Socratic word in the language. It names the examination Socrates practices everywhere in Plato — not lecturing an opponent but questioning him until the contradiction buried in his own confident answers rises to the surface and he sees, often for the first time, that he does not know what he thought he knew. To 'go into the elenchos about what you wrote' is therefore to do the one thing the written page can never do: stand in a living room and answer for itself. A book, Socrates said, when you question it, 'goes on signifying one and the same thing forever'; a person can meet the objection, revise, distinguish, or concede. So the mark of real knowledge is not authorship but <em>answerability</em>. Notice how far Socrates pushes it: the true writer must be able to 'show his own writings to be <em>phaula</em>' — paltry, slight, of small account — beside the truth they point at. This is not false modesty but the exact reverse of the disgrace diagnosed a page earlier, where the shameful writer believed his text held 'great certainty and clarity.' The philosopher holds his books lightly, ready to disown them, because he values the living truth above his own record of it. And the boldness of the passage is that Homer is dragged into the dock beside Lysias and Solon — even the poet must submit to the elenchos, even the <em>Iliad</em> is only <em>phaula</em> if its maker cannot answer for what he knows. Plato, who will refuse the poets a place in his ideal city, here offers them the same door out that he offers everyone: not the beauty of what you wrote, but whether you can be questioned to the ground and still stand.
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