Socrates’ atopia , his ‘strangeness’, confronts
modern readers most acutely in the religious
attitudes and experiences we encounter in
Plato’s dialogues, where Socrates is subject to
influences and forces less familiar to us than
they were to his contemporaries. All we have
in the case of Socrates, whatever his private
experiences may have been, are representations
by writers, mainly Plato and Xenophon,
who shared his religious discourse but who
also were motivated by their own agendas.
Indeed, one critic is sceptical that it is possible
to speak confidently about Socratic religion
at all, if the developmentalist view of the
Platonic dialogues is false, not to mention the
difficulties of inquiring into private religion
in classical antiquity generally (Gocer 2000:
120–3).