Socrates and Aesop : a few notes on Plato's portrait of the arch-philosopher

The description in the Phaedo of the last day of Socrates opens with the philosopher recounting a fable on pain and pleasure which is soon followed by the surprising reference to an obscure literary heritage, of which nothing is heard in the rest of the platonic corpus. Socrates composed the night before a hymn to Apollo and versified some Aesopic fables as a response to a dream that he had. The paper discusses the similarities and the suggestive differences between the literary portraits of these two unconventional wise men. This is a necessary first methodological step in the attempt to decipher the platonic assimilation of the fabulist Aesop into his portrayal of Socrates.