Socrates and Æsop

[Socrates is in prison, awaiting his imminent execution in the company of several of his closest friends. One of these said to him,] "Evenus, the poet, wanted to know why you, who never before wrote a line of poetry, now that you are in prison are turning Æsop’s fables into verse." [...]

[Socrates replied,] "In the course of my life I have often had intimations in dreams 'that I should compose music.' [...] And hitherto I had imagined that this was only intended to exhort and encourage me in the study of philosophy, which has been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music. [...] But I was not certain of this; for the dream might have meant music in the popular sense of the word, and being under sentence of death, and the festival giving me a respite, I thought that it would be safer for me to satisfy the scruple, and, in obedience to the dream, to compose a few verses before I departed. And first I made a hymn in honor of the god of the festival, and then considering that a poet, if he is really to be a poet, should not only put together words, but should invent stories."

(Plato, Phædo, as translated by Benjamin Jowett)

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Maybe it's a trifle, but I found it fun that in his last month that Socrates should turn from philosophizing to storytelling. Of the higher deities, both of these are the domain of Apollo; but of the lower, I should think that this is a shift from the Sun to the Moon. The Sun, after all, shines plainly, and philosophy is—at least ostensibly, and certainly to Socrates—the direct means of attempting to apprehend and communicate knowledge. But the Moon is a luminary as well: She shines, but with reflected light. And so storytelling is also a means, but an indirect one, of apprehending and communicating knowledge.

A Socrates would begin with a "wise" man and make him a "fool" using truths, so that his now-unclouded eyes could see clearly in the light. But a Scheherazade would begin with a fool and make him wise using lies, so that his now-beguiled eyes could navigate in the darkness.

Different means, but the same goal. I wondered that Socrates' friends thought such a thing so odd; but I suppose they all went and lamented his death even after he spent three hours telling them not to, so...