The pair of Phocion and Cato the Younger contains a kind of anticipated synkrisis. This
anticipation has implications for the author’s narrative strategy. Plutarch seems to prefer
Phocion, if one might judge from the way he highlights the text with clues that organize the
interpretation of the macrotext. This is to be seen in the way he cites models or plays with the
same hypotexts differently in the cases of Phocion and Cato, both of them close to Socrates’
model. It has already been said that the ostentatiousness of the Socratic model in the reading of
Phaedo by Cato permits the reader to glimpse a misunderstood appropriation of it. In Phocion’s
Life, on the other hand, the reader must look for the hypotext and its paradigmatic dimension
– either Herodotus (Solon before Croesus’ treasure/Phocion before Alexander’s treasures) or
Plato (Ap., Phd., Cri.) – in Phocion’s placid and soft attitude in his last moments, where some
coincidences of episodes before his death and that of Socrates are to be seen, or in Phocion’s
behaviour throughout his life. He kept his constantia of character, even under hard circumstances,
when Tyche was adverse to him and caused him to be misunderstood by the people or led to
death by the manipulation of demagogues.