 How, then, did he come under such suspicion? Socrates claims it is because he led a life that seemed strange to his compatriots, in fulfillment of his mission. Socrates claims to have been given this mission by the god, evidently Apollo, and he identifies this mission with his gadfly role of shaming people into sharing his quest for virtue. He may have developed elenchus (which derives from a word for shame) for this purpose, but he has another purpose for elenchus as well. Once the oracle declared that no one was wiser than he, Socrates had set out to test the oracle’s meaning by examining all those who claimed to be wise. Finding none who could pass the test, he concluded that the meaning of the oracle was probably this: that true wisdom belongs to the god, and no human being can be wiser than a person who is aware, as Socrates says he is, of his own inadequacy in wisdom. In keeping with this result, Socrates is cautious in his philosophical claims in the Apology. On the subject of life after death, he presents himself as agnostic, although other texts show him to have been committed to the immortality of the soul.