Menexenus

This one's a true oddball. I'm not sure what to make of it.  It's not much of a dialog at all.  There's a brief frame story exchange where Menexenus asks Socrates to recite a funeral oration for some fallen soldiers.  Socrates claims he learned a beautiful one from Aspasia, the renowned lover of Pericles.  The rest is Socrates giving the speech, which is basically just a bunch of ra-ra crap about how great and brave Athenians are and how proud one should be of dying for the patria.  

While the editorial comments suggest that the speech could be a satire, I don't see much evidence of that.  Of course, I don't know the style one should expect from a speech like this, nor the detailed history of Athenian bravery in the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars that it references.  There are plenty of other occasions where Plato's jokes are obviously funny even after 2500 years, so the hypothesis seems a stretch.  

Perhaps he's trying to convey what he considers important and essential about Athenian politics?  The speech contains two main themes.  First, Athenians are the authentic and pure Greeks and they don't mix with barbarians™.  Second, Athenians love freedom and they consider themselves the guardians of freedom for all Greeks.  But given that Kagan's course seems to indicate both would have been establishment views in Athens, it's hard to figure out why Plato would bother to put othodox platitudes in Socrates' mouth.   

So basically we just don't know dude.