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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Apology, by Plato
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Apology
+       Also known as “The Death of Socrates”
+       
+Author: Plato
+
+Translator: Benjamin Jowett
+
+Release Date: February, 1999 [EBook #1656]
+[Most recently updated: October 4, 2020]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APOLOGY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+Apology
+
+by Plato
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+
+Contents
+
+ INTRODUCTION
+ APOLOGY
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+In what relation the “Apology” of Plato stands to the real defence of
+Socrates, there are no means of determining. It certainly agrees in
+tone and character with the description of Xenophon, who says in the
+“Memorabilia” that Socrates might have been acquitted “if in any
+moderate degree he would have conciliated the favour of the dicasts;”
+and who informs us in another passage, on the testimony of Hermogenes,
+the friend of Socrates, that he had no wish to live; and that the
+divine sign refused to allow him to prepare a defence, and also that
+Socrates himself declared this to be unnecessary, on the ground that
+all his life long he had been preparing against that hour. For the
+speech breathes throughout a spirit of defiance, “_ut non supplex aut
+reus sed magister aut dominus videretur esse judicum_” (Cic. “de Orat.”
+i. 54); and the loose and desultory style is an imitation of the
+“accustomed manner” in which Socrates spoke in “the _agora_ and among
+the tables of the money-changers.” The allusion in the “Crito” (45 B)
+may, perhaps, be adduced as a further evidence of the literal accuracy
+of some parts (37 C, D). But in the main it must be regarded as the
+ideal of Socrates, according to Plato’s conception of him, appearing in
+the greatest and most public scene of his life, and in the height of
+his triumph, when he is weakest, and yet his mastery over mankind is
+greatest, and his habitual irony acquires a new meaning and a sort of
+tragic pathos in the face of death. The facts of his life are summed
+up, and the features of his character are brought out as if by accident
+in the course of the defence. The conversational manner, the seeming
+want of arrangement, the ironical simplicity, are found to result in a
+perfect work of art, which is the portrait of Socrates.
+
+Yet some of the topics may have been actually used by Socrates; and the
+recollection of his very words may have rung in the ears of his
+disciple. The “Apology” of Plato may be compared generally with those
+speeches of Thucydides in which he has embodied his conception of the
+lofty character and policy of the great Pericles, and which at the same
+time furnish a commentary on the situation of affairs from the point of
+view of the historian. So in the “Apology” there is an ideal rather
+than a literal truth; much is said which was not said, and is only
+Plato’s view of the situation. Plato was not, like Xenophon, a
+chronicler of facts; he does not appear in any of his writings to have
+aimed at literal accuracy. He is not therefore to be supplemented from
+the Memorabilia and Symposium of Xenophon, who belongs to an entirely
+different class of writers. The Apology of Plato is not the report of
+what Socrates said, but an elaborate composition, quite as much so in
+fact as one of the Dialogues. And we may perhaps even indulge in the
+fancy that the actual defence of Socrates was as much greater than the
+Platonic defence as the master was greater than the disciple. But in
+any case, some of the words used by him must have been remembered, and
+some of the facts recorded must have actually occurred. It is
+significant that Plato is said to have been present at the defence
+(Apol.), as he is also said to have been absent at the last scene in
+the “Phædo”. Is it fanciful to suppose that he meant to give the stamp
+of authenticity to the one and not to the other?—especially when we
+consider that these two passages are the only ones in which Plato makes
+mention of himself. The circumstance that Plato was to be one of his
+sureties for the payment of the fine which he proposed has the
+appearance of truth. More suspicious is the statement that Socrates
+received the first impulse to his favourite calling of cross-examining
+the world from the Oracle of Delphi; for he must already have been
+famous before Chaerephon went to consult the Oracle (Riddell), and the
+story is of a kind which is very likely to have been invented. On the
+whole we arrive at the conclusion that the “Apology” is true to the
+character of Socrates, but we cannot show that any single sentence in
+it was actually spoken by him. It breathes the spirit of Socrates, but
+has been cast anew in the mould of Plato.
+
+There is not much in the other Dialogues which can be compared with the
+“Apology”. The same recollection of his master may have been present to
+the mind of Plato when depicting the sufferings of the Just in the
+“Republic”. The “Crito” may also be regarded as a sort of appendage to
+the “Apology”, in which Socrates, who has defied the judges, is
+nevertheless represented as scrupulously obedient to the laws. The
+idealization of the sufferer is carried still further in the
+“Georgias”, in which the thesis is maintained, that “to suffer is
+better than to do evil;” and the art of rhetoric is described as only
+useful for the purpose of self-accusation. The parallelisms which occur
+in the so-called “Apology” of Xenophon are not worth noticing, because
+the writing in which they are contained is manifestly spurious. The
+statements of the “Memorabilia” respecting the trial and death of
+Socrates agree generally with Plato; but they have lost the flavour of
+Socratic irony in the narrative of Xenophon.
+
+The “Apology” or Platonic defence of Socrates is divided into three
+parts: 1st. The defence properly so called; 2nd. The shorter address in
+mitigation of the penalty; 3rd. The last words of prophetic rebuke and
+exhortation.
+
+The first part commences with an apology for his colloquial style; he
+is, as he has always been, the enemy of rhetoric, and knows of no
+rhetoric but truth; he will not falsify his character by making a
+speech. Then he proceeds to divide his accusers into two classes;
+first, there is the nameless accuser—public opinion. All the world from
+their earliest years had heard that he was a corrupter of youth, and
+had seen him caricatured in the “Clouds” of Aristophanes. Secondly,
+there are the professed accusers, who are but the mouth-piece of the
+others. The accusations of both might be summed up in a formula. The
+first say, “Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching
+into things under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse
+appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others.” The second,
+“Socrates is an evil-doer and corrupter of the youth, who does not
+receive the gods whom the state receives, but introduces other new
+divinities.” These last words appear to have been the actual indictment
+(compare Xen. Mem.); and the previous formula, which is a summary of
+public opinion, assumes the same legal style.
+
+The answer begins by clearing up a confusion. In the representations of
+the Comic poets, and in the opinion of the multitude, he had been
+identified with the teachers of physical science and with the Sophists.
+But this was an error. For both of them he professes a respect in the
+open court, which contrasts with his manner of speaking about them in
+other places. (Compare for Anaxagoras, Phædo, Laws; for the Sophists,
+Meno, Republic, Tim., Theaet., Soph., etc.) But at the same time he
+shows that he is not one of them. Of natural philosophy he knows
+nothing; not that he despises such pursuits, but the fact is that he is
+ignorant of them, and never says a word about them. Nor is he paid for
+giving instruction—that is another mistaken notion:—he has nothing to
+teach. But he commends Evenus for teaching virtue at such a “moderate”
+rate as five minæ. Something of the “accustomed irony,” which may
+perhaps be expected to sleep in the ear of the multitude, is lurking
+here.
+
+He then goes on to explain the reason why he is in such an evil name.
+That had arisen out of a peculiar mission which he had taken upon
+himself. The enthusiastic Chaerephon (probably in anticipation of the
+answer which he received) had gone to Delphi and asked the oracle if
+there was any man wiser than Socrates; and the answer was, that there
+was no man wiser. What could be the meaning of this—that he who knew
+nothing, and knew that he knew nothing, should be declared by the
+oracle to be the wisest of men? Reflecting upon the answer, he
+determined to refute it by finding “a wiser;” and first he went to the
+politicians, and then to the poets, and then to the craftsmen, but
+always with the same result—he found that they knew nothing, or hardly
+anything more than himself; and that the little advantage which in some
+cases they possessed was more than counter-balanced by their conceit of
+knowledge. He knew nothing, and knew that he knew nothing: they knew
+little or nothing, and imagined that they knew all things. Thus he had
+passed his life as a sort of missionary in detecting the pretended
+wisdom of mankind; and this occupation had quite absorbed him and taken
+him away both from public and private affairs. Young men of the richer
+sort had made a pastime of the same pursuit, “which was not unamusing.”
+And hence bitter enmities had arisen; the professors of knowledge had
+revenged themselves by calling him a villainous corrupter of youth, and
+by repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and
+sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers
+when there is nothing else to be said of them.
+
+The second accusation he meets by interrogating Meletus, who is present
+and can be interrogated. “If he is the corrupter, who is the improver
+of the citizens?” (Compare Meno.) “All men everywhere.” But how absurd,
+how contrary to analogy is this! How inconceivable too, that he should
+make the citizens worse when he has to live with them. This surely
+cannot be intentional; and if unintentional, he ought to have been
+instructed by Meletus, and not accused in the court.
+
+But there is another part of the indictment which says that he teaches
+men not to receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new
+gods. “Is that the way in which he is supposed to corrupt the youth?”
+“Yes, it is.” “Has he only new gods, or none at all?” “None at all.”
+“What, not even the sun and moon?” “No; why, he says that the sun is a
+stone, and the moon earth.” That, replies Socrates, is the old
+confusion about Anaxagoras; the Athenian people are not so ignorant as
+to attribute to the influence of Socrates notions which have found
+their way into the drama, and may be learned at the theatre. Socrates
+undertakes to show that Meletus (rather unjustifiably) has been
+compounding a riddle in this part of the indictment: “There are no
+gods, but Socrates believes in the existence of the sons of gods, which
+is absurd.”
+
+Leaving Meletus, who has had enough words spent upon him, he returns to
+the original accusation. The question may be asked, Why will he persist
+in following a profession which leads him to death? Why?—because he
+must remain at his post where the god has placed him, as he remained at
+Potidaea, and Amphipolis, and Delium, where the generals placed him.
+Besides, he is not so overwise as to imagine that he knows whether
+death is a good or an evil; and he is certain that desertion of his
+duty is an evil. Anytus is quite right in saying that they should never
+have indicted him if they meant to let him go. For he will certainly
+obey God rather than man; and will continue to preach to all men of all
+ages the necessity of virtue and improvement; and if they refuse to
+listen to him he will still persevere and reprove them. This is his way
+of corrupting the youth, which he will not cease to follow in obedience
+to the god, even if a thousand deaths await him.
+
+He is desirous that they should let him live—not for his own sake, but
+for theirs; because he is their heaven-sent friend (and they will never
+have such another), or, as he may be ludicrously described, he is the
+gadfly who stirs the generous steed into motion. Why then has he never
+taken part in public affairs? Because the familiar divine voice has
+hindered him; if he had been a public man, and had fought for the
+right, as he would certainly have fought against the many, he would not
+have lived, and could therefore have done no good. Twice in public
+matters he has risked his life for the sake of justice—once at the
+trial of the generals; and again in resistance to the tyrannical
+commands of the Thirty.
+
+But, though not a public man, he has passed his days in instructing the
+citizens without fee or reward—this was his mission. Whether his
+disciples have turned out well or ill, he cannot justly be charged with
+the result, for he never promised to teach them anything. They might
+come if they liked, and they might stay away if they liked: and they
+did come, because they found an amusement in hearing the pretenders to
+wisdom detected. If they have been corrupted, their elder relatives (if
+not themselves) might surely come into court and witness against him,
+and there is an opportunity still for them to appear. But their fathers
+and brothers all appear in court (including “this” Plato), to witness
+on his behalf; and if their relatives are corrupted, at least they are
+uncorrupted; “and they are my witnesses. For they know that I am
+speaking the truth, and that Meletus is lying.”
+
+This is about all that he has to say. He will not entreat the judges to
+spare his life; neither will he present a spectacle of weeping
+children, although he, too, is not made of “rock or oak.” Some of the
+judges themselves may have complied with this practice on similar
+occasions, and he trusts that they will not be angry with him for not
+following their example. But he feels that such conduct brings
+discredit on the name of Athens: he feels too, that the judge has sworn
+not to give away justice; and he cannot be guilty of the impiety of
+asking the judge to break his oath, when he is himself being tried for
+impiety.
+
+As he expected, and probably intended, he is convicted. And now the
+tone of the speech, instead of being more conciliatory, becomes more
+lofty and commanding. Anytus proposes death as the penalty: and what
+counter-proposition shall he make? He, the benefactor of the Athenian
+people, whose whole life has been spent in doing them good, should at
+least have the Olympic victor’s reward of maintenance in the Prytaneum.
+Or why should he propose any counter-penalty when he does not know
+whether death, which Anytus proposes, is a good or an evil? And he is
+certain that imprisonment is an evil, exile is an evil. Loss of money
+might be an evil, but then he has none to give; perhaps he can make up
+a mina. Let that be the penalty, or, if his friends wish, thirty minæ;
+for which they will be excellent securities.
+
+
+           [_He is condemned to death._]
+
+
+He is an old man already, and the Athenians will gain nothing but
+disgrace by depriving him of a few years of life. Perhaps he could have
+escaped, if he had chosen to throw down his arms and entreat for his
+life. But he does not at all repent of the manner of his defence; he
+would rather die in his own fashion than live in theirs. For the
+penalty of unrighteousness is swifter than death; that penalty has
+already overtaken his accusers as death will soon overtake him.
+
+And now, as one who is about to die, he will prophesy to them. They
+have put him to death in order to escape the necessity of giving an
+account of their lives. But his death “will be the seed” of many
+disciples who will convince them of their evil ways, and will come
+forth to reprove them in harsher terms, because they are younger and
+more inconsiderate.
+
+He would like to say a few words, while there is time, to those who
+would have acquitted him. He wishes them to know that the divine sign
+never interrupted him in the course of his defence; the reason of
+which, as he conjectures, is that the death to which he is going is a
+good and not an evil. For either death is a long sleep, the best of
+sleeps, or a journey to another world in which the souls of the dead
+are gathered together, and in which there may be a hope of seeing the
+heroes of old—in which, too, there are just judges; and as all are
+immortal, there can be no fear of any one suffering death for his
+opinions.
+
+Nothing evil can happen to the good man either in life or death, and
+his own death has been permitted by the gods, because it was better for
+him to depart; and therefore he forgives his judges because they have
+done him no harm, although they never meant to do him any good.
+
+He has a last request to make to them—that they will trouble his sons
+as he has troubled them, if they appear to prefer riches to virtue, or
+to think themselves something when they are nothing.
+
+
+“Few persons will be found to wish that Socrates should have defended
+himself otherwise,”—if, as we must add, his defence was that with which
+Plato has provided him. But leaving this question, which does not admit
+of a precise solution, we may go on to ask what was the impression
+which Plato in the “Apology” intended to give of the character and
+conduct of his master in the last great scene? Did he intend to
+represent him (1) as employing sophistries; (2) as designedly
+irritating the judges? Or are these sophistries to be regarded as
+belonging to the age in which he lived and to his personal character,
+and this apparent haughtiness as flowing from the natural elevation of
+his position?
+
+For example, when he says that it is absurd to suppose that one man is
+the corrupter and all the rest of the world the improvers of the youth;
+or, when he argues that he never could have corrupted the men with whom
+he had to live; or, when he proves his belief in the gods because he
+believes in the sons of gods, is he serious or jesting? It may be
+observed that these sophisms all occur in his cross-examination of
+Meletus, who is easily foiled and mastered in the hands of the great
+dialectician. Perhaps he regarded these answers as good enough for his
+accuser, of whom he makes very light. Also there is a touch of irony in
+them, which takes them out of the category of sophistry. (Compare
+Euthyph.)
+
+That the manner in which he defends himself about the lives of his
+disciples is not satisfactory, can hardly be denied. Fresh in the
+memory of the Athenians, and detestable as they deserved to be to the
+newly restored democracy, were the names of Alcibiades, Critias,
+Charmides. It is obviously not a sufficient answer that Socrates had
+never professed to teach them anything, and is therefore not justly
+chargeable with their crimes. Yet the defence, when taken out of this
+ironical form, is doubtless sound: that his teaching had nothing to do
+with their evil lives. Here, then, the sophistry is rather in form than
+in substance, though we might desire that to such a serious charge
+Socrates had given a more serious answer.
+
+Truly characteristic of Socrates is another point in his answer, which
+may also be regarded as sophistical. He says that “if he has corrupted
+the youth, he must have corrupted them involuntarily.” But if, as
+Socrates argues, all evil is involuntary, then all criminals ought to
+be admonished and not punished. In these words the Socratic doctrine of
+the involuntariness of evil is clearly intended to be conveyed. Here
+again, as in the former instance, the defence of Socrates is untrue
+practically, but may be true in some ideal or transcendental sense. The
+commonplace reply, that if he had been guilty of corrupting the youth
+their relations would surely have witnessed against him, with which he
+concludes this part of his defence, is more satisfactory.
+
+Again, when Socrates argues that he must believe in the gods because he
+believes in the sons of gods, we must remember that this is a
+refutation not of the original indictment, which is consistent
+enough—“Socrates does not receive the gods whom the city receives, and
+has other new divinities”—but of the interpretation put upon the words
+by Meletus, who has affirmed that he is a downright atheist. To this
+Socrates fairly answers, in accordance with the ideas of the time, that
+a downright atheist cannot believe in the sons of gods or in divine
+things. The notion that demons or lesser divinities are the sons of
+gods is not to be regarded as ironical or sceptical. He is arguing “ad
+hominem” according to the notions of mythology current in his age. Yet
+he abstains from saying that he believed in the gods whom the State
+approved. He does not defend himself, as Xenophon has defended him, by
+appealing to his practice of religion. Probably he neither wholly
+believed, nor disbelieved, in the existence of the popular gods; he had
+no means of knowing about them. According to Plato (compare Phædo;
+Symp.), as well as Xenophon (Memor.), he was punctual in the
+performance of the least religious duties; and he must have believed in
+his own oracular sign, of which he seemed to have an internal witness.
+But the existence of Apollo or Zeus, or the other gods whom the State
+approves, would have appeared to him both uncertain and unimportant in
+comparison of the duty of self-examination, and of those principles of
+truth and right which he deemed to be the foundation of religion.
+(Compare Phaedr.; Euthyph.; Republic.)
+
+The second question, whether Plato meant to represent Socrates as
+braving or irritating his judges, must also be answered in the
+negative. His irony, his superiority, his audacity, “regarding not the
+person of man,” necessarily flow out of the loftiness of his situation.
+He is not acting a part upon a great occasion, but he is what he has
+been all his life long, “a king of men.” He would rather not appear
+insolent, if he could avoid it (ouch os authadizomenos touto lego).
+Neither is he desirous of hastening his own end, for life and death are
+simply indifferent to him. But such a defence as would be acceptable to
+his judges and might procure an acquittal, it is not in his nature to
+make. He will not say or do anything that might pervert the course of
+justice; he cannot have his tongue bound even “in the throat of death.”
+With his accusers he will only fence and play, as he had fenced with
+other “improvers of youth,” answering the Sophist according to his
+sophistry all his life long. He is serious when he is speaking of his
+own mission, which seems to distinguish him from all other reformers of
+mankind, and originates in an accident. The dedication of himself to
+the improvement of his fellow-citizens is not so remarkable as the
+ironical spirit in which he goes about doing good only in vindication
+of the credit of the oracle, and in the vain hope of finding a wiser
+man than himself. Yet this singular and almost accidental character of
+his mission agrees with the divine sign which, according to our
+notions, is equally accidental and irrational, and is nevertheless
+accepted by him as the guiding principle of his life. Socrates is
+nowhere represented to us as a freethinker or sceptic. There is no
+reason to doubt his sincerity when he speculates on the possibility of
+seeing and knowing the heroes of the Trojan war in another world. On
+the other hand, his hope of immortality is uncertain;—he also conceives
+of death as a long sleep (in this respect differing from the Phædo),
+and at last falls back on resignation to the divine will, and the
+certainty that no evil can happen to the good man either in life or
+death. His absolute truthfulness seems to hinder him from asserting
+positively more than this; and he makes no attempt to veil his
+ignorance in mythology and figures of speech. The gentleness of the
+first part of the speech contrasts with the aggravated, almost
+threatening, tone of the conclusion. He characteristically remarks that
+he will not speak as a rhetorician, that is to say, he will not make a
+regular defence such as Lysias or one of the orators might have
+composed for him, or, according to some accounts, did compose for him.
+But he first procures himself a hearing by conciliatory words. He does
+not attack the Sophists; for they were open to the same charges as
+himself; they were equally ridiculed by the Comic poets, and almost
+equally hateful to Anytus and Meletus. Yet incidentally the antagonism
+between Socrates and the Sophists is allowed to appear. He is poor and
+they are rich; his profession that he teaches nothing is opposed to
+their readiness to teach all things; his talking in the marketplace to
+their private instructions; his tarry-at-home life to their wandering
+from city to city. The tone which he assumes towards them is one of
+real friendliness, but also of concealed irony. Towards Anaxagoras, who
+had disappointed him in his hopes of learning about mind and nature, he
+shows a less kindly feeling, which is also the feeling of Plato in
+other passages (Laws). But Anaxagoras had been dead thirty years, and
+was beyond the reach of persecution.
+
+It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers
+who would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more
+violent terms was, as far as we know, never fulfilled. No inference can
+be drawn from this circumstance as to the probability of the words
+attributed to him having been actually uttered. They express the
+aspiration of the first martyr of philosophy, that he would leave
+behind him many followers, accompanied by the not unnatural feeling
+that they would be fiercer and more inconsiderate in their words when
+emancipated from his control.
+
+The above remarks must be understood as applying with any degree of
+certainty to the Platonic Socrates only. For, although these or similar
+words may have been spoken by Socrates himself, we cannot exclude the
+possibility, that like so much else, _e.g._ the wisdom of Critias, the
+poem of Solon, the virtues of Charmides, they may have been due only to
+the imagination of Plato. The arguments of those who maintain that the
+Apology was composed during the process, resting on no evidence, do not
+require a serious refutation. Nor are the reasonings of Schleiermacher,
+who argues that the Platonic defence is an exact or nearly exact
+reproduction of the words of Socrates, partly because Plato would not
+have been guilty of the impiety of altering them, and also because many
+points of the defence might have been improved and strengthened, at all
+more conclusive. (See English Translation.) What effect the death of
+Socrates produced on the mind of Plato, we cannot certainly determine;
+nor can we say how he would or must have written under the
+circumstances. We observe that the enmity of Aristophanes to Socrates
+does not prevent Plato from introducing them together in the Symposium
+engaged in friendly intercourse. Nor is there any trace in the
+Dialogues of an attempt to make Anytus or Meletus personally odious in
+the eyes of the Athenian public.
+
+
+
+
+APOLOGY
+
+
+How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell;
+but I know that they almost made me forget who I was—so persuasively
+did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth. But
+of the many falsehoods told by them, there was one which quite amazed
+me;—I mean when they said that you should be upon your guard and not
+allow yourselves to be deceived by the force of my eloquence. To say
+this, when they were certain to be detected as soon as I opened my lips
+and proved myself to be anything but a great speaker, did indeed appear
+to me most shameless—unless by the force of eloquence they mean the
+force of truth; for if such is their meaning, I admit that I am
+eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs! Well, as I was
+saying, they have scarcely spoken the truth at all; but from me you
+shall hear the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner
+in a set oration duly ornamented with words and phrases. No, by heaven!
+but I shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the
+moment; for I am confident in the justice of my cause (Or, I am certain
+that I am right in taking this course.): at my time of life I ought not
+to be appearing before you, O men of Athens, in the character of a
+juvenile orator—let no one expect it of me. And I must beg of you to
+grant me a favour:—If I defend myself in my accustomed manner, and you
+hear me using the words which I have been in the habit of using in the
+agora, at the tables of the money-changers, or anywhere else, I would
+ask you not to be surprised, and not to interrupt me on this account.
+For I am more than seventy years of age, and appearing now for the
+first time in a court of law, I am quite a stranger to the language of
+the place; and therefore I would have you regard me as if I were really
+a stranger, whom you would excuse if he spoke in his native tongue, and
+after the fashion of his country:—Am I making an unfair request of you?
+Never mind the manner, which may or may not be good; but think only of
+the truth of my words, and give heed to that: let the speaker speak
+truly and the judge decide justly.
+
+And first, I have to reply to the older charges and to my first
+accusers, and then I will go on to the later ones. For of old I have
+had many accusers, who have accused me falsely to you during many
+years; and I am more afraid of them than of Anytus and his associates,
+who are dangerous, too, in their own way. But far more dangerous are
+the others, who began when you were children, and took possession of
+your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man,
+who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth
+beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. The disseminators
+of this tale are the accusers whom I dread; for their hearers are apt
+to fancy that such enquirers do not believe in the existence of the
+gods. And they are many, and their charges against me are of ancient
+date, and they were made by them in the days when you were more
+impressible than you are now—in childhood, or it may have been in
+youth—and the cause when heard went by default, for there was none to
+answer. And hardest of all, I do not know and cannot tell the names of
+my accusers; unless in the chance case of a Comic poet. All who from
+envy and malice have persuaded you—some of them having first convinced
+themselves—all this class of men are most difficult to deal with; for I
+cannot have them up here, and cross-examine them, and therefore I must
+simply fight with shadows in my own defence, and argue when there is no
+one who answers. I will ask you then to assume with me, as I was
+saying, that my opponents are of two kinds; one recent, the other
+ancient: and I hope that you will see the propriety of my answering the
+latter first, for these accusations you heard long before the others,
+and much oftener.
+
+Well, then, I must make my defence, and endeavour to clear away in a
+short time, a slander which has lasted a long time. May I succeed, if
+to succeed be for my good and yours, or likely to avail me in my cause!
+The task is not an easy one; I quite understand the nature of it. And
+so leaving the event with God, in obedience to the law I will now make
+my defence.
+
+I will begin at the beginning, and ask what is the accusation which has
+given rise to the slander of me, and in fact has encouraged Meletus to
+proof this charge against me. Well, what do the slanderers say? They
+shall be my prosecutors, and I will sum up their words in an affidavit:
+“Socrates is an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into
+things under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the
+better cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrines to others.” Such
+is the nature of the accusation: it is just what you have yourselves
+seen in the comedy of Aristophanes (Aristoph., Clouds.), who has
+introduced a man whom he calls Socrates, going about and saying that he
+walks in air, and talking a deal of nonsense concerning matters of
+which I do not pretend to know either much or little—not that I mean to
+speak disparagingly of any one who is a student of natural philosophy.
+I should be very sorry if Meletus could bring so grave a charge against
+me. But the simple truth is, O Athenians, that I have nothing to do
+with physical speculations. Very many of those here present are
+witnesses to the truth of this, and to them I appeal. Speak then, you
+who have heard me, and tell your neighbours whether any of you have
+ever known me hold forth in few words or in many upon such
+matters...You hear their answer. And from what they say of this part of
+the charge you will be able to judge of the truth of the rest.
+
+As little foundation is there for the report that I am a teacher, and
+take money; this accusation has no more truth in it than the other.
+Although, if a man were really able to instruct mankind, to receive
+money for giving instruction would, in my opinion, be an honour to him.
+There is Gorgias of Leontium, and Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of
+Elis, who go the round of the cities, and are able to persuade the
+young men to leave their own citizens by whom they might be taught for
+nothing, and come to them whom they not only pay, but are thankful if
+they may be allowed to pay them. There is at this time a Parian
+philosopher residing in Athens, of whom I have heard; and I came to
+hear of him in this way:—I came across a man who has spent a world of
+money on the Sophists, Callias, the son of Hipponicus, and knowing that
+he had sons, I asked him: “Callias,” I said, “if your two sons were
+foals or calves, there would be no difficulty in finding some one to
+put over them; we should hire a trainer of horses, or a farmer
+probably, who would improve and perfect them in their own proper virtue
+and excellence; but as they are human beings, whom are you thinking of
+placing over them? Is there any one who understands human and political
+virtue? You must have thought about the matter, for you have sons; is
+there any one?” “There is,” he said. “Who is he?” said I; “and of what
+country? and what does he charge?” “Evenus the Parian,” he replied; “he
+is the man, and his charge is five minæ.” Happy is Evenus, I said to
+myself, if he really has this wisdom, and teaches at such a moderate
+charge. Had I the same, I should have been very proud and conceited;
+but the truth is that I have no knowledge of the kind.
+
+I dare say, Athenians, that some one among you will reply, “Yes,
+Socrates, but what is the origin of these accusations which are brought
+against you; there must have been something strange which you have been
+doing? All these rumours and this talk about you would never have
+arisen if you had been like other men: tell us, then, what is the cause
+of them, for we should be sorry to judge hastily of you.” Now I regard
+this as a fair challenge, and I will endeavour to explain to you the
+reason why I am called wise and have such an evil fame. Please to
+attend then. And although some of you may think that I am joking, I
+declare that I will tell you the entire truth. Men of Athens, this
+reputation of mine has come of a certain sort of wisdom which I
+possess. If you ask me what kind of wisdom, I reply, wisdom such as may
+perhaps be attained by man, for to that extent I am inclined to believe
+that I am wise; whereas the persons of whom I was speaking have a
+superhuman wisdom which I may fail to describe, because I have it not
+myself; and he who says that I have, speaks falsely, and is taking away
+my character. And here, O men of Athens, I must beg you not to
+interrupt me, even if I seem to say something extravagant. For the word
+which I will speak is not mine. I will refer you to a witness who is
+worthy of credit; that witness shall be the God of Delphi—he will tell
+you about my wisdom, if I have any, and of what sort it is. You must
+have known Chaerephon; he was early a friend of mine, and also a friend
+of yours, for he shared in the recent exile of the people, and returned
+with you. Well, Chaerephon, as you know, was very impetuous in all his
+doings, and he went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him
+whether—as I was saying, I must beg you not to interrupt—he asked the
+oracle to tell him whether anyone was wiser than I was, and the Pythian
+prophetess answered, that there was no man wiser. Chaerephon is dead
+himself; but his brother, who is in court, will confirm the truth of
+what I am saying.
+
+Why do I mention this? Because I am going to explain to you why I have
+such an evil name. When I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can
+the god mean? and what is the interpretation of his riddle? for I know
+that I have no wisdom, small or great. What then can he mean when he
+says that I am the wisest of men? And yet he is a god, and cannot lie;
+that would be against his nature. After long consideration, I thought
+of a method of trying the question. I reflected that if I could only
+find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a
+refutation in my hand. I should say to him, “Here is a man who is wiser
+than I am; but you said that I was the wisest.” Accordingly I went to
+one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed him—his name I need
+not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination—and
+the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not
+help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise
+by many, and still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain
+to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the
+consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several
+who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I
+went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows
+anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,—for he
+knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that
+I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the
+advantage of him. Then I went to another who had still higher
+pretensions to wisdom, and my conclusion was exactly the same.
+Whereupon I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.
+
+Then I went to one man after another, being not unconscious of the
+enmity which I provoked, and I lamented and feared this: but necessity
+was laid upon me,—the word of God, I thought, ought to be considered
+first. And I said to myself, Go I must to all who appear to know, and
+find out the meaning of the oracle. And I swear to you, Athenians, by
+the dog I swear!—for I must tell you the truth—the result of my mission
+was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the
+most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and
+better. I will tell you the tale of my wanderings and of the
+“Herculean” labours, as I may call them, which I endured only to find
+at last the oracle irrefutable. After the politicians, I went to the
+poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. And there, I said to myself,
+you will be instantly detected; now you will find out that you are more
+ignorant than they are. Accordingly, I took them some of the most
+elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the
+meaning of them—thinking that they would teach me something. Will you
+believe me? I am almost ashamed to confess the truth, but I must say
+that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better
+about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by
+wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration;
+they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things,
+but do not understand the meaning of them. The poets appeared to me to
+be much in the same case; and I further observed that upon the strength
+of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in
+other things in which they were not wise. So I departed, conceiving
+myself to be superior to them for the same reason that I was superior
+to the politicians.
+
+At last I went to the artisans. I was conscious that I knew nothing at
+all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and
+here I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was
+ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I
+observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the
+poets;—because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew
+all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their
+wisdom; and therefore I asked myself on behalf of the oracle, whether I
+would like to be as I was, neither having their knowledge nor their
+ignorance, or like them in both; and I made answer to myself and to the
+oracle that I was better off as I was.
+
+This inquisition has led to my having many enemies of the worst and
+most dangerous kind, and has given occasion also to many calumnies. And
+I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess
+the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of
+Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show
+that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking
+of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he
+said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his
+wisdom is in truth worth nothing. And so I go about the world, obedient
+to the god, and search and make enquiry into the wisdom of any one,
+whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not
+wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise;
+and my occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either
+to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am
+in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god.
+
+There is another thing:—young men of the richer classes, who have not
+much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the
+pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine
+others; there are plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who
+think that they know something, but really know little or nothing; and
+then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with
+themselves are angry with me: This confounded Socrates, they say; this
+villainous misleader of youth!—and then if somebody asks them, Why,
+what evil does he practise or teach? they do not know, and cannot tell;
+but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the
+ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about
+teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no
+gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not
+like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been
+detected—which is the truth; and as they are numerous and ambitious and
+energetic, and are drawn up in battle array and have persuasive
+tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud and inveterate
+calumnies. And this is the reason why my three accusers, Meletus and
+Anytus and Lycon, have set upon me; Meletus, who has a quarrel with me
+on behalf of the poets; Anytus, on behalf of the craftsmen and
+politicians; Lycon, on behalf of the rhetoricians: and as I said at the
+beginning, I cannot expect to get rid of such a mass of calumny all in
+a moment. And this, O men of Athens, is the truth and the whole truth;
+I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing. And yet, I know
+that my plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their
+hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth?—Hence has arisen the
+prejudice against me; and this is the reason of it, as you will find
+out either in this or in any future enquiry.
+
+I have said enough in my defence against the first class of my
+accusers; I turn to the second class. They are headed by Meletus, that
+good man and true lover of his country, as he calls himself. Against
+these, too, I must try to make a defence:—Let their affidavit be read:
+it contains something of this kind: It says that Socrates is a doer of
+evil, who corrupts the youth; and who does not believe in the gods of
+the state, but has other new divinities of his own. Such is the charge;
+and now let us examine the particular counts. He says that I am a doer
+of evil, and corrupt the youth; but I say, O men of Athens, that
+Meletus is a doer of evil, in that he pretends to be in earnest when he
+is only in jest, and is so eager to bring men to trial from a pretended
+zeal and interest about matters in which he really never had the
+smallest interest. And the truth of this I will endeavour to prove to
+you.
+
+Come hither, Meletus, and let me ask a question of you. You think a
+great deal about the improvement of youth?
+
+Yes, I do.
+
+Tell the judges, then, who is their improver; for you must know, as you
+have taken the pains to discover their corrupter, and are citing and
+accusing me before them. Speak, then, and tell the judges who their
+improver is.—Observe, Meletus, that you are silent, and have nothing to
+say. But is not this rather disgraceful, and a very considerable proof
+of what I was saying, that you have no interest in the matter? Speak
+up, friend, and tell us who their improver is.
+
+The laws.
+
+But that, my good sir, is not my meaning. I want to know who the person
+is, who, in the first place, knows the laws.
+
+The judges, Socrates, who are present in court.
+
+What, do you mean to say, Meletus, that they are able to instruct and
+improve youth?
+
+Certainly they are.
+
+What, all of them, or some only and not others?
+
+All of them.
+
+By the goddess Here, that is good news! There are plenty of improvers,
+then. And what do you say of the audience,—do they improve them?
+
+Yes, they do.
+
+And the senators?
+
+Yes, the senators improve them.
+
+But perhaps the members of the assembly corrupt them?—or do they too
+improve them?
+
+They improve them.
+
+Then every Athenian improves and elevates them; all with the exception
+of myself; and I alone am their corrupter? Is that what you affirm?
+
+That is what I stoutly affirm.
+
+I am very unfortunate if you are right. But suppose I ask you a
+question: How about horses? Does one man do them harm and all the world
+good? Is not the exact opposite the truth? One man is able to do them
+good, or at least not many;—the trainer of horses, that is to say, does
+them good, and others who have to do with them rather injure them? Is
+not that true, Meletus, of horses, or of any other animals? Most
+assuredly it is; whether you and Anytus say yes or no. Happy indeed
+would be the condition of youth if they had one corrupter only, and all
+the rest of the world were their improvers. But you, Meletus, have
+sufficiently shown that you never had a thought about the young: your
+carelessness is seen in your not caring about the very things which you
+bring against me.
+
+And now, Meletus, I will ask you another question—by Zeus I will: Which
+is better, to live among bad citizens, or among good ones? Answer,
+friend, I say; the question is one which may be easily answered. Do not
+the good do their neighbours good, and the bad do them evil?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is there anyone who would rather be injured than benefited by those
+who live with him? Answer, my good friend, the law requires you to
+answer—does any one like to be injured?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And when you accuse me of corrupting and deteriorating the youth, do
+you allege that I corrupt them intentionally or unintentionally?
+
+Intentionally, I say.
+
+But you have just admitted that the good do their neighbours good, and
+the evil do them evil. Now, is that a truth which your superior wisdom
+has recognized thus early in life, and am I, at my age, in such
+darkness and ignorance as not to know that if a man with whom I have to
+live is corrupted by me, I am very likely to be harmed by him; and yet
+I corrupt him, and intentionally, too—so you say, although neither I
+nor any other human being is ever likely to be convinced by you. But
+either I do not corrupt them, or I corrupt them unintentionally; and on
+either view of the case you lie. If my offence is unintentional, the
+law has no cognizance of unintentional offences: you ought to have
+taken me privately, and warned and admonished me; for if I had been
+better advised, I should have left off doing what I only did
+unintentionally—no doubt I should; but you would have nothing to say to
+me and refused to teach me. And now you bring me up in this court,
+which is a place not of instruction, but of punishment.
+
+It will be very clear to you, Athenians, as I was saying, that Meletus
+has no care at all, great or small, about the matter. But still I
+should like to know, Meletus, in what I am affirmed to corrupt the
+young. I suppose you mean, as I infer from your indictment, that I
+teach them not to acknowledge the gods which the state acknowledges,
+but some other new divinities or spiritual agencies in their stead.
+These are the lessons by which I corrupt the youth, as you say.
+
+Yes, that I say emphatically.
+
+Then, by the gods, Meletus, of whom we are speaking, tell me and the
+court, in somewhat plainer terms, what you mean! for I do not as yet
+understand whether you affirm that I teach other men to acknowledge
+some gods, and therefore that I do believe in gods, and am not an
+entire atheist—this you do not lay to my charge,—but only you say that
+they are not the same gods which the city recognizes—the charge is that
+they are different gods. Or, do you mean that I am an atheist simply,
+and a teacher of atheism?
+
+I mean the latter—that you are a complete atheist.
+
+What an extraordinary statement! Why do you think so, Meletus? Do you
+mean that I do not believe in the godhead of the sun or moon, like
+other men?
+
+I assure you, judges, that he does not: for he says that the sun is
+stone, and the moon earth.
+
+Friend Meletus, you think that you are accusing Anaxagoras: and you
+have but a bad opinion of the judges, if you fancy them illiterate to
+such a degree as not to know that these doctrines are found in the
+books of Anaxagoras the Clazomenian, which are full of them. And so,
+forsooth, the youth are said to be taught them by Socrates, when there
+are not unfrequently exhibitions of them at the theatre (Probably in
+allusion to Aristophanes who caricatured, and to Euripides who borrowed
+the notions of Anaxagoras, as well as to other dramatic poets.) (price
+of admission one drachma at the most); and they might pay their money,
+and laugh at Socrates if he pretends to father these extraordinary
+views. And so, Meletus, you really think that I do not believe in any
+god?
+
+I swear by Zeus that you believe absolutely in none at all.
+
+Nobody will believe you, Meletus, and I am pretty sure that you do not
+believe yourself. I cannot help thinking, men of Athens, that Meletus
+is reckless and impudent, and that he has written this indictment in a
+spirit of mere wantonness and youthful bravado. Has he not compounded a
+riddle, thinking to try me? He said to himself:—I shall see whether the
+wise Socrates will discover my facetious contradiction, or whether I
+shall be able to deceive him and the rest of them. For he certainly
+does appear to me to contradict himself in the indictment as much as if
+he said that Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods, and yet
+of believing in them—but this is not like a person who is in earnest.
+
+I should like you, O men of Athens, to join me in examining what I
+conceive to be his inconsistency; and do you, Meletus, answer. And I
+must remind the audience of my request that they would not make a
+disturbance if I speak in my accustomed manner:
+
+Did ever man, Meletus, believe in the existence of human things, and
+not of human beings?...I wish, men of Athens, that he would answer, and
+not be always trying to get up an interruption. Did ever any man
+believe in horsemanship, and not in horses? or in flute-playing, and
+not in flute-players? No, my friend; I will answer to you and to the
+court, as you refuse to answer for yourself. There is no man who ever
+did. But now please to answer the next question: Can a man believe in
+spiritual and divine agencies, and not in spirits or demigods?
+
+He cannot.
+
+How lucky I am to have extracted that answer, by the assistance of the
+court! But then you swear in the indictment that I teach and believe in
+divine or spiritual agencies (new or old, no matter for that); at any
+rate, I believe in spiritual agencies,—so you say and swear in the
+affidavit; and yet if I believe in divine beings, how can I help
+believing in spirits or demigods;—must I not? To be sure I must; and
+therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent. Now what are
+spirits or demigods? Are they not either gods or the sons of gods?
+
+Certainly they are.
+
+But this is what I call the facetious riddle invented by you: the
+demigods or spirits are gods, and you say first that I do not believe
+in gods, and then again that I do believe in gods; that is, if I
+believe in demigods. For if the demigods are the illegitimate sons of
+gods, whether by the nymphs or by any other mothers, of whom they are
+said to be the sons—what human being will ever believe that there are
+no gods if they are the sons of gods? You might as well affirm the
+existence of mules, and deny that of horses and asses. Such nonsense,
+Meletus, could only have been intended by you to make trial of me. You
+have put this into the indictment because you had nothing real of which
+to accuse me. But no one who has a particle of understanding will ever
+be convinced by you that the same men can believe in divine and
+superhuman things, and yet not believe that there are gods and demigods
+and heroes.
+
+I have said enough in answer to the charge of Meletus: any elaborate
+defence is unnecessary, but I know only too well how many are the
+enmities which I have incurred, and this is what will be my destruction
+if I am destroyed;—not Meletus, nor yet Anytus, but the envy and
+detraction of the world, which has been the death of many good men, and
+will probably be the death of many more; there is no danger of my being
+the last of them.
+
+Some one will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of
+life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may
+fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything
+ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to
+consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong—acting
+the part of a good man or of a bad. Whereas, upon your view, the heroes
+who fell at Troy were not good for much, and the son of Thetis above
+all, who altogether despised danger in comparison with disgrace; and
+when he was so eager to slay Hector, his goddess mother said to him,
+that if he avenged his companion Patroclus, and slew Hector, he would
+die himself—“Fate,” she said, in these or the like words, “waits for
+you next after Hector;” he, receiving this warning, utterly despised
+danger and death, and instead of fearing them, feared rather to live in
+dishonour, and not to avenge his friend. “Let me die forthwith,” he
+replies, “and be avenged of my enemy, rather than abide here by the
+beaked ships, a laughing-stock and a burden of the earth.” Had Achilles
+any thought of death and danger? For wherever a man’s place is, whether
+the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a
+commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should
+not think of death or of anything but of disgrace. And this, O men of
+Athens, is a true saying.
+
+Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I
+was ordered by the generals whom you chose to command me at Potidaea
+and Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any
+other man, facing death—if now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God
+orders me to fulfil the philosopher’s mission of searching into myself
+and other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death, or any
+other fear; that would indeed be strange, and I might justly be
+arraigned in court for denying the existence of the gods, if I
+disobeyed the oracle because I was afraid of death, fancying that I was
+wise when I was not wise. For the fear of death is indeed the pretence
+of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretence of knowing the
+unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear
+apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is not
+this ignorance of a disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the
+conceit that a man knows what he does not know? And in this respect
+only I believe myself to differ from men in general, and may perhaps
+claim to be wiser than they are:—that whereas I know but little of the
+world below, I do not suppose that I know: but I do know that injustice
+and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and
+dishonourable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather
+than a certain evil. And therefore if you let me go now, and are not
+convinced by Anytus, who said that since I had been prosecuted I must
+be put to death; (or if not that I ought never to have been prosecuted
+at all); and that if I escape now, your sons will all be utterly ruined
+by listening to my words—if you say to me, Socrates, this time we will
+not mind Anytus, and you shall be let off, but upon one condition, that
+you are not to enquire and speculate in this way any more, and that if
+you are caught doing so again you shall die;—if this was the condition
+on which you let me go, I should reply: Men of Athens, I honour and
+love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life
+and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of
+philosophy, exhorting any one whom I meet and saying to him after my
+manner: You, my friend,—a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city
+of Athens,—are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of
+money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and
+truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard
+or heed at all? And if the person with whom I am arguing, says: Yes,
+but I do care; then I do not leave him or let him go at once; but I
+proceed to interrogate and examine and cross-examine him, and if I
+think that he has no virtue in him, but only says that he has, I
+reproach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the less.
+And I shall repeat the same words to every one whom I meet, young and
+old, citizen and alien, but especially to the citizens, inasmuch as
+they are my brethren. For know that this is the command of God; and I
+believe that no greater good has ever happened in the state than my
+service to the God. For I do nothing but go about persuading you all,
+old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your
+properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest
+improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money,
+but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as
+well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which
+corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person. But if any one says that
+this is not my teaching, he is speaking an untruth. Wherefore, O men of
+Athens, I say to you, do as Anytus bids or not as Anytus bids, and
+either acquit me or not; but whichever you do, understand that I shall
+never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.
+
+Men of Athens, do not interrupt, but hear me; there was an
+understanding between us that you should hear me to the end: I have
+something more to say, at which you may be inclined to cry out; but I
+believe that to hear me will be good for you, and therefore I beg that
+you will not cry out. I would have you know, that if you kill such an
+one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.
+Nothing will injure me, not Meletus nor yet Anytus—they cannot, for a
+bad man is not permitted to injure a better than himself. I do not deny
+that Anytus may, perhaps, kill him, or drive him into exile, or deprive
+him of civil rights; and he may imagine, and others may imagine, that
+he is inflicting a great injury upon him: but there I do not agree. For
+the evil of doing as he is doing—the evil of unjustly taking away the
+life of another—is greater far.
+
+And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may
+think, but for yours, that you may not sin against the God by
+condemning me, who am his gift to you. For if you kill me you will not
+easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous
+figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and
+the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing
+to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that
+gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all
+places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and
+reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me, and
+therefore I would advise you to spare me. I dare say that you may feel
+out of temper (like a person who is suddenly awakened from sleep), and
+you think that you might easily strike me dead as Anytus advises, and
+then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in
+his care of you sent you another gadfly. When I say that I am given to
+you by God, the proof of my mission is this:—if I had been like other
+men, I should not have neglected all my own concerns or patiently seen
+the neglect of them during all these years, and have been doing yours,
+coming to you individually like a father or elder brother, exhorting
+you to regard virtue; such conduct, I say, would be unlike human
+nature. If I had gained anything, or if my exhortations had been paid,
+there would have been some sense in my doing so; but now, as you will
+perceive, not even the impudence of my accusers dares to say that I
+have ever exacted or sought pay of any one; of that they have no
+witness. And I have a sufficient witness to the truth of what I say—my
+poverty.
+
+Some one may wonder why I go about in private giving advice and busying
+myself with the concerns of others, but do not venture to come forward
+in public and advise the state. I will tell you why. You have heard me
+speak at sundry times and in divers places of an oracle or sign which
+comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the
+indictment. This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to
+me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do
+anything which I am going to do. This is what deters me from being a
+politician. And rightly, as I think. For I am certain, O men of Athens,
+that if I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago, and
+done no good either to you or to myself. And do not be offended at my
+telling you the truth: for the truth is, that no man who goes to war
+with you or any other multitude, honestly striving against the many
+lawless and unrighteous deeds which are done in a state, will save his
+life; he who will fight for the right, if he would live even for a
+brief space, must have a private station and not a public one.
+
+I can give you convincing evidence of what I say, not words only, but
+what you value far more—actions. Let me relate to you a passage of my
+own life which will prove to you that I should never have yielded to
+injustice from any fear of death, and that “as I should have refused to
+yield” I must have died at once. I will tell you a tale of the courts,
+not very interesting perhaps, but nevertheless true. The only office of
+state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator: the
+tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of
+the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the
+battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them in a body, contrary
+to law, as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the only
+one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my
+vote against you; and when the orators threatened to impeach and arrest
+me, and you called and shouted, I made up my mind that I would run the
+risk, having law and justice with me, rather than take part in your
+injustice because I feared imprisonment and death. This happened in the
+days of the democracy. But when the oligarchy of the Thirty was in
+power, they sent for me and four others into the rotunda, and bade us
+bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis, as they wanted to put him to
+death. This was a specimen of the sort of commands which they were
+always giving with the view of implicating as many as possible in their
+crimes; and then I showed, not in word only but in deed, that, if I may
+be allowed to use such an expression, I cared not a straw for death,
+and that my great and only care was lest I should do an unrighteous or
+unholy thing. For the strong arm of that oppressive power did not
+frighten me into doing wrong; and when we came out of the rotunda the
+other four went to Salamis and fetched Leon, but I went quietly home.
+For which I might have lost my life, had not the power of the Thirty
+shortly afterwards come to an end. And many will witness to my words.
+
+Now do you really imagine that I could have survived all these years,
+if I had led a public life, supposing that like a good man I had always
+maintained the right and had made justice, as I ought, the first thing?
+No indeed, men of Athens, neither I nor any other man. But I have been
+always the same in all my actions, public as well as private, and never
+have I yielded any base compliance to those who are slanderously termed
+my disciples, or to any other. Not that I have any regular disciples.
+But if any one likes to come and hear me while I am pursuing my
+mission, whether he be young or old, he is not excluded. Nor do I
+converse only with those who pay; but any one, whether he be rich or
+poor, may ask and answer me and listen to my words; and whether he
+turns out to be a bad man or a good one, neither result can be justly
+imputed to me; for I never taught or professed to teach him anything.
+And if any one says that he has ever learned or heard anything from me
+in private which all the world has not heard, let me tell you that he
+is lying.
+
+But I shall be asked, Why do people delight in continually conversing
+with you? I have told you already, Athenians, the whole truth about
+this matter: they like to hear the cross-examination of the pretenders
+to wisdom; there is amusement in it. Now this duty of cross-examining
+other men has been imposed upon me by God; and has been signified to me
+by oracles, visions, and in every way in which the will of divine power
+was ever intimated to any one. This is true, O Athenians, or, if not
+true, would be soon refuted. If I am or have been corrupting the youth,
+those of them who are now grown up and have become sensible that I gave
+them bad advice in the days of their youth should come forward as
+accusers, and take their revenge; or if they do not like to come
+themselves, some of their relatives, fathers, brothers, or other
+kinsmen, should say what evil their families have suffered at my hands.
+Now is their time. Many of them I see in the court. There is Crito, who
+is of the same age and of the same deme with myself, and there is
+Critobulus his son, whom I also see. Then again there is Lysanias of
+Sphettus, who is the father of Aeschines—he is present; and also there
+is Antiphon of Cephisus, who is the father of Epigenes; and there are
+the brothers of several who have associated with me. There is
+Nicostratus the son of Theosdotides, and the brother of Theodotus (now
+Theodotus himself is dead, and therefore he, at any rate, will not seek
+to stop him); and there is Paralus the son of Demodocus, who had a
+brother Theages; and Adeimantus the son of Ariston, whose brother Plato
+is present; and Aeantodorus, who is the brother of Apollodorus, whom I
+also see. I might mention a great many others, some of whom Meletus
+should have produced as witnesses in the course of his speech; and let
+him still produce them, if he has forgotten—I will make way for him.
+And let him say, if he has any testimony of the sort which he can
+produce. Nay, Athenians, the very opposite is the truth. For all these
+are ready to witness on behalf of the corrupter, of the injurer of
+their kindred, as Meletus and Anytus call me; not the corrupted youth
+only—there might have been a motive for that—but their uncorrupted
+elder relatives. Why should they too support me with their testimony?
+Why, indeed, except for the sake of truth and justice, and because they
+know that I am speaking the truth, and that Meletus is a liar.
+
+Well, Athenians, this and the like of this is all the defence which I
+have to offer. Yet a word more. Perhaps there may be some one who is
+offended at me, when he calls to mind how he himself on a similar, or
+even a less serious occasion, prayed and entreated the judges with many
+tears, and how he produced his children in court, which was a moving
+spectacle, together with a host of relations and friends; whereas I,
+who am probably in danger of my life, will do none of these things. The
+contrast may occur to his mind, and he may be set against me, and vote
+in anger because he is displeased at me on this account. Now if there
+be such a person among you,—mind, I do not say that there is,—to him I
+may fairly reply: My friend, I am a man, and like other men, a creature
+of flesh and blood, and not “of wood or stone,” as Homer says; and I
+have a family, yes, and sons, O Athenians, three in number, one almost
+a man, and two others who are still young; and yet I will not bring any
+of them hither in order to petition you for an acquittal. And why not?
+Not from any self-assertion or want of respect for you. Whether I am or
+am not afraid of death is another question, of which I will not now
+speak. But, having regard to public opinion, I feel that such conduct
+would be discreditable to myself, and to you, and to the whole state.
+One who has reached my years, and who has a name for wisdom, ought not
+to demean himself. Whether this opinion of me be deserved or not, at
+any rate the world has decided that Socrates is in some way superior to
+other men. And if those among you who are said to be superior in wisdom
+and courage, and any other virtue, demean themselves in this way, how
+shameful is their conduct! I have seen men of reputation, when they
+have been condemned, behaving in the strangest manner: they seemed to
+fancy that they were going to suffer something dreadful if they died,
+and that they could be immortal if you only allowed them to live; and I
+think that such are a dishonour to the state, and that any stranger
+coming in would have said of them that the most eminent men of Athens,
+to whom the Athenians themselves give honour and command, are no better
+than women. And I say that these things ought not to be done by those
+of us who have a reputation; and if they are done, you ought not to
+permit them; you ought rather to show that you are far more disposed to
+condemn the man who gets up a doleful scene and makes the city
+ridiculous, than him who holds his peace.
+
+But, setting aside the question of public opinion, there seems to be
+something wrong in asking a favour of a judge, and thus procuring an
+acquittal, instead of informing and convincing him. For his duty is,
+not to make a present of justice, but to give judgment; and he has
+sworn that he will judge according to the laws, and not according to
+his own good pleasure; and we ought not to encourage you, nor should
+you allow yourselves to be encouraged, in this habit of perjury—there
+can be no piety in that. Do not then require me to do what I consider
+dishonourable and impious and wrong, especially now, when I am being
+tried for impiety on the indictment of Meletus. For if, O men of
+Athens, by force of persuasion and entreaty I could overpower your
+oaths, then I should be teaching you to believe that there are no gods,
+and in defending should simply convict myself of the charge of not
+believing in them. But that is not so—far otherwise. For I do believe
+that there are gods, and in a sense higher than that in which any of my
+accusers believe in them. And to you and to God I commit my cause, to
+be determined by you as is best for you and me.
+
+
+There are many reasons why I am not grieved, O men of Athens, at the
+vote of condemnation. I expected it, and am only surprised that the
+votes are so nearly equal; for I had thought that the majority against
+me would have been far larger; but now, had thirty votes gone over to
+the other side, I should have been acquitted. And I may say, I think,
+that I have escaped Meletus. I may say more; for without the assistance
+of Anytus and Lycon, any one may see that he would not have had a fifth
+part of the votes, as the law requires, in which case he would have
+incurred a fine of a thousand drachmae.
+
+And so he proposes death as the penalty. And what shall I propose on my
+part, O men of Athens? Clearly that which is my due. And what is my
+due? What return shall be made to the man who has never had the wit to
+be idle during his whole life; but has been careless of what the many
+care for—wealth, and family interests, and military offices, and
+speaking in the assembly, and magistracies, and plots, and parties.
+Reflecting that I was really too honest a man to be a politician and
+live, I did not go where I could do no good to you or to myself; but
+where I could do the greatest good privately to every one of you,
+thither I went, and sought to persuade every man among you that he must
+look to himself, and seek virtue and wisdom before he looks to his
+private interests, and look to the state before he looks to the
+interests of the state; and that this should be the order which he
+observes in all his actions. What shall be done to such an one?
+Doubtless some good thing, O men of Athens, if he has his reward; and
+the good should be of a kind suitable to him. What would be a reward
+suitable to a poor man who is your benefactor, and who desires leisure
+that he may instruct you? There can be no reward so fitting as
+maintenance in the Prytaneum, O men of Athens, a reward which he
+deserves far more than the citizen who has won the prize at Olympia in
+the horse or chariot race, whether the chariots were drawn by two
+horses or by many. For I am in want, and he has enough; and he only
+gives you the appearance of happiness, and I give you the reality. And
+if I am to estimate the penalty fairly, I should say that maintenance
+in the Prytaneum is the just return.
+
+Perhaps you think that I am braving you in what I am saying now, as in
+what I said before about the tears and prayers. But this is not so. I
+speak rather because I am convinced that I never intentionally wronged
+any one, although I cannot convince you—the time has been too short; if
+there were a law at Athens, as there is in other cities, that a capital
+cause should not be decided in one day, then I believe that I should
+have convinced you. But I cannot in a moment refute great slanders;
+and, as I am convinced that I never wronged another, I will assuredly
+not wrong myself. I will not say of myself that I deserve any evil, or
+propose any penalty. Why should I? because I am afraid of the penalty
+of death which Meletus proposes? When I do not know whether death is a
+good or an evil, why should I propose a penalty which would certainly
+be an evil? Shall I say imprisonment? And why should I live in prison,
+and be the slave of the magistrates of the year—of the Eleven? Or shall
+the penalty be a fine, and imprisonment until the fine is paid? There
+is the same objection. I should have to lie in prison, for money I have
+none, and cannot pay. And if I say exile (and this may possibly be the
+penalty which you will affix), I must indeed be blinded by the love of
+life, if I am so irrational as to expect that when you, who are my own
+citizens, cannot endure my discourses and words, and have found them so
+grievous and odious that you will have no more of them, others are
+likely to endure me. No indeed, men of Athens, that is not very likely.
+And what a life should I lead, at my age, wandering from city to city,
+ever changing my place of exile, and always being driven out! For I am
+quite sure that wherever I go, there, as here, the young men will flock
+to me; and if I drive them away, their elders will drive me out at
+their request; and if I let them come, their fathers and friends will
+drive me out for their sakes.
+
+Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and
+then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with
+you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to
+this. For if I tell you that to do as you say would be a disobedience
+to the God, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not
+believe that I am serious; and if I say again that daily to discourse
+about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me
+examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the
+unexamined life is not worth living, you are still less likely to
+believe me. Yet I say what is true, although a thing of which it is
+hard for me to persuade you. Also, I have never been accustomed to
+think that I deserve to suffer any harm. Had I money I might have
+estimated the offence at what I was able to pay, and not have been much
+the worse. But I have none, and therefore I must ask you to proportion
+the fine to my means. Well, perhaps I could afford a mina, and
+therefore I propose that penalty: Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and
+Apollodorus, my friends here, bid me say thirty minæ, and they will be
+the sureties. Let thirty minæ be the penalty; for which sum they will
+be ample security to you.
+
+
+Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name
+which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that
+you killed Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise, even
+although I am not wise, when they want to reproach you. If you had
+waited a little while, your desire would have been fulfilled in the
+course of nature. For I am far advanced in years, as you may perceive,
+and not far from death. I am speaking now not to all of you, but only
+to those who have condemned me to death. And I have another thing to
+say to them: you think that I was convicted because I had no words of
+the sort which would have procured my acquittal—I mean, if I had
+thought fit to leave nothing undone or unsaid. Not so; the deficiency
+which led to my conviction was not of words—certainly not. But I had
+not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you
+would have liked me to do, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and
+saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hear
+from others, and which, as I maintain, are unworthy of me. I thought at
+the time that I ought not to do anything common or mean when in danger:
+nor do I now repent of the style of my defence; I would rather die
+having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For
+neither in war nor yet at law ought I or any man to use every way of
+escaping death. Often in battle there can be no doubt that if a man
+will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he
+may escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping
+death, if a man is willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my
+friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that
+runs faster than death. I am old and move slowly, and the slower runner
+has overtaken me, and my accusers are keen and quick, and the faster
+runner, who is unrighteousness, has overtaken them. And now I depart
+hence condemned by you to suffer the penalty of death,—they too go
+their ways condemned by the truth to suffer the penalty of villainy and
+wrong; and I must abide by my award—let them abide by theirs. I suppose
+that these things may be regarded as fated,—and I think that they are
+well.
+
+And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for
+I am about to die, and in the hour of death men are gifted with
+prophetic power. And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that
+immediately after my departure punishment far heavier than you have
+inflicted on me will surely await you. Me you have killed because you
+wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an account of your lives.
+But that will not be as you suppose: far otherwise. For I say that
+there will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom
+hitherto I have restrained: and as they are younger they will be more
+inconsiderate with you, and you will be more offended at them. If you
+think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your
+evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is
+either possible or honourable; the easiest and the noblest way is not
+to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves. This is the
+prophecy which I utter before my departure to the judges who have
+condemned me.
+
+Friends, who would have acquitted me, I would like also to talk with
+you about the thing which has come to pass, while the magistrates are
+busy, and before I go to the place at which I must die. Stay then a
+little, for we may as well talk with one another while there is time.
+You are my friends, and I should like to show you the meaning of this
+event which has happened to me. O my judges—for you I may truly call
+judges—I should like to tell you of a wonderful circumstance. Hitherto
+the divine faculty of which the internal oracle is the source has
+constantly been in the habit of opposing me even about trifles, if I
+was going to make a slip or error in any matter; and now as you see
+there has come upon me that which may be thought, and is generally
+believed to be, the last and worst evil. But the oracle made no sign of
+opposition, either when I was leaving my house in the morning, or when
+I was on my way to the court, or while I was speaking, at anything
+which I was going to say; and yet I have often been stopped in the
+middle of a speech, but now in nothing I either said or did touching
+the matter in hand has the oracle opposed me. What do I take to be the
+explanation of this silence? I will tell you. It is an intimation that
+what has happened to me is a good, and that those of us who think that
+death is an evil are in error. For the customary sign would surely have
+opposed me had I been going to evil and not to good.
+
+Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great
+reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things—either death
+is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say,
+there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.
+Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the
+sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an
+unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his
+sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the
+other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many
+days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more
+pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a
+private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or
+nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a
+nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single
+night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men
+say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be
+greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world
+below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world,
+and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos
+and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who
+were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making.
+What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus
+and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.
+I myself, too, shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and
+conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other
+ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and
+there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own
+sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall then be able to continue my
+search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the
+next; and I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise,
+and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine
+the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or
+numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there
+be in conversing with them and asking them questions! In another world
+they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For
+besides being happier than we are, they will be immortal, if what is
+said is true.
+
+Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a
+certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or
+after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own
+approaching end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that the
+time had arrived when it was better for me to die and be released from
+trouble; wherefore the oracle gave no sign. For which reason, also, I
+am not angry with my condemners, or with my accusers; they have done me
+no harm, although they did not mean to do me any good; and for this I
+may gently blame them.
+
+Still I have a favour to ask of them. When my sons are grown up, I
+would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you
+trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about
+riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be
+something when they are really nothing,—then reprove them, as I have
+reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care,
+and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And
+if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your
+hands.
+
+The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you
+to live. Which is better God only knows.
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Apology, by Plato
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+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Apology, by Plato
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Apology
+       Also known as &ldquo;The Death of Socrates&rdquo;
+       
+Author: Plato
+
+Translator: Benjamin Jowett
+
+Release Date: February, 1999 [EBook #1656]
+[Most recently updated: October 4, 2020]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APOLOGY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>Apology</h1>
+
+<h2>by Plato</h2>
+
+<h3>Translated by Benjamin Jowett</h3>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">INTRODUCTION</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">APOLOGY</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>INTRODUCTION.</h2>
+
+<p>
+In what relation the &ldquo;Apology&rdquo; of Plato stands to the real defence
+of Socrates, there are no means of determining. It certainly agrees in tone and
+character with the description of Xenophon, who says in the
+&ldquo;Memorabilia&rdquo; that Socrates might have been acquitted &ldquo;if in
+any moderate degree he would have conciliated the favour of the dicasts;&rdquo;
+and who informs us in another passage, on the testimony of Hermogenes, the
+friend of Socrates, that he had no wish to live; and that the divine sign
+refused to allow him to prepare a defence, and also that Socrates himself
+declared this to be unnecessary, on the ground that all his life long he had
+been preparing against that hour. For the speech breathes throughout a spirit
+of defiance, &ldquo;<i>ut non supplex aut reus sed magister aut dominus
+videretur esse judicum</i>&rdquo; (Cic. &ldquo;de Orat.&rdquo; i. 54); and the
+loose and desultory style is an imitation of the &ldquo;accustomed
+manner&rdquo; in which Socrates spoke in &ldquo;the <i>agora</i> and among the
+tables of the money-changers.&rdquo; The allusion in the &ldquo;Crito&rdquo;
+(45 B) may, perhaps, be adduced as a further evidence of the literal accuracy
+of some parts (37 C, D). But in the main it must be regarded as the ideal of
+Socrates, according to Plato&rsquo;s conception of him, appearing in the
+greatest and most public scene of his life, and in the height of his triumph,
+when he is weakest, and yet his mastery over mankind is greatest, and his
+habitual irony acquires a new meaning and a sort of tragic pathos in the face
+of death. The facts of his life are summed up, and the features of his
+character are brought out as if by accident in the course of the defence. The
+conversational manner, the seeming want of arrangement, the ironical
+simplicity, are found to result in a perfect work of art, which is the portrait
+of Socrates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet some of the topics may have been actually used by Socrates; and the
+recollection of his very words may have rung in the ears of his disciple. The
+&ldquo;Apology&rdquo; of Plato may be compared generally with those speeches of
+Thucydides in which he has embodied his conception of the lofty character and
+policy of the great Pericles, and which at the same time furnish a commentary
+on the situation of affairs from the point of view of the historian. So in the
+&ldquo;Apology&rdquo; there is an ideal rather than a literal truth; much is
+said which was not said, and is only Plato&rsquo;s view of the situation. Plato
+was not, like Xenophon, a chronicler of facts; he does not appear in any of his
+writings to have aimed at literal accuracy. He is not therefore to be
+supplemented from the Memorabilia and Symposium of Xenophon, who belongs to an
+entirely different class of writers. The Apology of Plato is not the report of
+what Socrates said, but an elaborate composition, quite as much so in fact as
+one of the Dialogues. And we may perhaps even indulge in the fancy that the
+actual defence of Socrates was as much greater than the Platonic defence as the
+master was greater than the disciple. But in any case, some of the words used
+by him must have been remembered, and some of the facts recorded must have
+actually occurred. It is significant that Plato is said to have been present at
+the defence (Apol.), as he is also said to have been absent at the last scene
+in the &ldquo;Phædo&rdquo;. Is it fanciful to suppose that he meant to give the
+stamp of authenticity to the one and not to the other?&mdash;especially when we
+consider that these two passages are the only ones in which Plato makes mention
+of himself. The circumstance that Plato was to be one of his sureties for the
+payment of the fine which he proposed has the appearance of truth. More
+suspicious is the statement that Socrates received the first impulse to his
+favourite calling of cross-examining the world from the Oracle of Delphi; for
+he must already have been famous before Chaerephon went to consult the Oracle
+(Riddell), and the story is of a kind which is very likely to have been
+invented. On the whole we arrive at the conclusion that the
+&ldquo;Apology&rdquo; is true to the character of Socrates, but we cannot show
+that any single sentence in it was actually spoken by him. It breathes the
+spirit of Socrates, but has been cast anew in the mould of Plato.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is not much in the other Dialogues which can be compared with the
+&ldquo;Apology&rdquo;. The same recollection of his master may have been
+present to the mind of Plato when depicting the sufferings of the Just in the
+&ldquo;Republic&rdquo;. The &ldquo;Crito&rdquo; may also be regarded as a sort
+of appendage to the &ldquo;Apology&rdquo;, in which Socrates, who has defied
+the judges, is nevertheless represented as scrupulously obedient to the laws.
+The idealization of the sufferer is carried still further in the
+&ldquo;Georgias&rdquo;, in which the thesis is maintained, that &ldquo;to
+suffer is better than to do evil;&rdquo; and the art of rhetoric is described
+as only useful for the purpose of self-accusation. The parallelisms which occur
+in the so-called &ldquo;Apology&rdquo; of Xenophon are not worth noticing,
+because the writing in which they are contained is manifestly spurious. The
+statements of the &ldquo;Memorabilia&rdquo; respecting the trial and death of
+Socrates agree generally with Plato; but they have lost the flavour of Socratic
+irony in the narrative of Xenophon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The &ldquo;Apology&rdquo; or Platonic defence of Socrates is divided into three
+parts: 1st. The defence properly so called; 2nd. The shorter address in
+mitigation of the penalty; 3rd. The last words of prophetic rebuke and
+exhortation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first part commences with an apology for his colloquial style; he is, as he
+has always been, the enemy of rhetoric, and knows of no rhetoric but truth; he
+will not falsify his character by making a speech. Then he proceeds to divide
+his accusers into two classes; first, there is the nameless
+accuser&mdash;public opinion. All the world from their earliest years had heard
+that he was a corrupter of youth, and had seen him caricatured in the
+&ldquo;Clouds&rdquo; of Aristophanes. Secondly, there are the professed
+accusers, who are but the mouth-piece of the others. The accusations of both
+might be summed up in a formula. The first say, &ldquo;Socrates is an evil-doer
+and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the
+heaven; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to
+others.&rdquo; The second, &ldquo;Socrates is an evil-doer and corrupter of the
+youth, who does not receive the gods whom the state receives, but introduces
+other new divinities.&rdquo; These last words appear to have been the actual
+indictment (compare Xen. Mem.); and the previous formula, which is a summary of
+public opinion, assumes the same legal style.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The answer begins by clearing up a confusion. In the representations of the
+Comic poets, and in the opinion of the multitude, he had been identified with
+the teachers of physical science and with the Sophists. But this was an error.
+For both of them he professes a respect in the open court, which contrasts with
+his manner of speaking about them in other places. (Compare for Anaxagoras,
+Phædo, Laws; for the Sophists, Meno, Republic, Tim., Theaet., Soph., etc.) But
+at the same time he shows that he is not one of them. Of natural philosophy he
+knows nothing; not that he despises such pursuits, but the fact is that he is
+ignorant of them, and never says a word about them. Nor is he paid for giving
+instruction&mdash;that is another mistaken notion:&mdash;he has nothing to
+teach. But he commends Evenus for teaching virtue at such a
+&ldquo;moderate&rdquo; rate as five minæ. Something of the &ldquo;accustomed
+irony,&rdquo; which may perhaps be expected to sleep in the ear of the
+multitude, is lurking here.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He then goes on to explain the reason why he is in such an evil name. That had
+arisen out of a peculiar mission which he had taken upon himself. The
+enthusiastic Chaerephon (probably in anticipation of the answer which he
+received) had gone to Delphi and asked the oracle if there was any man wiser
+than Socrates; and the answer was, that there was no man wiser. What could be
+the meaning of this&mdash;that he who knew nothing, and knew that he knew
+nothing, should be declared by the oracle to be the wisest of men? Reflecting
+upon the answer, he determined to refute it by finding &ldquo;a wiser;&rdquo;
+and first he went to the politicians, and then to the poets, and then to the
+craftsmen, but always with the same result&mdash;he found that they knew
+nothing, or hardly anything more than himself; and that the little advantage
+which in some cases they possessed was more than counter-balanced by their
+conceit of knowledge. He knew nothing, and knew that he knew nothing: they knew
+little or nothing, and imagined that they knew all things. Thus he had passed
+his life as a sort of missionary in detecting the pretended wisdom of mankind;
+and this occupation had quite absorbed him and taken him away both from public
+and private affairs. Young men of the richer sort had made a pastime of the
+same pursuit, &ldquo;which was not unamusing.&rdquo; And hence bitter enmities
+had arisen; the professors of knowledge had revenged themselves by calling him
+a villainous corrupter of youth, and by repeating the commonplaces about
+atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against
+all philosophers when there is nothing else to be said of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second accusation he meets by interrogating Meletus, who is present and can
+be interrogated. &ldquo;If he is the corrupter, who is the improver of the
+citizens?&rdquo; (Compare Meno.) &ldquo;All men everywhere.&rdquo; But how
+absurd, how contrary to analogy is this! How inconceivable too, that he should
+make the citizens worse when he has to live with them. This surely cannot be
+intentional; and if unintentional, he ought to have been instructed by Meletus,
+and not accused in the court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there is another part of the indictment which says that he teaches men not
+to receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new gods. &ldquo;Is
+that the way in which he is supposed to corrupt the youth?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,
+it is.&rdquo; &ldquo;Has he only new gods, or none at all?&rdquo; &ldquo;None
+at all.&rdquo; &ldquo;What, not even the sun and moon?&rdquo; &ldquo;No; why,
+he says that the sun is a stone, and the moon earth.&rdquo; That, replies
+Socrates, is the old confusion about Anaxagoras; the Athenian people are not so
+ignorant as to attribute to the influence of Socrates notions which have found
+their way into the drama, and may be learned at the theatre. Socrates
+undertakes to show that Meletus (rather unjustifiably) has been compounding a
+riddle in this part of the indictment: &ldquo;There are no gods, but Socrates
+believes in the existence of the sons of gods, which is absurd.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leaving Meletus, who has had enough words spent upon him, he returns to the
+original accusation. The question may be asked, Why will he persist in
+following a profession which leads him to death? Why?&mdash;because he must
+remain at his post where the god has placed him, as he remained at Potidaea,
+and Amphipolis, and Delium, where the generals placed him. Besides, he is not
+so overwise as to imagine that he knows whether death is a good or an evil; and
+he is certain that desertion of his duty is an evil. Anytus is quite right in
+saying that they should never have indicted him if they meant to let him go.
+For he will certainly obey God rather than man; and will continue to preach to
+all men of all ages the necessity of virtue and improvement; and if they refuse
+to listen to him he will still persevere and reprove them. This is his way of
+corrupting the youth, which he will not cease to follow in obedience to the
+god, even if a thousand deaths await him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He is desirous that they should let him live&mdash;not for his own sake, but
+for theirs; because he is their heaven-sent friend (and they will never have
+such another), or, as he may be ludicrously described, he is the gadfly who
+stirs the generous steed into motion. Why then has he never taken part in
+public affairs? Because the familiar divine voice has hindered him; if he had
+been a public man, and had fought for the right, as he would certainly have
+fought against the many, he would not have lived, and could therefore have done
+no good. Twice in public matters he has risked his life for the sake of
+justice&mdash;once at the trial of the generals; and again in resistance to the
+tyrannical commands of the Thirty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, though not a public man, he has passed his days in instructing the
+citizens without fee or reward&mdash;this was his mission. Whether his
+disciples have turned out well or ill, he cannot justly be charged with the
+result, for he never promised to teach them anything. They might come if they
+liked, and they might stay away if they liked: and they did come, because they
+found an amusement in hearing the pretenders to wisdom detected. If they have
+been corrupted, their elder relatives (if not themselves) might surely come
+into court and witness against him, and there is an opportunity still for them
+to appear. But their fathers and brothers all appear in court (including
+&ldquo;this&rdquo; Plato), to witness on his behalf; and if their relatives are
+corrupted, at least they are uncorrupted; &ldquo;and they are my witnesses. For
+they know that I am speaking the truth, and that Meletus is lying.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is about all that he has to say. He will not entreat the judges to spare
+his life; neither will he present a spectacle of weeping children, although he,
+too, is not made of &ldquo;rock or oak.&rdquo; Some of the judges themselves
+may have complied with this practice on similar occasions, and he trusts that
+they will not be angry with him for not following their example. But he feels
+that such conduct brings discredit on the name of Athens: he feels too, that
+the judge has sworn not to give away justice; and he cannot be guilty of the
+impiety of asking the judge to break his oath, when he is himself being tried
+for impiety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he expected, and probably intended, he is convicted. And now the tone of the
+speech, instead of being more conciliatory, becomes more lofty and commanding.
+Anytus proposes death as the penalty: and what counter-proposition shall he
+make? He, the benefactor of the Athenian people, whose whole life has been
+spent in doing them good, should at least have the Olympic victor&rsquo;s
+reward of maintenance in the Prytaneum. Or why should he propose any
+counter-penalty when he does not know whether death, which Anytus proposes, is
+a good or an evil? And he is certain that imprisonment is an evil, exile is an
+evil. Loss of money might be an evil, but then he has none to give; perhaps he
+can make up a mina. Let that be the penalty, or, if his friends wish, thirty
+minæ; for which they will be excellent securities.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+[<i>He is condemned to death.</i>]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He is an old man already, and the Athenians will gain nothing but disgrace by
+depriving him of a few years of life. Perhaps he could have escaped, if he had
+chosen to throw down his arms and entreat for his life. But he does not at all
+repent of the manner of his defence; he would rather die in his own fashion
+than live in theirs. For the penalty of unrighteousness is swifter than death;
+that penalty has already overtaken his accusers as death will soon overtake
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, as one who is about to die, he will prophesy to them. They have put
+him to death in order to escape the necessity of giving an account of their
+lives. But his death &ldquo;will be the seed&rdquo; of many disciples who will
+convince them of their evil ways, and will come forth to reprove them in
+harsher terms, because they are younger and more inconsiderate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He would like to say a few words, while there is time, to those who would have
+acquitted him. He wishes them to know that the divine sign never interrupted
+him in the course of his defence; the reason of which, as he conjectures, is
+that the death to which he is going is a good and not an evil. For either death
+is a long sleep, the best of sleeps, or a journey to another world in which the
+souls of the dead are gathered together, and in which there may be a hope of
+seeing the heroes of old&mdash;in which, too, there are just judges; and as all
+are immortal, there can be no fear of any one suffering death for his opinions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing evil can happen to the good man either in life or death, and his own
+death has been permitted by the gods, because it was better for him to depart;
+and therefore he forgives his judges because they have done him no harm,
+although they never meant to do him any good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He has a last request to make to them&mdash;that they will trouble his sons as
+he has troubled them, if they appear to prefer riches to virtue, or to think
+themselves something when they are nothing.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Few persons will be found to wish that Socrates should have defended
+himself otherwise,&rdquo;&mdash;if, as we must add, his defence was that with
+which Plato has provided him. But leaving this question, which does not admit
+of a precise solution, we may go on to ask what was the impression which Plato
+in the &ldquo;Apology&rdquo; intended to give of the character and conduct of
+his master in the last great scene? Did he intend to represent him (1) as
+employing sophistries; (2) as designedly irritating the judges? Or are these
+sophistries to be regarded as belonging to the age in which he lived and to his
+personal character, and this apparent haughtiness as flowing from the natural
+elevation of his position?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For example, when he says that it is absurd to suppose that one man is the
+corrupter and all the rest of the world the improvers of the youth; or, when he
+argues that he never could have corrupted the men with whom he had to live; or,
+when he proves his belief in the gods because he believes in the sons of gods,
+is he serious or jesting? It may be observed that these sophisms all occur in
+his cross-examination of Meletus, who is easily foiled and mastered in the
+hands of the great dialectician. Perhaps he regarded these answers as good
+enough for his accuser, of whom he makes very light. Also there is a touch of
+irony in them, which takes them out of the category of sophistry. (Compare
+Euthyph.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the manner in which he defends himself about the lives of his disciples is
+not satisfactory, can hardly be denied. Fresh in the memory of the Athenians,
+and detestable as they deserved to be to the newly restored democracy, were the
+names of Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides. It is obviously not a sufficient
+answer that Socrates had never professed to teach them anything, and is
+therefore not justly chargeable with their crimes. Yet the defence, when taken
+out of this ironical form, is doubtless sound: that his teaching had nothing to
+do with their evil lives. Here, then, the sophistry is rather in form than in
+substance, though we might desire that to such a serious charge Socrates had
+given a more serious answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Truly characteristic of Socrates is another point in his answer, which may also
+be regarded as sophistical. He says that &ldquo;if he has corrupted the youth,
+he must have corrupted them involuntarily.&rdquo; But if, as Socrates argues,
+all evil is involuntary, then all criminals ought to be admonished and not
+punished. In these words the Socratic doctrine of the involuntariness of evil
+is clearly intended to be conveyed. Here again, as in the former instance, the
+defence of Socrates is untrue practically, but may be true in some ideal or
+transcendental sense. The commonplace reply, that if he had been guilty of
+corrupting the youth their relations would surely have witnessed against him,
+with which he concludes this part of his defence, is more satisfactory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, when Socrates argues that he must believe in the gods because he
+believes in the sons of gods, we must remember that this is a refutation not of
+the original indictment, which is consistent enough&mdash;&ldquo;Socrates does
+not receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new
+divinities&rdquo;&mdash;but of the interpretation put upon the words by
+Meletus, who has affirmed that he is a downright atheist. To this Socrates
+fairly answers, in accordance with the ideas of the time, that a downright
+atheist cannot believe in the sons of gods or in divine things. The notion that
+demons or lesser divinities are the sons of gods is not to be regarded as
+ironical or sceptical. He is arguing &ldquo;ad hominem&rdquo; according to the
+notions of mythology current in his age. Yet he abstains from saying that he
+believed in the gods whom the State approved. He does not defend himself, as
+Xenophon has defended him, by appealing to his practice of religion. Probably
+he neither wholly believed, nor disbelieved, in the existence of the popular
+gods; he had no means of knowing about them. According to Plato (compare Phædo;
+Symp.), as well as Xenophon (Memor.), he was punctual in the performance of the
+least religious duties; and he must have believed in his own oracular sign, of
+which he seemed to have an internal witness. But the existence of Apollo or
+Zeus, or the other gods whom the State approves, would have appeared to him
+both uncertain and unimportant in comparison of the duty of self-examination,
+and of those principles of truth and right which he deemed to be the foundation
+of religion. (Compare Phaedr.; Euthyph.; Republic.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second question, whether Plato meant to represent Socrates as braving or
+irritating his judges, must also be answered in the negative. His irony, his
+superiority, his audacity, &ldquo;regarding not the person of man,&rdquo;
+necessarily flow out of the loftiness of his situation. He is not acting a part
+upon a great occasion, but he is what he has been all his life long, &ldquo;a
+king of men.&rdquo; He would rather not appear insolent, if he could avoid it
+(ouch os authadizomenos touto lego). Neither is he desirous of hastening his
+own end, for life and death are simply indifferent to him. But such a defence
+as would be acceptable to his judges and might procure an acquittal, it is not
+in his nature to make. He will not say or do anything that might pervert the
+course of justice; he cannot have his tongue bound even &ldquo;in the throat of
+death.&rdquo; With his accusers he will only fence and play, as he had fenced
+with other &ldquo;improvers of youth,&rdquo; answering the Sophist according to
+his sophistry all his life long. He is serious when he is speaking of his own
+mission, which seems to distinguish him from all other reformers of mankind,
+and originates in an accident. The dedication of himself to the improvement of
+his fellow-citizens is not so remarkable as the ironical spirit in which he
+goes about doing good only in vindication of the credit of the oracle, and in
+the vain hope of finding a wiser man than himself. Yet this singular and almost
+accidental character of his mission agrees with the divine sign which,
+according to our notions, is equally accidental and irrational, and is
+nevertheless accepted by him as the guiding principle of his life. Socrates is
+nowhere represented to us as a freethinker or sceptic. There is no reason to
+doubt his sincerity when he speculates on the possibility of seeing and knowing
+the heroes of the Trojan war in another world. On the other hand, his hope of
+immortality is uncertain;&mdash;he also conceives of death as a long sleep (in
+this respect differing from the Phædo), and at last falls back on resignation
+to the divine will, and the certainty that no evil can happen to the good man
+either in life or death. His absolute truthfulness seems to hinder him from
+asserting positively more than this; and he makes no attempt to veil his
+ignorance in mythology and figures of speech. The gentleness of the first part
+of the speech contrasts with the aggravated, almost threatening, tone of the
+conclusion. He characteristically remarks that he will not speak as a
+rhetorician, that is to say, he will not make a regular defence such as Lysias
+or one of the orators might have composed for him, or, according to some
+accounts, did compose for him. But he first procures himself a hearing by
+conciliatory words. He does not attack the Sophists; for they were open to the
+same charges as himself; they were equally ridiculed by the Comic poets, and
+almost equally hateful to Anytus and Meletus. Yet incidentally the antagonism
+between Socrates and the Sophists is allowed to appear. He is poor and they are
+rich; his profession that he teaches nothing is opposed to their readiness to
+teach all things; his talking in the marketplace to their private instructions;
+his tarry-at-home life to their wandering from city to city. The tone which he
+assumes towards them is one of real friendliness, but also of concealed irony.
+Towards Anaxagoras, who had disappointed him in his hopes of learning about
+mind and nature, he shows a less kindly feeling, which is also the feeling of
+Plato in other passages (Laws). But Anaxagoras had been dead thirty years, and
+was beyond the reach of persecution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers who
+would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more violent terms
+was, as far as we know, never fulfilled. No inference can be drawn from this
+circumstance as to the probability of the words attributed to him having been
+actually uttered. They express the aspiration of the first martyr of
+philosophy, that he would leave behind him many followers, accompanied by the
+not unnatural feeling that they would be fiercer and more inconsiderate in
+their words when emancipated from his control.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The above remarks must be understood as applying with any degree of certainty
+to the Platonic Socrates only. For, although these or similar words may have
+been spoken by Socrates himself, we cannot exclude the possibility, that like
+so much else, <i>e.g.</i> the wisdom of Critias, the poem of Solon, the virtues
+of Charmides, they may have been due only to the imagination of Plato. The
+arguments of those who maintain that the Apology was composed during the
+process, resting on no evidence, do not require a serious refutation. Nor are
+the reasonings of Schleiermacher, who argues that the Platonic defence is an
+exact or nearly exact reproduction of the words of Socrates, partly because
+Plato would not have been guilty of the impiety of altering them, and also
+because many points of the defence might have been improved and strengthened,
+at all more conclusive. (See English Translation.) What effect the death of
+Socrates produced on the mind of Plato, we cannot certainly determine; nor can
+we say how he would or must have written under the circumstances. We observe
+that the enmity of Aristophanes to Socrates does not prevent Plato from
+introducing them together in the Symposium engaged in friendly intercourse. Nor
+is there any trace in the Dialogues of an attempt to make Anytus or Meletus
+personally odious in the eyes of the Athenian public.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>APOLOGY</h2>
+
+<p>
+How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I
+know that they almost made me forget who I was&mdash;so persuasively did they
+speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth. But of the many
+falsehoods told by them, there was one which quite amazed me;&mdash;I mean when
+they said that you should be upon your guard and not allow yourselves to be
+deceived by the force of my eloquence. To say this, when they were certain to
+be detected as soon as I opened my lips and proved myself to be anything but a
+great speaker, did indeed appear to me most shameless&mdash;unless by the force
+of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for if such is their meaning, I
+admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs! Well, as I
+was saying, they have scarcely spoken the truth at all; but from me you shall
+hear the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner in a set
+oration duly ornamented with words and phrases. No, by heaven! but I shall use
+the words and arguments which occur to me at the moment; for I am confident in
+the justice of my cause (Or, I am certain that I am right in taking this
+course.): at my time of life I ought not to be appearing before you, O men of
+Athens, in the character of a juvenile orator&mdash;let no one expect it of me.
+And I must beg of you to grant me a favour:&mdash;If I defend myself in my
+accustomed manner, and you hear me using the words which I have been in the
+habit of using in the agora, at the tables of the money-changers, or anywhere
+else, I would ask you not to be surprised, and not to interrupt me on this
+account. For I am more than seventy years of age, and appearing now for the
+first time in a court of law, I am quite a stranger to the language of the
+place; and therefore I would have you regard me as if I were really a stranger,
+whom you would excuse if he spoke in his native tongue, and after the fashion
+of his country:&mdash;Am I making an unfair request of you? Never mind the
+manner, which may or may not be good; but think only of the truth of my words,
+and give heed to that: let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And first, I have to reply to the older charges and to my first accusers, and
+then I will go on to the later ones. For of old I have had many accusers, who
+have accused me falsely to you during many years; and I am more afraid of them
+than of Anytus and his associates, who are dangerous, too, in their own way.
+But far more dangerous are the others, who began when you were children, and
+took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a
+wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth
+beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. The disseminators of this
+tale are the accusers whom I dread; for their hearers are apt to fancy that
+such enquirers do not believe in the existence of the gods. And they are many,
+and their charges against me are of ancient date, and they were made by them in
+the days when you were more impressible than you are now&mdash;in childhood, or
+it may have been in youth&mdash;and the cause when heard went by default, for
+there was none to answer. And hardest of all, I do not know and cannot tell the
+names of my accusers; unless in the chance case of a Comic poet. All who from
+envy and malice have persuaded you&mdash;some of them having first convinced
+themselves&mdash;all this class of men are most difficult to deal with; for I
+cannot have them up here, and cross-examine them, and therefore I must simply
+fight with shadows in my own defence, and argue when there is no one who
+answers. I will ask you then to assume with me, as I was saying, that my
+opponents are of two kinds; one recent, the other ancient: and I hope that you
+will see the propriety of my answering the latter first, for these accusations
+you heard long before the others, and much oftener.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, then, I must make my defence, and endeavour to clear away in a short
+time, a slander which has lasted a long time. May I succeed, if to succeed be
+for my good and yours, or likely to avail me in my cause! The task is not an
+easy one; I quite understand the nature of it. And so leaving the event with
+God, in obedience to the law I will now make my defence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I will begin at the beginning, and ask what is the accusation which has given
+rise to the slander of me, and in fact has encouraged Meletus to proof this
+charge against me. Well, what do the slanderers say? They shall be my
+prosecutors, and I will sum up their words in an affidavit: &ldquo;Socrates is
+an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into things under the earth
+and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better cause; and he teaches
+the aforesaid doctrines to others.&rdquo; Such is the nature of the accusation:
+it is just what you have yourselves seen in the comedy of Aristophanes
+(Aristoph., Clouds.), who has introduced a man whom he calls Socrates, going
+about and saying that he walks in air, and talking a deal of nonsense
+concerning matters of which I do not pretend to know either much or
+little&mdash;not that I mean to speak disparagingly of any one who is a student
+of natural philosophy. I should be very sorry if Meletus could bring so grave a
+charge against me. But the simple truth is, O Athenians, that I have nothing to
+do with physical speculations. Very many of those here present are witnesses to
+the truth of this, and to them I appeal. Speak then, you who have heard me, and
+tell your neighbours whether any of you have ever known me hold forth in few
+words or in many upon such matters...You hear their answer. And from what they
+say of this part of the charge you will be able to judge of the truth of the
+rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As little foundation is there for the report that I am a teacher, and take
+money; this accusation has no more truth in it than the other. Although, if a
+man were really able to instruct mankind, to receive money for giving
+instruction would, in my opinion, be an honour to him. There is Gorgias of
+Leontium, and Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis, who go the round of the
+cities, and are able to persuade the young men to leave their own citizens by
+whom they might be taught for nothing, and come to them whom they not only pay,
+but are thankful if they may be allowed to pay them. There is at this time a
+Parian philosopher residing in Athens, of whom I have heard; and I came to hear
+of him in this way:&mdash;I came across a man who has spent a world of money on
+the Sophists, Callias, the son of Hipponicus, and knowing that he had sons, I
+asked him: &ldquo;Callias,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if your two sons were foals or
+calves, there would be no difficulty in finding some one to put over them; we
+should hire a trainer of horses, or a farmer probably, who would improve and
+perfect them in their own proper virtue and excellence; but as they are human
+beings, whom are you thinking of placing over them? Is there any one who
+understands human and political virtue? You must have thought about the matter,
+for you have sons; is there any one?&rdquo; &ldquo;There is,&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;Who is he?&rdquo; said I; &ldquo;and of what country? and what does he
+charge?&rdquo; &ldquo;Evenus the Parian,&rdquo; he replied; &ldquo;he is the
+man, and his charge is five minæ.&rdquo; Happy is Evenus, I said to myself, if
+he really has this wisdom, and teaches at such a moderate charge. Had I the
+same, I should have been very proud and conceited; but the truth is that I have
+no knowledge of the kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I dare say, Athenians, that some one among you will reply, &ldquo;Yes,
+Socrates, but what is the origin of these accusations which are brought against
+you; there must have been something strange which you have been doing? All
+these rumours and this talk about you would never have arisen if you had been
+like other men: tell us, then, what is the cause of them, for we should be
+sorry to judge hastily of you.&rdquo; Now I regard this as a fair challenge,
+and I will endeavour to explain to you the reason why I am called wise and have
+such an evil fame. Please to attend then. And although some of you may think
+that I am joking, I declare that I will tell you the entire truth. Men of
+Athens, this reputation of mine has come of a certain sort of wisdom which I
+possess. If you ask me what kind of wisdom, I reply, wisdom such as may perhaps
+be attained by man, for to that extent I am inclined to believe that I am wise;
+whereas the persons of whom I was speaking have a superhuman wisdom which I may
+fail to describe, because I have it not myself; and he who says that I have,
+speaks falsely, and is taking away my character. And here, O men of Athens, I
+must beg you not to interrupt me, even if I seem to say something extravagant.
+For the word which I will speak is not mine. I will refer you to a witness who
+is worthy of credit; that witness shall be the God of Delphi&mdash;he will tell
+you about my wisdom, if I have any, and of what sort it is. You must have known
+Chaerephon; he was early a friend of mine, and also a friend of yours, for he
+shared in the recent exile of the people, and returned with you. Well,
+Chaerephon, as you know, was very impetuous in all his doings, and he went to
+Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether&mdash;as I was saying, I
+must beg you not to interrupt&mdash;he asked the oracle to tell him whether
+anyone was wiser than I was, and the Pythian prophetess answered, that there
+was no man wiser. Chaerephon is dead himself; but his brother, who is in court,
+will confirm the truth of what I am saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Why do I mention this? Because I am going to explain to you why I have such an
+evil name. When I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can the god mean?
+and what is the interpretation of his riddle? for I know that I have no wisdom,
+small or great. What then can he mean when he says that I am the wisest of men?
+And yet he is a god, and cannot lie; that would be against his nature. After
+long consideration, I thought of a method of trying the question. I reflected
+that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god
+with a refutation in my hand. I should say to him, &ldquo;Here is a man who is
+wiser than I am; but you said that I was the wisest.&rdquo; Accordingly I went
+to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed him&mdash;his name I need
+not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination&mdash;and the
+result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking
+that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still
+wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought
+himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated
+me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I
+left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose
+that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off
+than he is,&mdash;for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither
+know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have
+slightly the advantage of him. Then I went to another who had still higher
+pretensions to wisdom, and my conclusion was exactly the same. Whereupon I made
+another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I went to one man after another, being not unconscious of the enmity which
+I provoked, and I lamented and feared this: but necessity was laid upon
+me,&mdash;the word of God, I thought, ought to be considered first. And I said
+to myself, Go I must to all who appear to know, and find out the meaning of the
+oracle. And I swear to you, Athenians, by the dog I swear!&mdash;for I must
+tell you the truth&mdash;the result of my mission was just this: I found that
+the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less
+esteemed were really wiser and better. I will tell you the tale of my
+wanderings and of the &ldquo;Herculean&rdquo; labours, as I may call them,
+which I endured only to find at last the oracle irrefutable. After the
+politicians, I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. And
+there, I said to myself, you will be instantly detected; now you will find out
+that you are more ignorant than they are. Accordingly, I took them some of the
+most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning
+of them&mdash;thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me?
+I am almost ashamed to confess the truth, but I must say that there is hardly a
+person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they
+did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a
+sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also
+say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. The poets
+appeared to me to be much in the same case; and I further observed that upon
+the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men
+in other things in which they were not wise. So I departed, conceiving myself
+to be superior to them for the same reason that I was superior to the
+politicians.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last I went to the artisans. I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as
+I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and here I was not
+mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this
+they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good
+artisans fell into the same error as the poets;&mdash;because they were good
+workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this
+defect in them overshadowed their wisdom; and therefore I asked myself on
+behalf of the oracle, whether I would like to be as I was, neither having their
+knowledge nor their ignorance, or like them in both; and I made answer to
+myself and to the oracle that I was better off as I was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This inquisition has led to my having many enemies of the worst and most
+dangerous kind, and has given occasion also to many calumnies. And I am called
+wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I
+find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is
+wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth
+little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by
+way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like
+Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. And so I go about
+the world, obedient to the god, and search and make enquiry into the wisdom of
+any one, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not
+wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and my
+occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to any public
+matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by
+reason of my devotion to the god.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is another thing:&mdash;young men of the richer classes, who have not
+much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders
+examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine others; there are
+plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who think that they know
+something, but really know little or nothing; and then those who are examined
+by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me: This
+confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth!&mdash;and
+then if somebody asks them, Why, what evil does he practise or teach? they do
+not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a
+loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all
+philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and
+having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not
+like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected&mdash;which
+is the truth; and as they are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are
+drawn up in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your
+ears with their loud and inveterate calumnies. And this is the reason why my
+three accusers, Meletus and Anytus and Lycon, have set upon me; Meletus, who
+has a quarrel with me on behalf of the poets; Anytus, on behalf of the
+craftsmen and politicians; Lycon, on behalf of the rhetoricians: and as I said
+at the beginning, I cannot expect to get rid of such a mass of calumny all in a
+moment. And this, O men of Athens, is the truth and the whole truth; I have
+concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing. And yet, I know that my plainness
+of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am
+speaking the truth?&mdash;Hence has arisen the prejudice against me; and this
+is the reason of it, as you will find out either in this or in any future
+enquiry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have said enough in my defence against the first class of my accusers; I turn
+to the second class. They are headed by Meletus, that good man and true lover
+of his country, as he calls himself. Against these, too, I must try to make a
+defence:&mdash;Let their affidavit be read: it contains something of this kind:
+It says that Socrates is a doer of evil, who corrupts the youth; and who does
+not believe in the gods of the state, but has other new divinities of his own.
+Such is the charge; and now let us examine the particular counts. He says that
+I am a doer of evil, and corrupt the youth; but I say, O men of Athens, that
+Meletus is a doer of evil, in that he pretends to be in earnest when he is only
+in jest, and is so eager to bring men to trial from a pretended zeal and
+interest about matters in which he really never had the smallest interest. And
+the truth of this I will endeavour to prove to you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Come hither, Meletus, and let me ask a question of you. You think a great deal
+about the improvement of youth?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, I do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tell the judges, then, who is their improver; for you must know, as you have
+taken the pains to discover their corrupter, and are citing and accusing me
+before them. Speak, then, and tell the judges who their improver
+is.&mdash;Observe, Meletus, that you are silent, and have nothing to say. But
+is not this rather disgraceful, and a very considerable proof of what I was
+saying, that you have no interest in the matter? Speak up, friend, and tell us
+who their improver is.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The laws.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But that, my good sir, is not my meaning. I want to know who the person is,
+who, in the first place, knows the laws.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The judges, Socrates, who are present in court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What, do you mean to say, Meletus, that they are able to instruct and improve
+youth?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly they are.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What, all of them, or some only and not others?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the goddess Here, that is good news! There are plenty of improvers, then.
+And what do you say of the audience,&mdash;do they improve them?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, they do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the senators?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, the senators improve them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But perhaps the members of the assembly corrupt them?&mdash;or do they too
+improve them?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They improve them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then every Athenian improves and elevates them; all with the exception of
+myself; and I alone am their corrupter? Is that what you affirm?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That is what I stoutly affirm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am very unfortunate if you are right. But suppose I ask you a question: How
+about horses? Does one man do them harm and all the world good? Is not the
+exact opposite the truth? One man is able to do them good, or at least not
+many;&mdash;the trainer of horses, that is to say, does them good, and others
+who have to do with them rather injure them? Is not that true, Meletus, of
+horses, or of any other animals? Most assuredly it is; whether you and Anytus
+say yes or no. Happy indeed would be the condition of youth if they had one
+corrupter only, and all the rest of the world were their improvers. But you,
+Meletus, have sufficiently shown that you never had a thought about the young:
+your carelessness is seen in your not caring about the very things which you
+bring against me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, Meletus, I will ask you another question&mdash;by Zeus I will: Which
+is better, to live among bad citizens, or among good ones? Answer, friend, I
+say; the question is one which may be easily answered. Do not the good do their
+neighbours good, and the bad do them evil?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And is there anyone who would rather be injured than benefited by those who
+live with him? Answer, my good friend, the law requires you to
+answer&mdash;does any one like to be injured?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when you accuse me of corrupting and deteriorating the youth, do you allege
+that I corrupt them intentionally or unintentionally?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Intentionally, I say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But you have just admitted that the good do their neighbours good, and the evil
+do them evil. Now, is that a truth which your superior wisdom has recognized
+thus early in life, and am I, at my age, in such darkness and ignorance as not
+to know that if a man with whom I have to live is corrupted by me, I am very
+likely to be harmed by him; and yet I corrupt him, and intentionally,
+too&mdash;so you say, although neither I nor any other human being is ever
+likely to be convinced by you. But either I do not corrupt them, or I corrupt
+them unintentionally; and on either view of the case you lie. If my offence is
+unintentional, the law has no cognizance of unintentional offences: you ought
+to have taken me privately, and warned and admonished me; for if I had been
+better advised, I should have left off doing what I only did
+unintentionally&mdash;no doubt I should; but you would have nothing to say to
+me and refused to teach me. And now you bring me up in this court, which is a
+place not of instruction, but of punishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be very clear to you, Athenians, as I was saying, that Meletus has no
+care at all, great or small, about the matter. But still I should like to know,
+Meletus, in what I am affirmed to corrupt the young. I suppose you mean, as I
+infer from your indictment, that I teach them not to acknowledge the gods which
+the state acknowledges, but some other new divinities or spiritual agencies in
+their stead. These are the lessons by which I corrupt the youth, as you say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, that I say emphatically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, by the gods, Meletus, of whom we are speaking, tell me and the court, in
+somewhat plainer terms, what you mean! for I do not as yet understand whether
+you affirm that I teach other men to acknowledge some gods, and therefore that
+I do believe in gods, and am not an entire atheist&mdash;this you do not lay to
+my charge,&mdash;but only you say that they are not the same gods which the
+city recognizes&mdash;the charge is that they are different gods. Or, do you
+mean that I am an atheist simply, and a teacher of atheism?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I mean the latter&mdash;that you are a complete atheist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What an extraordinary statement! Why do you think so, Meletus? Do you mean that
+I do not believe in the godhead of the sun or moon, like other men?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I assure you, judges, that he does not: for he says that the sun is stone, and
+the moon earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Friend Meletus, you think that you are accusing Anaxagoras: and you have but a
+bad opinion of the judges, if you fancy them illiterate to such a degree as not
+to know that these doctrines are found in the books of Anaxagoras the
+Clazomenian, which are full of them. And so, forsooth, the youth are said to be
+taught them by Socrates, when there are not unfrequently exhibitions of them at
+the theatre (Probably in allusion to Aristophanes who caricatured, and to
+Euripides who borrowed the notions of Anaxagoras, as well as to other dramatic
+poets.) (price of admission one drachma at the most); and they might pay their
+money, and laugh at Socrates if he pretends to father these extraordinary
+views. And so, Meletus, you really think that I do not believe in any god?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I swear by Zeus that you believe absolutely in none at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nobody will believe you, Meletus, and I am pretty sure that you do not believe
+yourself. I cannot help thinking, men of Athens, that Meletus is reckless and
+impudent, and that he has written this indictment in a spirit of mere
+wantonness and youthful bravado. Has he not compounded a riddle, thinking to
+try me? He said to himself:&mdash;I shall see whether the wise Socrates will
+discover my facetious contradiction, or whether I shall be able to deceive him
+and the rest of them. For he certainly does appear to me to contradict himself
+in the indictment as much as if he said that Socrates is guilty of not
+believing in the gods, and yet of believing in them&mdash;but this is not like
+a person who is in earnest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I should like you, O men of Athens, to join me in examining what I conceive to
+be his inconsistency; and do you, Meletus, answer. And I must remind the
+audience of my request that they would not make a disturbance if I speak in my
+accustomed manner:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Did ever man, Meletus, believe in the existence of human things, and not of
+human beings?...I wish, men of Athens, that he would answer, and not be always
+trying to get up an interruption. Did ever any man believe in horsemanship, and
+not in horses? or in flute-playing, and not in flute-players? No, my friend; I
+will answer to you and to the court, as you refuse to answer for yourself.
+There is no man who ever did. But now please to answer the next question: Can a
+man believe in spiritual and divine agencies, and not in spirits or demigods?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He cannot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How lucky I am to have extracted that answer, by the assistance of the court!
+But then you swear in the indictment that I teach and believe in divine or
+spiritual agencies (new or old, no matter for that); at any rate, I believe in
+spiritual agencies,&mdash;so you say and swear in the affidavit; and yet if I
+believe in divine beings, how can I help believing in spirits or
+demigods;&mdash;must I not? To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that
+your silence gives consent. Now what are spirits or demigods? Are they not
+either gods or the sons of gods?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly they are.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this is what I call the facetious riddle invented by you: the demigods or
+spirits are gods, and you say first that I do not believe in gods, and then
+again that I do believe in gods; that is, if I believe in demigods. For if the
+demigods are the illegitimate sons of gods, whether by the nymphs or by any
+other mothers, of whom they are said to be the sons&mdash;what human being will
+ever believe that there are no gods if they are the sons of gods? You might as
+well affirm the existence of mules, and deny that of horses and asses. Such
+nonsense, Meletus, could only have been intended by you to make trial of me.
+You have put this into the indictment because you had nothing real of which to
+accuse me. But no one who has a particle of understanding will ever be
+convinced by you that the same men can believe in divine and superhuman things,
+and yet not believe that there are gods and demigods and heroes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have said enough in answer to the charge of Meletus: any elaborate defence is
+unnecessary, but I know only too well how many are the enmities which I have
+incurred, and this is what will be my destruction if I am destroyed;&mdash;not
+Meletus, nor yet Anytus, but the envy and detraction of the world, which has
+been the death of many good men, and will probably be the death of many more;
+there is no danger of my being the last of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some one will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which
+is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may fairly answer: There
+you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the
+chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything
+he is doing right or wrong&mdash;acting the part of a good man or of a bad.
+Whereas, upon your view, the heroes who fell at Troy were not good for much,
+and the son of Thetis above all, who altogether despised danger in comparison
+with disgrace; and when he was so eager to slay Hector, his goddess mother said
+to him, that if he avenged his companion Patroclus, and slew Hector, he would
+die himself&mdash;&ldquo;Fate,&rdquo; she said, in these or the like words,
+&ldquo;waits for you next after Hector;&rdquo; he, receiving this warning,
+utterly despised danger and death, and instead of fearing them, feared rather
+to live in dishonour, and not to avenge his friend. &ldquo;Let me die
+forthwith,&rdquo; he replies, &ldquo;and be avenged of my enemy, rather than
+abide here by the beaked ships, a laughing-stock and a burden of the
+earth.&rdquo; Had Achilles any thought of death and danger? For wherever a
+man&rsquo;s place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he
+has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger;
+he should not think of death or of anything but of disgrace. And this, O men of
+Athens, is a true saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I was
+ordered by the generals whom you chose to command me at Potidaea and Amphipolis
+and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any other man, facing
+death&mdash;if now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfil
+the philosopher&rsquo;s mission of searching into myself and other men, I were
+to desert my post through fear of death, or any other fear; that would indeed
+be strange, and I might justly be arraigned in court for denying the existence
+of the gods, if I disobeyed the oracle because I was afraid of death, fancying
+that I was wise when I was not wise. For the fear of death is indeed the
+pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretence of knowing the
+unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to
+be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is not this ignorance of a
+disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the conceit that a man knows what he
+does not know? And in this respect only I believe myself to differ from men in
+general, and may perhaps claim to be wiser than they are:&mdash;that whereas I
+know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know: but I do know
+that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and
+dishonourable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a
+certain evil. And therefore if you let me go now, and are not convinced by
+Anytus, who said that since I had been prosecuted I must be put to death; (or
+if not that I ought never to have been prosecuted at all); and that if I escape
+now, your sons will all be utterly ruined by listening to my words&mdash;if you
+say to me, Socrates, this time we will not mind Anytus, and you shall be let
+off, but upon one condition, that you are not to enquire and speculate in this
+way any more, and that if you are caught doing so again you shall die;&mdash;if
+this was the condition on which you let me go, I should reply: Men of Athens, I
+honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have
+life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of
+philosophy, exhorting any one whom I meet and saying to him after my manner:
+You, my friend,&mdash;a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of
+Athens,&mdash;are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money
+and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the
+greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? And if
+the person with whom I am arguing, says: Yes, but I do care; then I do not
+leave him or let him go at once; but I proceed to interrogate and examine and
+cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue in him, but only says
+that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the
+less. And I shall repeat the same words to every one whom I meet, young and
+old, citizen and alien, but especially to the citizens, inasmuch as they are my
+brethren. For know that this is the command of God; and I believe that no
+greater good has ever happened in the state than my service to the God. For I
+do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take
+thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care
+about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given
+by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public
+as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which
+corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person. But if any one says that this is
+not my teaching, he is speaking an untruth. Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say
+to you, do as Anytus bids or not as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not;
+but whichever you do, understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even if
+I have to die many times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Men of Athens, do not interrupt, but hear me; there was an understanding
+between us that you should hear me to the end: I have something more to say, at
+which you may be inclined to cry out; but I believe that to hear me will be
+good for you, and therefore I beg that you will not cry out. I would have you
+know, that if you kill such an one as I am, you will injure yourselves more
+than you will injure me. Nothing will injure me, not Meletus nor yet
+Anytus&mdash;they cannot, for a bad man is not permitted to injure a better
+than himself. I do not deny that Anytus may, perhaps, kill him, or drive him
+into exile, or deprive him of civil rights; and he may imagine, and others may
+imagine, that he is inflicting a great injury upon him: but there I do not
+agree. For the evil of doing as he is doing&mdash;the evil of unjustly taking
+away the life of another&mdash;is greater far.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think,
+but for yours, that you may not sin against the God by condemning me, who am
+his gift to you. For if you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me,
+who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given
+to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in
+his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am
+that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all
+places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching
+you. You will not easily find another like me, and therefore I would advise you
+to spare me. I dare say that you may feel out of temper (like a person who is
+suddenly awakened from sleep), and you think that you might easily strike me
+dead as Anytus advises, and then you would sleep on for the remainder of your
+lives, unless God in his care of you sent you another gadfly. When I say that I
+am given to you by God, the proof of my mission is this:&mdash;if I had been
+like other men, I should not have neglected all my own concerns or patiently
+seen the neglect of them during all these years, and have been doing yours,
+coming to you individually like a father or elder brother, exhorting you to
+regard virtue; such conduct, I say, would be unlike human nature. If I had
+gained anything, or if my exhortations had been paid, there would have been
+some sense in my doing so; but now, as you will perceive, not even the
+impudence of my accusers dares to say that I have ever exacted or sought pay of
+any one; of that they have no witness. And I have a sufficient witness to the
+truth of what I say&mdash;my poverty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some one may wonder why I go about in private giving advice and busying myself
+with the concerns of others, but do not venture to come forward in public and
+advise the state. I will tell you why. You have heard me speak at sundry times
+and in divers places of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the
+divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign, which is a kind
+of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but
+never commands me to do anything which I am going to do. This is what deters me
+from being a politician. And rightly, as I think. For I am certain, O men of
+Athens, that if I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago, and
+done no good either to you or to myself. And do not be offended at my telling
+you the truth: for the truth is, that no man who goes to war with you or any
+other multitude, honestly striving against the many lawless and unrighteous
+deeds which are done in a state, will save his life; he who will fight for the
+right, if he would live even for a brief space, must have a private station and
+not a public one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I can give you convincing evidence of what I say, not words only, but what you
+value far more&mdash;actions. Let me relate to you a passage of my own life
+which will prove to you that I should never have yielded to injustice from any
+fear of death, and that &ldquo;as I should have refused to yield&rdquo; I must
+have died at once. I will tell you a tale of the courts, not very interesting
+perhaps, but nevertheless true. The only office of state which I ever held, O
+men of Athens, was that of senator: the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had
+the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of
+the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them in a
+body, contrary to law, as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the
+only one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my vote
+against you; and when the orators threatened to impeach and arrest me, and you
+called and shouted, I made up my mind that I would run the risk, having law and
+justice with me, rather than take part in your injustice because I feared
+imprisonment and death. This happened in the days of the democracy. But when
+the oligarchy of the Thirty was in power, they sent for me and four others into
+the rotunda, and bade us bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis, as they wanted
+to put him to death. This was a specimen of the sort of commands which they
+were always giving with the view of implicating as many as possible in their
+crimes; and then I showed, not in word only but in deed, that, if I may be
+allowed to use such an expression, I cared not a straw for death, and that my
+great and only care was lest I should do an unrighteous or unholy thing. For
+the strong arm of that oppressive power did not frighten me into doing wrong;
+and when we came out of the rotunda the other four went to Salamis and fetched
+Leon, but I went quietly home. For which I might have lost my life, had not the
+power of the Thirty shortly afterwards come to an end. And many will witness to
+my words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now do you really imagine that I could have survived all these years, if I had
+led a public life, supposing that like a good man I had always maintained the
+right and had made justice, as I ought, the first thing? No indeed, men of
+Athens, neither I nor any other man. But I have been always the same in all my
+actions, public as well as private, and never have I yielded any base
+compliance to those who are slanderously termed my disciples, or to any other.
+Not that I have any regular disciples. But if any one likes to come and hear me
+while I am pursuing my mission, whether he be young or old, he is not excluded.
+Nor do I converse only with those who pay; but any one, whether he be rich or
+poor, may ask and answer me and listen to my words; and whether he turns out to
+be a bad man or a good one, neither result can be justly imputed to me; for I
+never taught or professed to teach him anything. And if any one says that he
+has ever learned or heard anything from me in private which all the world has
+not heard, let me tell you that he is lying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I shall be asked, Why do people delight in continually conversing with you?
+I have told you already, Athenians, the whole truth about this matter: they
+like to hear the cross-examination of the pretenders to wisdom; there is
+amusement in it. Now this duty of cross-examining other men has been imposed
+upon me by God; and has been signified to me by oracles, visions, and in every
+way in which the will of divine power was ever intimated to any one. This is
+true, O Athenians, or, if not true, would be soon refuted. If I am or have been
+corrupting the youth, those of them who are now grown up and have become
+sensible that I gave them bad advice in the days of their youth should come
+forward as accusers, and take their revenge; or if they do not like to come
+themselves, some of their relatives, fathers, brothers, or other kinsmen,
+should say what evil their families have suffered at my hands. Now is their
+time. Many of them I see in the court. There is Crito, who is of the same age
+and of the same deme with myself, and there is Critobulus his son, whom I also
+see. Then again there is Lysanias of Sphettus, who is the father of
+Aeschines&mdash;he is present; and also there is Antiphon of Cephisus, who is
+the father of Epigenes; and there are the brothers of several who have
+associated with me. There is Nicostratus the son of Theosdotides, and the
+brother of Theodotus (now Theodotus himself is dead, and therefore he, at any
+rate, will not seek to stop him); and there is Paralus the son of Demodocus,
+who had a brother Theages; and Adeimantus the son of Ariston, whose brother
+Plato is present; and Aeantodorus, who is the brother of Apollodorus, whom I
+also see. I might mention a great many others, some of whom Meletus should have
+produced as witnesses in the course of his speech; and let him still produce
+them, if he has forgotten&mdash;I will make way for him. And let him say, if he
+has any testimony of the sort which he can produce. Nay, Athenians, the very
+opposite is the truth. For all these are ready to witness on behalf of the
+corrupter, of the injurer of their kindred, as Meletus and Anytus call me; not
+the corrupted youth only&mdash;there might have been a motive for
+that&mdash;but their uncorrupted elder relatives. Why should they too support
+me with their testimony? Why, indeed, except for the sake of truth and justice,
+and because they know that I am speaking the truth, and that Meletus is a liar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, Athenians, this and the like of this is all the defence which I have to
+offer. Yet a word more. Perhaps there may be some one who is offended at me,
+when he calls to mind how he himself on a similar, or even a less serious
+occasion, prayed and entreated the judges with many tears, and how he produced
+his children in court, which was a moving spectacle, together with a host of
+relations and friends; whereas I, who am probably in danger of my life, will do
+none of these things. The contrast may occur to his mind, and he may be set
+against me, and vote in anger because he is displeased at me on this account.
+Now if there be such a person among you,&mdash;mind, I do not say that there
+is,&mdash;to him I may fairly reply: My friend, I am a man, and like other men,
+a creature of flesh and blood, and not &ldquo;of wood or stone,&rdquo; as Homer
+says; and I have a family, yes, and sons, O Athenians, three in number, one
+almost a man, and two others who are still young; and yet I will not bring any
+of them hither in order to petition you for an acquittal. And why not? Not from
+any self-assertion or want of respect for you. Whether I am or am not afraid of
+death is another question, of which I will not now speak. But, having regard to
+public opinion, I feel that such conduct would be discreditable to myself, and
+to you, and to the whole state. One who has reached my years, and who has a
+name for wisdom, ought not to demean himself. Whether this opinion of me be
+deserved or not, at any rate the world has decided that Socrates is in some way
+superior to other men. And if those among you who are said to be superior in
+wisdom and courage, and any other virtue, demean themselves in this way, how
+shameful is their conduct! I have seen men of reputation, when they have been
+condemned, behaving in the strangest manner: they seemed to fancy that they
+were going to suffer something dreadful if they died, and that they could be
+immortal if you only allowed them to live; and I think that such are a
+dishonour to the state, and that any stranger coming in would have said of them
+that the most eminent men of Athens, to whom the Athenians themselves give
+honour and command, are no better than women. And I say that these things ought
+not to be done by those of us who have a reputation; and if they are done, you
+ought not to permit them; you ought rather to show that you are far more
+disposed to condemn the man who gets up a doleful scene and makes the city
+ridiculous, than him who holds his peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, setting aside the question of public opinion, there seems to be something
+wrong in asking a favour of a judge, and thus procuring an acquittal, instead
+of informing and convincing him. For his duty is, not to make a present of
+justice, but to give judgment; and he has sworn that he will judge according to
+the laws, and not according to his own good pleasure; and we ought not to
+encourage you, nor should you allow yourselves to be encouraged, in this habit
+of perjury&mdash;there can be no piety in that. Do not then require me to do
+what I consider dishonourable and impious and wrong, especially now, when I am
+being tried for impiety on the indictment of Meletus. For if, O men of Athens,
+by force of persuasion and entreaty I could overpower your oaths, then I should
+be teaching you to believe that there are no gods, and in defending should
+simply convict myself of the charge of not believing in them. But that is not
+so&mdash;far otherwise. For I do believe that there are gods, and in a sense
+higher than that in which any of my accusers believe in them. And to you and to
+God I commit my cause, to be determined by you as is best for you and me.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+There are many reasons why I am not grieved, O men of Athens, at the vote of
+condemnation. I expected it, and am only surprised that the votes are so nearly
+equal; for I had thought that the majority against me would have been far
+larger; but now, had thirty votes gone over to the other side, I should have
+been acquitted. And I may say, I think, that I have escaped Meletus. I may say
+more; for without the assistance of Anytus and Lycon, any one may see that he
+would not have had a fifth part of the votes, as the law requires, in which
+case he would have incurred a fine of a thousand drachmae.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so he proposes death as the penalty. And what shall I propose on my part, O
+men of Athens? Clearly that which is my due. And what is my due? What return
+shall be made to the man who has never had the wit to be idle during his whole
+life; but has been careless of what the many care for&mdash;wealth, and family
+interests, and military offices, and speaking in the assembly, and
+magistracies, and plots, and parties. Reflecting that I was really too honest a
+man to be a politician and live, I did not go where I could do no good to you
+or to myself; but where I could do the greatest good privately to every one of
+you, thither I went, and sought to persuade every man among you that he must
+look to himself, and seek virtue and wisdom before he looks to his private
+interests, and look to the state before he looks to the interests of the state;
+and that this should be the order which he observes in all his actions. What
+shall be done to such an one? Doubtless some good thing, O men of Athens, if he
+has his reward; and the good should be of a kind suitable to him. What would be
+a reward suitable to a poor man who is your benefactor, and who desires leisure
+that he may instruct you? There can be no reward so fitting as maintenance in
+the Prytaneum, O men of Athens, a reward which he deserves far more than the
+citizen who has won the prize at Olympia in the horse or chariot race, whether
+the chariots were drawn by two horses or by many. For I am in want, and he has
+enough; and he only gives you the appearance of happiness, and I give you the
+reality. And if I am to estimate the penalty fairly, I should say that
+maintenance in the Prytaneum is the just return.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps you think that I am braving you in what I am saying now, as in what I
+said before about the tears and prayers. But this is not so. I speak rather
+because I am convinced that I never intentionally wronged any one, although I
+cannot convince you&mdash;the time has been too short; if there were a law at
+Athens, as there is in other cities, that a capital cause should not be decided
+in one day, then I believe that I should have convinced you. But I cannot in a
+moment refute great slanders; and, as I am convinced that I never wronged
+another, I will assuredly not wrong myself. I will not say of myself that I
+deserve any evil, or propose any penalty. Why should I? because I am afraid of
+the penalty of death which Meletus proposes? When I do not know whether death
+is a good or an evil, why should I propose a penalty which would certainly be
+an evil? Shall I say imprisonment? And why should I live in prison, and be the
+slave of the magistrates of the year&mdash;of the Eleven? Or shall the penalty
+be a fine, and imprisonment until the fine is paid? There is the same
+objection. I should have to lie in prison, for money I have none, and cannot
+pay. And if I say exile (and this may possibly be the penalty which you will
+affix), I must indeed be blinded by the love of life, if I am so irrational as
+to expect that when you, who are my own citizens, cannot endure my discourses
+and words, and have found them so grievous and odious that you will have no
+more of them, others are likely to endure me. No indeed, men of Athens, that is
+not very likely. And what a life should I lead, at my age, wandering from city
+to city, ever changing my place of exile, and always being driven out! For I am
+quite sure that wherever I go, there, as here, the young men will flock to me;
+and if I drive them away, their elders will drive me out at their request; and
+if I let them come, their fathers and friends will drive me out for their
+sakes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you
+may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have
+great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you
+that to do as you say would be a disobedience to the God, and therefore that I
+cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say
+again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about
+which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and
+that the unexamined life is not worth living, you are still less likely to
+believe me. Yet I say what is true, although a thing of which it is hard for me
+to persuade you. Also, I have never been accustomed to think that I deserve to
+suffer any harm. Had I money I might have estimated the offence at what I was
+able to pay, and not have been much the worse. But I have none, and therefore I
+must ask you to proportion the fine to my means. Well, perhaps I could afford a
+mina, and therefore I propose that penalty: Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and
+Apollodorus, my friends here, bid me say thirty minæ, and they will be the
+sureties. Let thirty minæ be the penalty; for which sum they will be ample
+security to you.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name which
+you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that you killed
+Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise, even although I am not wise,
+when they want to reproach you. If you had waited a little while, your desire
+would have been fulfilled in the course of nature. For I am far advanced in
+years, as you may perceive, and not far from death. I am speaking now not to
+all of you, but only to those who have condemned me to death. And I have
+another thing to say to them: you think that I was convicted because I had no
+words of the sort which would have procured my acquittal&mdash;I mean, if I had
+thought fit to leave nothing undone or unsaid. Not so; the deficiency which led
+to my conviction was not of words&mdash;certainly not. But I had not the
+boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me
+to do, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things
+which you have been accustomed to hear from others, and which, as I maintain,
+are unworthy of me. I thought at the time that I ought not to do anything
+common or mean when in danger: nor do I now repent of the style of my defence;
+I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and
+live. For neither in war nor yet at law ought I or any man to use every way of
+escaping death. Often in battle there can be no doubt that if a man will throw
+away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death;
+and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is
+willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid
+death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. I am old
+and move slowly, and the slower runner has overtaken me, and my accusers are
+keen and quick, and the faster runner, who is unrighteousness, has overtaken
+them. And now I depart hence condemned by you to suffer the penalty of
+death,&mdash;they too go their ways condemned by the truth to suffer the
+penalty of villainy and wrong; and I must abide by my award&mdash;let them
+abide by theirs. I suppose that these things may be regarded as
+fated,&mdash;and I think that they are well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am
+about to die, and in the hour of death men are gifted with prophetic power. And
+I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after my departure
+punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you. Me
+you have killed because you wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an
+account of your lives. But that will not be as you suppose: far otherwise. For
+I say that there will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom
+hitherto I have restrained: and as they are younger they will be more
+inconsiderate with you, and you will be more offended at them. If you think
+that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your evil lives,
+you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or
+honourable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but
+to be improving yourselves. This is the prophecy which I utter before my
+departure to the judges who have condemned me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Friends, who would have acquitted me, I would like also to talk with you about
+the thing which has come to pass, while the magistrates are busy, and before I
+go to the place at which I must die. Stay then a little, for we may as well
+talk with one another while there is time. You are my friends, and I should
+like to show you the meaning of this event which has happened to me. O my
+judges&mdash;for you I may truly call judges&mdash;I should like to tell you of
+a wonderful circumstance. Hitherto the divine faculty of which the internal
+oracle is the source has constantly been in the habit of opposing me even about
+trifles, if I was going to make a slip or error in any matter; and now as you
+see there has come upon me that which may be thought, and is generally believed
+to be, the last and worst evil. But the oracle made no sign of opposition,
+either when I was leaving my house in the morning, or when I was on my way to
+the court, or while I was speaking, at anything which I was going to say; and
+yet I have often been stopped in the middle of a speech, but now in nothing I
+either said or did touching the matter in hand has the oracle opposed me. What
+do I take to be the explanation of this silence? I will tell you. It is an
+intimation that what has happened to me is a good, and that those of us who
+think that death is an evil are in error. For the customary sign would surely
+have opposed me had I been going to evil and not to good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to
+hope that death is a good; for one of two things&mdash;either death is a state
+of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and
+migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there
+is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even
+by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select
+the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to
+compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell
+us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and
+more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private
+man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when
+compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die
+is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey
+to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my
+friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim
+arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in
+this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there,
+Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who
+were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What
+would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod
+and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I myself, too,
+shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and conversing with Palamedes,
+and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other ancient hero who has suffered death
+through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in
+comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall then be able to
+continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in
+the next; and I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is
+not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of
+the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men
+and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and
+asking them questions! In another world they do not put a man to death for
+asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier than we are, they
+will be immortal, if what is said is true.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty,
+that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and
+his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own approaching end happened by
+mere chance. But I see clearly that the time had arrived when it was better for
+me to die and be released from trouble; wherefore the oracle gave no sign. For
+which reason, also, I am not angry with my condemners, or with my accusers;
+they have done me no harm, although they did not mean to do me any good; and
+for this I may gently blame them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still I have a favour to ask of them. When my sons are grown up, I would ask
+you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have
+troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about
+virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really
+nothing,&mdash;then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about
+that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when
+they are really nothing. And if you do this, both I and my sons will have
+received justice at your hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways&mdash;I to die, and you
+to live. Which is better God only knows.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Apology, by Plato
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Apology
+       Also known as "The Death of Socrates"
+
+Author: Plato
+
+Translator: Benjamin Jowett
+
+Posting Date: November 3, 2008 [EBook #1656]
+Release Date: February, 1999
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APOLOGY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher
+
+
+
+
+
+APOLOGY
+
+By Plato
+
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+In what relation the Apology of Plato stands to the real defence of
+Socrates, there are no means of determining. It certainly agrees in
+tone and character with the description of Xenophon, who says in the
+Memorabilia that Socrates might have been acquitted 'if in any moderate
+degree he would have conciliated the favour of the dicasts;' and who
+informs us in another passage, on the testimony of Hermogenes, the
+friend of Socrates, that he had no wish to live; and that the divine
+sign refused to allow him to prepare a defence, and also that Socrates
+himself declared this to be unnecessary, on the ground that all his life
+long he had been preparing against that hour. For the speech breathes
+throughout a spirit of defiance, (ut non supplex aut reus sed magister
+aut dominus videretur esse judicum', Cic. de Orat.); and the loose and
+desultory style is an imitation of the 'accustomed manner' in
+which Socrates spoke in 'the agora and among the tables of the
+money-changers.' The allusion in the Crito may, perhaps, be adduced as a
+further evidence of the literal accuracy of some parts. But in the
+main it must be regarded as the ideal of Socrates, according to Plato's
+conception of him, appearing in the greatest and most public scene of
+his life, and in the height of his triumph, when he is weakest, and yet
+his mastery over mankind is greatest, and his habitual irony acquires a
+new meaning and a sort of tragic pathos in the face of death. The facts
+of his life are summed up, and the features of his character are brought
+out as if by accident in the course of the defence. The conversational
+manner, the seeming want of arrangement, the ironical simplicity, are
+found to result in a perfect work of art, which is the portrait of
+Socrates.
+
+Yet some of the topics may have been actually used by Socrates; and
+the recollection of his very words may have rung in the ears of his
+disciple. The Apology of Plato may be compared generally with those
+speeches of Thucydides in which he has embodied his conception of the
+lofty character and policy of the great Pericles, and which at the same
+time furnish a commentary on the situation of affairs from the point of
+view of the historian. So in the Apology there is an ideal rather than a
+literal truth; much is said which was not said, and is only Plato's view
+of the situation. Plato was not, like Xenophon, a chronicler of facts;
+he does not appear in any of his writings to have aimed at literal
+accuracy. He is not therefore to be supplemented from the Memorabilia
+and Symposium of Xenophon, who belongs to an entirely different class of
+writers. The Apology of Plato is not the report of what Socrates said,
+but an elaborate composition, quite as much so in fact as one of the
+Dialogues. And we may perhaps even indulge in the fancy that the actual
+defence of Socrates was as much greater than the Platonic defence as the
+master was greater than the disciple. But in any case, some of the words
+used by him must have been remembered, and some of the facts recorded
+must have actually occurred. It is significant that Plato is said to
+have been present at the defence (Apol.), as he is also said to have
+been absent at the last scene in the Phaedo. Is it fanciful to suppose
+that he meant to give the stamp of authenticity to the one and not to
+the other?--especially when we consider that these two passages are the
+only ones in which Plato makes mention of himself. The circumstance that
+Plato was to be one of his sureties for the payment of the fine which he
+proposed has the appearance of truth. More suspicious is the statement
+that Socrates received the first impulse to his favourite calling of
+cross-examining the world from the Oracle of Delphi; for he must already
+have been famous before Chaerephon went to consult the Oracle (Riddell),
+and the story is of a kind which is very likely to have been invented.
+On the whole we arrive at the conclusion that the Apology is true to the
+character of Socrates, but we cannot show that any single sentence in it
+was actually spoken by him. It breathes the spirit of Socrates, but has
+been cast anew in the mould of Plato.
+
+There is not much in the other Dialogues which can be compared with the
+Apology. The same recollection of his master may have been present
+to the mind of Plato when depicting the sufferings of the Just in the
+Republic. The Crito may also be regarded as a sort of appendage to the
+Apology, in which Socrates, who has defied the judges, is nevertheless
+represented as scrupulously obedient to the laws. The idealization
+of the sufferer is carried still further in the Gorgias, in which the
+thesis is maintained, that 'to suffer is better than to do evil;' and
+the art of rhetoric is described as only useful for the purpose of
+self-accusation. The parallelisms which occur in the so-called Apology
+of Xenophon are not worth noticing, because the writing in which they
+are contained is manifestly spurious. The statements of the Memorabilia
+respecting the trial and death of Socrates agree generally with Plato;
+but they have lost the flavour of Socratic irony in the narrative of
+Xenophon.
+
+The Apology or Platonic defence of Socrates is divided into three
+parts: 1st. The defence properly so called; 2nd. The shorter address in
+mitigation of the penalty; 3rd. The last words of prophetic rebuke and
+exhortation.
+
+The first part commences with an apology for his colloquial style;
+he is, as he has always been, the enemy of rhetoric, and knows of
+no rhetoric but truth; he will not falsify his character by making a
+speech. Then he proceeds to divide his accusers into two classes; first,
+there is the nameless accuser--public opinion. All the world from their
+earliest years had heard that he was a corrupter of youth, and had seen
+him caricatured in the Clouds of Aristophanes. Secondly, there are
+the professed accusers, who are but the mouth-piece of the others. The
+accusations of both might be summed up in a formula. The first say,
+'Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things
+under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse appear the
+better cause, and teaching all this to others.' The second, 'Socrates is
+an evil-doer and corrupter of the youth, who does not receive the gods
+whom the state receives, but introduces other new divinities.' These
+last words appear to have been the actual indictment (compare Xen.
+Mem.); and the previous formula, which is a summary of public opinion,
+assumes the same legal style.
+
+The answer begins by clearing up a confusion. In the representations
+of the Comic poets, and in the opinion of the multitude, he had been
+identified with the teachers of physical science and with the Sophists.
+But this was an error. For both of them he professes a respect in the
+open court, which contrasts with his manner of speaking about them in
+other places. (Compare for Anaxagoras, Phaedo, Laws; for the Sophists,
+Meno, Republic, Tim., Theaet., Soph., etc.) But at the same time
+he shows that he is not one of them. Of natural philosophy he knows
+nothing; not that he despises such pursuits, but the fact is that he is
+ignorant of them, and never says a word about them. Nor is he paid for
+giving instruction--that is another mistaken notion:--he has nothing to
+teach. But he commends Evenus for teaching virtue at such a 'moderate'
+rate as five minae. Something of the 'accustomed irony,' which may
+perhaps be expected to sleep in the ear of the multitude, is lurking
+here.
+
+He then goes on to explain the reason why he is in such an evil name.
+That had arisen out of a peculiar mission which he had taken upon
+himself. The enthusiastic Chaerephon (probably in anticipation of the
+answer which he received) had gone to Delphi and asked the oracle if
+there was any man wiser than Socrates; and the answer was, that there
+was no man wiser. What could be the meaning of this--that he who knew
+nothing, and knew that he knew nothing, should be declared by the oracle
+to be the wisest of men? Reflecting upon the answer, he determined to
+refute it by finding 'a wiser;' and first he went to the politicians,
+and then to the poets, and then to the craftsmen, but always with the
+same result--he found that they knew nothing, or hardly anything more
+than himself; and that the little advantage which in some cases they
+possessed was more than counter-balanced by their conceit of knowledge.
+He knew nothing, and knew that he knew nothing: they knew little or
+nothing, and imagined that they knew all things. Thus he had passed
+his life as a sort of missionary in detecting the pretended wisdom of
+mankind; and this occupation had quite absorbed him and taken him away
+both from public and private affairs. Young men of the richer sort had
+made a pastime of the same pursuit, 'which was not unamusing.' And hence
+bitter enmities had arisen; the professors of knowledge had revenged
+themselves by calling him a villainous corrupter of youth, and by
+repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry,
+which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is
+nothing else to be said of them.
+
+The second accusation he meets by interrogating Meletus, who is present
+and can be interrogated. 'If he is the corrupter, who is the improver of
+the citizens?' (Compare Meno.) 'All men everywhere.' But how absurd, how
+contrary to analogy is this! How inconceivable too, that he should make
+the citizens worse when he has to live with them. This surely cannot be
+intentional; and if unintentional, he ought to have been instructed by
+Meletus, and not accused in the court.
+
+But there is another part of the indictment which says that he teaches
+men not to receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new
+gods. 'Is that the way in which he is supposed to corrupt the youth?'
+'Yes, it is.' 'Has he only new gods, or none at all?' 'None at all.'
+'What, not even the sun and moon?' 'No; why, he says that the sun is a
+stone, and the moon earth.' That, replies Socrates, is the old confusion
+about Anaxagoras; the Athenian people are not so ignorant as to
+attribute to the influence of Socrates notions which have found
+their way into the drama, and may be learned at the theatre. Socrates
+undertakes to show that Meletus (rather unjustifiably) has been
+compounding a riddle in this part of the indictment: 'There are no gods,
+but Socrates believes in the existence of the sons of gods, which is
+absurd.'
+
+Leaving Meletus, who has had enough words spent upon him, he returns to
+the original accusation. The question may be asked, Why will he persist
+in following a profession which leads him to death? Why?--because he
+must remain at his post where the god has placed him, as he remained
+at Potidaea, and Amphipolis, and Delium, where the generals placed him.
+Besides, he is not so overwise as to imagine that he knows whether death
+is a good or an evil; and he is certain that desertion of his duty is
+an evil. Anytus is quite right in saying that they should never have
+indicted him if they meant to let him go. For he will certainly obey God
+rather than man; and will continue to preach to all men of all ages the
+necessity of virtue and improvement; and if they refuse to listen to him
+he will still persevere and reprove them. This is his way of corrupting
+the youth, which he will not cease to follow in obedience to the god,
+even if a thousand deaths await him.
+
+He is desirous that they should let him live--not for his own sake, but
+for theirs; because he is their heaven-sent friend (and they will never
+have such another), or, as he may be ludicrously described, he is the
+gadfly who stirs the generous steed into motion. Why then has he never
+taken part in public affairs? Because the familiar divine voice has
+hindered him; if he had been a public man, and had fought for the right,
+as he would certainly have fought against the many, he would not have
+lived, and could therefore have done no good. Twice in public matters
+he has risked his life for the sake of justice--once at the trial of
+the generals; and again in resistance to the tyrannical commands of the
+Thirty.
+
+But, though not a public man, he has passed his days in instructing
+the citizens without fee or reward--this was his mission. Whether his
+disciples have turned out well or ill, he cannot justly be charged with
+the result, for he never promised to teach them anything. They might
+come if they liked, and they might stay away if they liked: and they
+did come, because they found an amusement in hearing the pretenders to
+wisdom detected. If they have been corrupted, their elder relatives (if
+not themselves) might surely come into court and witness against him,
+and there is an opportunity still for them to appear. But their fathers
+and brothers all appear in court (including 'this' Plato), to witness
+on his behalf; and if their relatives are corrupted, at least they
+are uncorrupted; 'and they are my witnesses. For they know that I am
+speaking the truth, and that Meletus is lying.'
+
+This is about all that he has to say. He will not entreat the judges to
+spare his life; neither will he present a spectacle of weeping children,
+although he, too, is not made of 'rock or oak.' Some of the judges
+themselves may have complied with this practice on similar occasions,
+and he trusts that they will not be angry with him for not following
+their example. But he feels that such conduct brings discredit on the
+name of Athens: he feels too, that the judge has sworn not to give away
+justice; and he cannot be guilty of the impiety of asking the judge to
+break his oath, when he is himself being tried for impiety.
+
+As he expected, and probably intended, he is convicted. And now the tone
+of the speech, instead of being more conciliatory, becomes more
+lofty and commanding. Anytus proposes death as the penalty: and what
+counter-proposition shall he make? He, the benefactor of the Athenian
+people, whose whole life has been spent in doing them good, should at
+least have the Olympic victor's reward of maintenance in the Prytaneum.
+Or why should he propose any counter-penalty when he does not know
+whether death, which Anytus proposes, is a good or an evil? And he is
+certain that imprisonment is an evil, exile is an evil. Loss of money
+might be an evil, but then he has none to give; perhaps he can make up
+a mina. Let that be the penalty, or, if his friends wish, thirty minae;
+for which they will be excellent securities.
+
+(He is condemned to death.)
+
+He is an old man already, and the Athenians will gain nothing but
+disgrace by depriving him of a few years of life. Perhaps he could have
+escaped, if he had chosen to throw down his arms and entreat for his
+life. But he does not at all repent of the manner of his defence; he
+would rather die in his own fashion than live in theirs. For the penalty
+of unrighteousness is swifter than death; that penalty has already
+overtaken his accusers as death will soon overtake him.
+
+And now, as one who is about to die, he will prophesy to them. They have
+put him to death in order to escape the necessity of giving an account
+of their lives. But his death 'will be the seed' of many disciples who
+will convince them of their evil ways, and will come forth to reprove
+them in harsher terms, because they are younger and more inconsiderate.
+
+He would like to say a few words, while there is time, to those who
+would have acquitted him. He wishes them to know that the divine sign
+never interrupted him in the course of his defence; the reason of which,
+as he conjectures, is that the death to which he is going is a good and
+not an evil. For either death is a long sleep, the best of sleeps, or
+a journey to another world in which the souls of the dead are gathered
+together, and in which there may be a hope of seeing the heroes of
+old--in which, too, there are just judges; and as all are immortal,
+there can be no fear of any one suffering death for his opinions.
+
+Nothing evil can happen to the good man either in life or death, and his
+own death has been permitted by the gods, because it was better for him
+to depart; and therefore he forgives his judges because they have done
+him no harm, although they never meant to do him any good.
+
+He has a last request to make to them--that they will trouble his sons
+as he has troubled them, if they appear to prefer riches to virtue, or
+to think themselves something when they are nothing.
+
+*****
+
+'Few persons will be found to wish that Socrates should have defended
+himself otherwise,'--if, as we must add, his defence was that with which
+Plato has provided him. But leaving this question, which does not admit
+of a precise solution, we may go on to ask what was the impression which
+Plato in the Apology intended to give of the character and conduct of
+his master in the last great scene? Did he intend to represent him (1)
+as employing sophistries; (2) as designedly irritating the judges? Or
+are these sophistries to be regarded as belonging to the age in which
+he lived and to his personal character, and this apparent haughtiness as
+flowing from the natural elevation of his position?
+
+For example, when he says that it is absurd to suppose that one man is
+the corrupter and all the rest of the world the improvers of the youth;
+or, when he argues that he never could have corrupted the men with whom
+he had to live; or, when he proves his belief in the gods because
+he believes in the sons of gods, is he serious or jesting? It may be
+observed that these sophisms all occur in his cross-examination of
+Meletus, who is easily foiled and mastered in the hands of the great
+dialectician. Perhaps he regarded these answers as good enough for his
+accuser, of whom he makes very light. Also there is a touch of irony
+in them, which takes them out of the category of sophistry. (Compare
+Euthyph.)
+
+That the manner in which he defends himself about the lives of his
+disciples is not satisfactory, can hardly be denied. Fresh in the memory
+of the Athenians, and detestable as they deserved to be to the newly
+restored democracy, were the names of Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides. It
+is obviously not a sufficient answer that Socrates had never professed
+to teach them anything, and is therefore not justly chargeable with
+their crimes. Yet the defence, when taken out of this ironical form,
+is doubtless sound: that his teaching had nothing to do with their evil
+lives. Here, then, the sophistry is rather in form than in substance,
+though we might desire that to such a serious charge Socrates had given
+a more serious answer.
+
+Truly characteristic of Socrates is another point in his answer, which
+may also be regarded as sophistical. He says that 'if he has corrupted
+the youth, he must have corrupted them involuntarily.' But if, as
+Socrates argues, all evil is involuntary, then all criminals ought to be
+admonished and not punished. In these words the Socratic doctrine of the
+involuntariness of evil is clearly intended to be conveyed. Here
+again, as in the former instance, the defence of Socrates is untrue
+practically, but may be true in some ideal or transcendental sense. The
+commonplace reply, that if he had been guilty of corrupting the youth
+their relations would surely have witnessed against him, with which he
+concludes this part of his defence, is more satisfactory.
+
+Again, when Socrates argues that he must believe in the gods because he
+believes in the sons of gods, we must remember that this is a refutation
+not of the original indictment, which is consistent enough--'Socrates
+does not receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new
+divinities'--but of the interpretation put upon the words by Meletus,
+who has affirmed that he is a downright atheist. To this Socrates fairly
+answers, in accordance with the ideas of the time, that a downright
+atheist cannot believe in the sons of gods or in divine things. The
+notion that demons or lesser divinities are the sons of gods is not
+to be regarded as ironical or sceptical. He is arguing 'ad hominem'
+according to the notions of mythology current in his age. Yet he
+abstains from saying that he believed in the gods whom the State
+approved. He does not defend himself, as Xenophon has defended him,
+by appealing to his practice of religion. Probably he neither wholly
+believed, nor disbelieved, in the existence of the popular gods; he
+had no means of knowing about them. According to Plato (compare Phaedo;
+Symp.), as well as Xenophon (Memor.), he was punctual in the performance
+of the least religious duties; and he must have believed in his own
+oracular sign, of which he seemed to have an internal witness. But the
+existence of Apollo or Zeus, or the other gods whom the State approves,
+would have appeared to him both uncertain and unimportant in comparison
+of the duty of self-examination, and of those principles of truth
+and right which he deemed to be the foundation of religion. (Compare
+Phaedr.; Euthyph.; Republic.)
+
+The second question, whether Plato meant to represent Socrates as
+braving or irritating his judges, must also be answered in the negative.
+His irony, his superiority, his audacity, 'regarding not the person of
+man,' necessarily flow out of the loftiness of his situation. He is not
+acting a part upon a great occasion, but he is what he has been all his
+life long, 'a king of men.' He would rather not appear insolent, if
+he could avoid it (ouch os authadizomenos touto lego). Neither is
+he desirous of hastening his own end, for life and death are simply
+indifferent to him. But such a defence as would be acceptable to his
+judges and might procure an acquittal, it is not in his nature to make.
+He will not say or do anything that might pervert the course of justice;
+he cannot have his tongue bound even 'in the throat of death.' With
+his accusers he will only fence and play, as he had fenced with other
+'improvers of youth,' answering the Sophist according to his sophistry
+all his life long. He is serious when he is speaking of his own mission,
+which seems to distinguish him from all other reformers of mankind, and
+originates in an accident. The dedication of himself to the improvement
+of his fellow-citizens is not so remarkable as the ironical spirit in
+which he goes about doing good only in vindication of the credit of the
+oracle, and in the vain hope of finding a wiser man than himself. Yet
+this singular and almost accidental character of his mission agrees with
+the divine sign which, according to our notions, is equally accidental
+and irrational, and is nevertheless accepted by him as the guiding
+principle of his life. Socrates is nowhere represented to us as a
+freethinker or sceptic. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity when
+he speculates on the possibility of seeing and knowing the heroes of the
+Trojan war in another world. On the other hand, his hope of immortality
+is uncertain;--he also conceives of death as a long sleep (in
+this respect differing from the Phaedo), and at last falls back on
+resignation to the divine will, and the certainty that no evil
+can happen to the good man either in life or death. His absolute
+truthfulness seems to hinder him from asserting positively more than
+this; and he makes no attempt to veil his ignorance in mythology and
+figures of speech. The gentleness of the first part of the speech
+contrasts with the aggravated, almost threatening, tone of the
+conclusion. He characteristically remarks that he will not speak as a
+rhetorician, that is to say, he will not make a regular defence such as
+Lysias or one of the orators might have composed for him, or, according
+to some accounts, did compose for him. But he first procures himself a
+hearing by conciliatory words. He does not attack the Sophists; for they
+were open to the same charges as himself; they were equally ridiculed by
+the Comic poets, and almost equally hateful to Anytus and Meletus. Yet
+incidentally the antagonism between Socrates and the Sophists is allowed
+to appear. He is poor and they are rich; his profession that he teaches
+nothing is opposed to their readiness to teach all things; his talking
+in the marketplace to their private instructions; his tarry-at-home life
+to their wandering from city to city. The tone which he assumes towards
+them is one of real friendliness, but also of concealed irony. Towards
+Anaxagoras, who had disappointed him in his hopes of learning about mind
+and nature, he shows a less kindly feeling, which is also the feeling
+of Plato in other passages (Laws). But Anaxagoras had been dead thirty
+years, and was beyond the reach of persecution.
+
+It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers
+who would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more
+violent terms was, as far as we know, never fulfilled. No inference
+can be drawn from this circumstance as to the probability of the
+words attributed to him having been actually uttered. They express the
+aspiration of the first martyr of philosophy, that he would leave behind
+him many followers, accompanied by the not unnatural feeling that they
+would be fiercer and more inconsiderate in their words when emancipated
+from his control.
+
+The above remarks must be understood as applying with any degree of
+certainty to the Platonic Socrates only. For, although these or similar
+words may have been spoken by Socrates himself, we cannot exclude the
+possibility, that like so much else, e.g. the wisdom of Critias, the
+poem of Solon, the virtues of Charmides, they may have been due only to
+the imagination of Plato. The arguments of those who maintain that the
+Apology was composed during the process, resting on no evidence, do not
+require a serious refutation. Nor are the reasonings of Schleiermacher,
+who argues that the Platonic defence is an exact or nearly exact
+reproduction of the words of Socrates, partly because Plato would not
+have been guilty of the impiety of altering them, and also because many
+points of the defence might have been improved and strengthened, at all
+more conclusive. (See English Translation.) What effect the death of
+Socrates produced on the mind of Plato, we cannot certainly
+determine; nor can we say how he would or must have written under the
+circumstances. We observe that the enmity of Aristophanes to Socrates
+does not prevent Plato from introducing them together in the Symposium
+engaged in friendly intercourse. Nor is there any trace in the Dialogues
+of an attempt to make Anytus or Meletus personally odious in the eyes of
+the Athenian public.
+
+
+
+
+APOLOGY
+
+
+How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell;
+but I know that they almost made me forget who I was--so persuasively
+did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth. But
+of the many falsehoods told by them, there was one which quite amazed
+me;--I mean when they said that you should be upon your guard and not
+allow yourselves to be deceived by the force of my eloquence. To say
+this, when they were certain to be detected as soon as I opened my lips
+and proved myself to be anything but a great speaker, did indeed appear
+to me most shameless--unless by the force of eloquence they mean
+the force of truth; for if such is their meaning, I admit that I am
+eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs! Well, as I was saying,
+they have scarcely spoken the truth at all; but from me you shall hear
+the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner in a set
+oration duly ornamented with words and phrases. No, by heaven! but I
+shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the moment; for
+I am confident in the justice of my cause (Or, I am certain that I am
+right in taking this course.): at my time of life I ought not to be
+appearing before you, O men of Athens, in the character of a juvenile
+orator--let no one expect it of me. And I must beg of you to grant me
+a favour:--If I defend myself in my accustomed manner, and you hear me
+using the words which I have been in the habit of using in the agora, at
+the tables of the money-changers, or anywhere else, I would ask you not
+to be surprised, and not to interrupt me on this account. For I am more
+than seventy years of age, and appearing now for the first time in a
+court of law, I am quite a stranger to the language of the place; and
+therefore I would have you regard me as if I were really a stranger,
+whom you would excuse if he spoke in his native tongue, and after the
+fashion of his country:--Am I making an unfair request of you? Never
+mind the manner, which may or may not be good; but think only of the
+truth of my words, and give heed to that: let the speaker speak truly
+and the judge decide justly.
+
+And first, I have to reply to the older charges and to my first
+accusers, and then I will go on to the later ones. For of old I have had
+many accusers, who have accused me falsely to you during many years;
+and I am more afraid of them than of Anytus and his associates, who are
+dangerous, too, in their own way. But far more dangerous are the others,
+who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with
+their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated
+about the heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made
+the worse appear the better cause. The disseminators of this tale are
+the accusers whom I dread; for their hearers are apt to fancy that such
+enquirers do not believe in the existence of the gods. And they are
+many, and their charges against me are of ancient date, and they were
+made by them in the days when you were more impressible than you are
+now--in childhood, or it may have been in youth--and the cause when
+heard went by default, for there was none to answer. And hardest of all,
+I do not know and cannot tell the names of my accusers; unless in the
+chance case of a Comic poet. All who from envy and malice have persuaded
+you--some of them having first convinced themselves--all this class of
+men are most difficult to deal with; for I cannot have them up here, and
+cross-examine them, and therefore I must simply fight with shadows in my
+own defence, and argue when there is no one who answers. I will ask you
+then to assume with me, as I was saying, that my opponents are of two
+kinds; one recent, the other ancient: and I hope that you will see the
+propriety of my answering the latter first, for these accusations you
+heard long before the others, and much oftener.
+
+Well, then, I must make my defence, and endeavour to clear away in a
+short time, a slander which has lasted a long time. May I succeed, if to
+succeed be for my good and yours, or likely to avail me in my cause!
+The task is not an easy one; I quite understand the nature of it. And so
+leaving the event with God, in obedience to the law I will now make my
+defence.
+
+I will begin at the beginning, and ask what is the accusation which has
+given rise to the slander of me, and in fact has encouraged Meletus to
+proof this charge against me. Well, what do the slanderers say? They
+shall be my prosecutors, and I will sum up their words in an affidavit:
+'Socrates is an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into
+things under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the
+better cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrines to others.' Such is
+the nature of the accusation: it is just what you have yourselves seen
+in the comedy of Aristophanes (Aristoph., Clouds.), who has introduced a
+man whom he calls Socrates, going about and saying that he walks in
+air, and talking a deal of nonsense concerning matters of which I do
+not pretend to know either much or little--not that I mean to speak
+disparagingly of any one who is a student of natural philosophy. I
+should be very sorry if Meletus could bring so grave a charge against
+me. But the simple truth is, O Athenians, that I have nothing to do with
+physical speculations. Very many of those here present are witnesses to
+the truth of this, and to them I appeal. Speak then, you who have heard
+me, and tell your neighbours whether any of you have ever known me hold
+forth in few words or in many upon such matters...You hear their answer.
+And from what they say of this part of the charge you will be able to
+judge of the truth of the rest.
+
+As little foundation is there for the report that I am a teacher, and
+take money; this accusation has no more truth in it than the other.
+Although, if a man were really able to instruct mankind, to receive
+money for giving instruction would, in my opinion, be an honour to him.
+There is Gorgias of Leontium, and Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis,
+who go the round of the cities, and are able to persuade the young men
+to leave their own citizens by whom they might be taught for nothing,
+and come to them whom they not only pay, but are thankful if they may be
+allowed to pay them. There is at this time a Parian philosopher residing
+in Athens, of whom I have heard; and I came to hear of him in this
+way:--I came across a man who has spent a world of money on the
+Sophists, Callias, the son of Hipponicus, and knowing that he had sons,
+I asked him: 'Callias,' I said, 'if your two sons were foals or calves,
+there would be no difficulty in finding some one to put over them; we
+should hire a trainer of horses, or a farmer probably, who would improve
+and perfect them in their own proper virtue and excellence; but as they
+are human beings, whom are you thinking of placing over them? Is there
+any one who understands human and political virtue? You must have
+thought about the matter, for you have sons; is there any one?' 'There
+is,' he said. 'Who is he?' said I; 'and of what country? and what does
+he charge?' 'Evenus the Parian,' he replied; 'he is the man, and his
+charge is five minae.' Happy is Evenus, I said to myself, if he really
+has this wisdom, and teaches at such a moderate charge. Had I the same,
+I should have been very proud and conceited; but the truth is that I
+have no knowledge of the kind.
+
+I dare say, Athenians, that some one among you will reply, 'Yes,
+Socrates, but what is the origin of these accusations which are brought
+against you; there must have been something strange which you have been
+doing? All these rumours and this talk about you would never have arisen
+if you had been like other men: tell us, then, what is the cause of
+them, for we should be sorry to judge hastily of you.' Now I regard this
+as a fair challenge, and I will endeavour to explain to you the reason
+why I am called wise and have such an evil fame. Please to attend then.
+And although some of you may think that I am joking, I declare that I
+will tell you the entire truth. Men of Athens, this reputation of mine
+has come of a certain sort of wisdom which I possess. If you ask me what
+kind of wisdom, I reply, wisdom such as may perhaps be attained by man,
+for to that extent I am inclined to believe that I am wise; whereas the
+persons of whom I was speaking have a superhuman wisdom which I may fail
+to describe, because I have it not myself; and he who says that I have,
+speaks falsely, and is taking away my character. And here, O men of
+Athens, I must beg you not to interrupt me, even if I seem to say
+something extravagant. For the word which I will speak is not mine. I
+will refer you to a witness who is worthy of credit; that witness shall
+be the God of Delphi--he will tell you about my wisdom, if I have any,
+and of what sort it is. You must have known Chaerephon; he was early a
+friend of mine, and also a friend of yours, for he shared in the recent
+exile of the people, and returned with you. Well, Chaerephon, as you
+know, was very impetuous in all his doings, and he went to Delphi and
+boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether--as I was saying, I must beg
+you not to interrupt--he asked the oracle to tell him whether anyone was
+wiser than I was, and the Pythian prophetess answered, that there was no
+man wiser. Chaerephon is dead himself; but his brother, who is in court,
+will confirm the truth of what I am saying.
+
+Why do I mention this? Because I am going to explain to you why I have
+such an evil name. When I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can
+the god mean? and what is the interpretation of his riddle? for I know
+that I have no wisdom, small or great. What then can he mean when he
+says that I am the wisest of men? And yet he is a god, and cannot lie;
+that would be against his nature. After long consideration, I thought of
+a method of trying the question. I reflected that if I could only find
+a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in
+my hand. I should say to him, 'Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but
+you said that I was the wisest.' Accordingly I went to one who had the
+reputation of wisdom, and observed him--his name I need not mention; he
+was a politician whom I selected for examination--and the result was as
+follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that
+he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and
+still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he
+thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was
+that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present
+and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well,
+although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really
+beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,--for he knows nothing,
+and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this
+latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.
+Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions to wisdom, and
+my conclusion was exactly the same. Whereupon I made another enemy of
+him, and of many others besides him.
+
+Then I went to one man after another, being not unconscious of the
+enmity which I provoked, and I lamented and feared this: but necessity
+was laid upon me,--the word of God, I thought, ought to be considered
+first. And I said to myself, Go I must to all who appear to know, and
+find out the meaning of the oracle. And I swear to you, Athenians,
+by the dog I swear!--for I must tell you the truth--the result of my
+mission was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but
+the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and
+better. I will tell you the tale of my wanderings and of the 'Herculean'
+labours, as I may call them, which I endured only to find at last the
+oracle irrefutable. After the politicians, I went to the poets; tragic,
+dithyrambic, and all sorts. And there, I said to myself, you will be
+instantly detected; now you will find out that you are more ignorant
+than they are. Accordingly, I took them some of the most elaborate
+passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of
+them--thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me?
+I am almost ashamed to confess the truth, but I must say that there is
+hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their
+poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets
+write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like
+diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not
+understand the meaning of them. The poets appeared to me to be much in
+the same case; and I further observed that upon the strength of their
+poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things
+in which they were not wise. So I departed, conceiving myself to
+be superior to them for the same reason that I was superior to the
+politicians.
+
+At last I went to the artisans. I was conscious that I knew nothing at
+all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and
+here I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I
+was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I
+observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the
+poets;--because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew
+all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their
+wisdom; and therefore I asked myself on behalf of the oracle, whether
+I would like to be as I was, neither having their knowledge nor their
+ignorance, or like them in both; and I made answer to myself and to the
+oracle that I was better off as I was.
+
+This inquisition has led to my having many enemies of the worst and most
+dangerous kind, and has given occasion also to many calumnies. And I
+am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess
+the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of
+Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show
+that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking
+of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if
+he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his
+wisdom is in truth worth nothing. And so I go about the world, obedient
+to the god, and search and make enquiry into the wisdom of any one,
+whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not
+wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise;
+and my occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to
+any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in
+utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god.
+
+There is another thing:--young men of the richer classes, who have not
+much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the
+pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine
+others; there are plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who think
+that they know something, but really know little or nothing; and then
+those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves
+are angry with me: This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous
+misleader of youth!--and then if somebody asks them, Why, what evil does
+he practise or teach? they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order
+that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made
+charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things
+up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making
+the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that
+their pretence of knowledge has been detected--which is the truth; and
+as they are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are drawn up in
+battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears
+with their loud and inveterate calumnies. And this is the reason why my
+three accusers, Meletus and Anytus and Lycon, have set upon me; Meletus,
+who has a quarrel with me on behalf of the poets; Anytus, on behalf of
+the craftsmen and politicians; Lycon, on behalf of the rhetoricians: and
+as I said at the beginning, I cannot expect to get rid of such a mass of
+calumny all in a moment. And this, O men of Athens, is the truth and the
+whole truth; I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing. And
+yet, I know that my plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is
+their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth?--Hence has arisen
+the prejudice against me; and this is the reason of it, as you will find
+out either in this or in any future enquiry.
+
+I have said enough in my defence against the first class of my accusers;
+I turn to the second class. They are headed by Meletus, that good man
+and true lover of his country, as he calls himself. Against these, too,
+I must try to make a defence:--Let their affidavit be read: it contains
+something of this kind: It says that Socrates is a doer of evil, who
+corrupts the youth; and who does not believe in the gods of the state,
+but has other new divinities of his own. Such is the charge; and now let
+us examine the particular counts. He says that I am a doer of evil, and
+corrupt the youth; but I say, O men of Athens, that Meletus is a doer of
+evil, in that he pretends to be in earnest when he is only in jest, and
+is so eager to bring men to trial from a pretended zeal and interest
+about matters in which he really never had the smallest interest. And
+the truth of this I will endeavour to prove to you.
+
+Come hither, Meletus, and let me ask a question of you. You think a
+great deal about the improvement of youth?
+
+Yes, I do.
+
+Tell the judges, then, who is their improver; for you must know, as you
+have taken the pains to discover their corrupter, and are citing and
+accusing me before them. Speak, then, and tell the judges who their
+improver is.--Observe, Meletus, that you are silent, and have nothing to
+say. But is not this rather disgraceful, and a very considerable proof
+of what I was saying, that you have no interest in the matter? Speak up,
+friend, and tell us who their improver is.
+
+The laws.
+
+But that, my good sir, is not my meaning. I want to know who the person
+is, who, in the first place, knows the laws.
+
+The judges, Socrates, who are present in court.
+
+What, do you mean to say, Meletus, that they are able to instruct and
+improve youth?
+
+Certainly they are.
+
+What, all of them, or some only and not others?
+
+All of them.
+
+By the goddess Here, that is good news! There are plenty of improvers,
+then. And what do you say of the audience,--do they improve them?
+
+Yes, they do.
+
+And the senators?
+
+Yes, the senators improve them.
+
+But perhaps the members of the assembly corrupt them?--or do they too
+improve them?
+
+They improve them.
+
+Then every Athenian improves and elevates them; all with the exception
+of myself; and I alone am their corrupter? Is that what you affirm?
+
+That is what I stoutly affirm.
+
+I am very unfortunate if you are right. But suppose I ask you a
+question: How about horses? Does one man do them harm and all the world
+good? Is not the exact opposite the truth? One man is able to do them
+good, or at least not many;--the trainer of horses, that is to say, does
+them good, and others who have to do with them rather injure them?
+Is not that true, Meletus, of horses, or of any other animals? Most
+assuredly it is; whether you and Anytus say yes or no. Happy indeed
+would be the condition of youth if they had one corrupter only, and
+all the rest of the world were their improvers. But you, Meletus, have
+sufficiently shown that you never had a thought about the young: your
+carelessness is seen in your not caring about the very things which you
+bring against me.
+
+And now, Meletus, I will ask you another question--by Zeus I will:
+Which is better, to live among bad citizens, or among good ones? Answer,
+friend, I say; the question is one which may be easily answered. Do not
+the good do their neighbours good, and the bad do them evil?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is there anyone who would rather be injured than benefited by those
+who live with him? Answer, my good friend, the law requires you to
+answer--does any one like to be injured?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And when you accuse me of corrupting and deteriorating the youth, do you
+allege that I corrupt them intentionally or unintentionally?
+
+Intentionally, I say.
+
+But you have just admitted that the good do their neighbours good, and
+the evil do them evil. Now, is that a truth which your superior wisdom
+has recognized thus early in life, and am I, at my age, in such darkness
+and ignorance as not to know that if a man with whom I have to live is
+corrupted by me, I am very likely to be harmed by him; and yet I corrupt
+him, and intentionally, too--so you say, although neither I nor any
+other human being is ever likely to be convinced by you. But either I do
+not corrupt them, or I corrupt them unintentionally; and on either view
+of the case you lie. If my offence is unintentional, the law has
+no cognizance of unintentional offences: you ought to have taken me
+privately, and warned and admonished me; for if I had been
+better advised, I should have left off doing what I only did
+unintentionally--no doubt I should; but you would have nothing to say to
+me and refused to teach me. And now you bring me up in this court, which
+is a place not of instruction, but of punishment.
+
+It will be very clear to you, Athenians, as I was saying, that Meletus
+has no care at all, great or small, about the matter. But still I should
+like to know, Meletus, in what I am affirmed to corrupt the young. I
+suppose you mean, as I infer from your indictment, that I teach them not
+to acknowledge the gods which the state acknowledges, but some other new
+divinities or spiritual agencies in their stead. These are the lessons
+by which I corrupt the youth, as you say.
+
+Yes, that I say emphatically.
+
+Then, by the gods, Meletus, of whom we are speaking, tell me and the
+court, in somewhat plainer terms, what you mean! for I do not as yet
+understand whether you affirm that I teach other men to acknowledge
+some gods, and therefore that I do believe in gods, and am not an entire
+atheist--this you do not lay to my charge,--but only you say that they
+are not the same gods which the city recognizes--the charge is that they
+are different gods. Or, do you mean that I am an atheist simply, and a
+teacher of atheism?
+
+I mean the latter--that you are a complete atheist.
+
+What an extraordinary statement! Why do you think so, Meletus? Do you
+mean that I do not believe in the godhead of the sun or moon, like other
+men?
+
+I assure you, judges, that he does not: for he says that the sun is
+stone, and the moon earth.
+
+Friend Meletus, you think that you are accusing Anaxagoras: and you have
+but a bad opinion of the judges, if you fancy them illiterate to such
+a degree as not to know that these doctrines are found in the books of
+Anaxagoras the Clazomenian, which are full of them. And so, forsooth,
+the youth are said to be taught them by Socrates, when there are not
+unfrequently exhibitions of them at the theatre (Probably in allusion to
+Aristophanes who caricatured, and to Euripides who borrowed the notions
+of Anaxagoras, as well as to other dramatic poets.) (price of admission
+one drachma at the most); and they might pay their money, and laugh at
+Socrates if he pretends to father these extraordinary views. And so,
+Meletus, you really think that I do not believe in any god?
+
+I swear by Zeus that you believe absolutely in none at all.
+
+Nobody will believe you, Meletus, and I am pretty sure that you do not
+believe yourself. I cannot help thinking, men of Athens, that Meletus
+is reckless and impudent, and that he has written this indictment in a
+spirit of mere wantonness and youthful bravado. Has he not compounded a
+riddle, thinking to try me? He said to himself:--I shall see whether
+the wise Socrates will discover my facetious contradiction, or whether I
+shall be able to deceive him and the rest of them. For he certainly does
+appear to me to contradict himself in the indictment as much as if he
+said that Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods, and yet of
+believing in them--but this is not like a person who is in earnest.
+
+I should like you, O men of Athens, to join me in examining what I
+conceive to be his inconsistency; and do you, Meletus, answer. And
+I must remind the audience of my request that they would not make a
+disturbance if I speak in my accustomed manner:
+
+Did ever man, Meletus, believe in the existence of human things, and not
+of human beings?...I wish, men of Athens, that he would answer, and not
+be always trying to get up an interruption. Did ever any man believe
+in horsemanship, and not in horses? or in flute-playing, and not in
+flute-players? No, my friend; I will answer to you and to the court, as
+you refuse to answer for yourself. There is no man who ever did. But now
+please to answer the next question: Can a man believe in spiritual and
+divine agencies, and not in spirits or demigods?
+
+He cannot.
+
+How lucky I am to have extracted that answer, by the assistance of the
+court! But then you swear in the indictment that I teach and believe in
+divine or spiritual agencies (new or old, no matter for that); at any
+rate, I believe in spiritual agencies,--so you say and swear in the
+affidavit; and yet if I believe in divine beings, how can I help
+believing in spirits or demigods;--must I not? To be sure I must; and
+therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent. Now what are
+spirits or demigods? Are they not either gods or the sons of gods?
+
+Certainly they are.
+
+But this is what I call the facetious riddle invented by you: the
+demigods or spirits are gods, and you say first that I do not believe in
+gods, and then again that I do believe in gods; that is, if I believe in
+demigods. For if the demigods are the illegitimate sons of gods, whether
+by the nymphs or by any other mothers, of whom they are said to be the
+sons--what human being will ever believe that there are no gods if they
+are the sons of gods? You might as well affirm the existence of mules,
+and deny that of horses and asses. Such nonsense, Meletus, could only
+have been intended by you to make trial of me. You have put this into
+the indictment because you had nothing real of which to accuse me. But
+no one who has a particle of understanding will ever be convinced by you
+that the same men can believe in divine and superhuman things, and yet
+not believe that there are gods and demigods and heroes.
+
+I have said enough in answer to the charge of Meletus: any elaborate
+defence is unnecessary, but I know only too well how many are the
+enmities which I have incurred, and this is what will be my destruction
+if I am destroyed;--not Meletus, nor yet Anytus, but the envy and
+detraction of the world, which has been the death of many good men, and
+will probably be the death of many more; there is no danger of my being
+the last of them.
+
+Some one will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of
+life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may
+fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything
+ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to
+consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong--acting
+the part of a good man or of a bad. Whereas, upon your view, the heroes
+who fell at Troy were not good for much, and the son of Thetis above
+all, who altogether despised danger in comparison with disgrace; and
+when he was so eager to slay Hector, his goddess mother said to him,
+that if he avenged his companion Patroclus, and slew Hector, he would
+die himself--'Fate,' she said, in these or the like words, 'waits for
+you next after Hector;' he, receiving this warning, utterly despised
+danger and death, and instead of fearing them, feared rather to live
+in dishonour, and not to avenge his friend. 'Let me die forthwith,'
+he replies, 'and be avenged of my enemy, rather than abide here by the
+beaked ships, a laughing-stock and a burden of the earth.' Had Achilles
+any thought of death and danger? For wherever a man's place is, whether
+the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a
+commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should
+not think of death or of anything but of disgrace. And this, O men of
+Athens, is a true saying.
+
+Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I
+was ordered by the generals whom you chose to command me at Potidaea
+and Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any other
+man, facing death--if now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders
+me to fulfil the philosopher's mission of searching into myself and
+other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death, or any other
+fear; that would indeed be strange, and I might justly be arraigned in
+court for denying the existence of the gods, if I disobeyed the oracle
+because I was afraid of death, fancying that I was wise when I was not
+wise. For the fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not
+real wisdom, being a pretence of knowing the unknown; and no one knows
+whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest
+evil, may not be the greatest good. Is not this ignorance of a
+disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the conceit that a man knows
+what he does not know? And in this respect only I believe myself to
+differ from men in general, and may perhaps claim to be wiser than
+they are:--that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not
+suppose that I know: but I do know that injustice and disobedience to a
+better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonourable, and I will never
+fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil. And therefore
+if you let me go now, and are not convinced by Anytus, who said that
+since I had been prosecuted I must be put to death; (or if not that I
+ought never to have been prosecuted at all); and that if I escape now,
+your sons will all be utterly ruined by listening to my words--if you
+say to me, Socrates, this time we will not mind Anytus, and you shall
+be let off, but upon one condition, that you are not to enquire and
+speculate in this way any more, and that if you are caught doing so
+again you shall die;--if this was the condition on which you let me go,
+I should reply: Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey
+God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never
+cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting any
+one whom I meet and saying to him after my manner: You, my friend,--a
+citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens,--are you
+not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and
+reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest
+improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? And if
+the person with whom I am arguing, says: Yes, but I do care; then I do
+not leave him or let him go at once; but I proceed to interrogate and
+examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue in
+him, but only says that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the
+greater, and overvaluing the less. And I shall repeat the same words to
+every one whom I meet, young and old, citizen and alien, but especially
+to the citizens, inasmuch as they are my brethren. For know that this is
+the command of God; and I believe that no greater good has ever happened
+in the state than my service to the God. For I do nothing but go about
+persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your
+persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the
+greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given
+by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of
+man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the
+doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person. But if
+any one says that this is not my teaching, he is speaking an untruth.
+Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you, do as Anytus bids or not
+as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not; but whichever you do,
+understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die
+many times.
+
+Men of Athens, do not interrupt, but hear me; there was an understanding
+between us that you should hear me to the end: I have something more to
+say, at which you may be inclined to cry out; but I believe that to hear
+me will be good for you, and therefore I beg that you will not cry out.
+I would have you know, that if you kill such an one as I am, you will
+injure yourselves more than you will injure me. Nothing will injure me,
+not Meletus nor yet Anytus--they cannot, for a bad man is not permitted
+to injure a better than himself. I do not deny that Anytus may, perhaps,
+kill him, or drive him into exile, or deprive him of civil rights; and
+he may imagine, and others may imagine, that he is inflicting a great
+injury upon him: but there I do not agree. For the evil of doing as
+he is doing--the evil of unjustly taking away the life of another--is
+greater far.
+
+And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may
+think, but for yours, that you may not sin against the God by condemning
+me, who am his gift to you. For if you kill me you will not easily find
+a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech,
+am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great
+and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size,
+and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has
+attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always
+fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You
+will not easily find another like me, and therefore I would advise you
+to spare me. I dare say that you may feel out of temper (like a person
+who is suddenly awakened from sleep), and you think that you might
+easily strike me dead as Anytus advises, and then you would sleep on
+for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you sent you
+another gadfly. When I say that I am given to you by God, the proof of
+my mission is this:--if I had been like other men, I should not have
+neglected all my own concerns or patiently seen the neglect of them
+during all these years, and have been doing yours, coming to you
+individually like a father or elder brother, exhorting you to regard
+virtue; such conduct, I say, would be unlike human nature. If I had
+gained anything, or if my exhortations had been paid, there would have
+been some sense in my doing so; but now, as you will perceive, not even
+the impudence of my accusers dares to say that I have ever exacted
+or sought pay of any one; of that they have no witness. And I have a
+sufficient witness to the truth of what I say--my poverty.
+
+Some one may wonder why I go about in private giving advice and busying
+myself with the concerns of others, but do not venture to come forward
+in public and advise the state. I will tell you why. You have heard me
+speak at sundry times and in divers places of an oracle or sign
+which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the
+indictment. This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come
+to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to
+do anything which I am going to do. This is what deters me from being a
+politician. And rightly, as I think. For I am certain, O men of Athens,
+that if I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago, and
+done no good either to you or to myself. And do not be offended at my
+telling you the truth: for the truth is, that no man who goes to war
+with you or any other multitude, honestly striving against the many
+lawless and unrighteous deeds which are done in a state, will save his
+life; he who will fight for the right, if he would live even for a brief
+space, must have a private station and not a public one.
+
+I can give you convincing evidence of what I say, not words only, but
+what you value far more--actions. Let me relate to you a passage of my
+own life which will prove to you that I should never have yielded to
+injustice from any fear of death, and that 'as I should have refused to
+yield' I must have died at once. I will tell you a tale of the courts,
+not very interesting perhaps, but nevertheless true. The only office of
+state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator: the tribe
+Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the
+generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the battle
+of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them in a body, contrary to law,
+as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the only one of the
+Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my vote against
+you; and when the orators threatened to impeach and arrest me, and you
+called and shouted, I made up my mind that I would run the risk, having
+law and justice with me, rather than take part in your injustice because
+I feared imprisonment and death. This happened in the days of the
+democracy. But when the oligarchy of the Thirty was in power, they sent
+for me and four others into the rotunda, and bade us bring Leon the
+Salaminian from Salamis, as they wanted to put him to death. This was a
+specimen of the sort of commands which they were always giving with
+the view of implicating as many as possible in their crimes; and then I
+showed, not in word only but in deed, that, if I may be allowed to use
+such an expression, I cared not a straw for death, and that my great and
+only care was lest I should do an unrighteous or unholy thing. For
+the strong arm of that oppressive power did not frighten me into doing
+wrong; and when we came out of the rotunda the other four went to
+Salamis and fetched Leon, but I went quietly home. For which I might
+have lost my life, had not the power of the Thirty shortly afterwards
+come to an end. And many will witness to my words.
+
+Now do you really imagine that I could have survived all these years,
+if I had led a public life, supposing that like a good man I had always
+maintained the right and had made justice, as I ought, the first thing?
+No indeed, men of Athens, neither I nor any other man. But I have been
+always the same in all my actions, public as well as private, and never
+have I yielded any base compliance to those who are slanderously termed
+my disciples, or to any other. Not that I have any regular disciples.
+But if any one likes to come and hear me while I am pursuing my mission,
+whether he be young or old, he is not excluded. Nor do I converse only
+with those who pay; but any one, whether he be rich or poor, may ask and
+answer me and listen to my words; and whether he turns out to be a bad
+man or a good one, neither result can be justly imputed to me; for I
+never taught or professed to teach him anything. And if any one says
+that he has ever learned or heard anything from me in private which all
+the world has not heard, let me tell you that he is lying.
+
+But I shall be asked, Why do people delight in continually conversing
+with you? I have told you already, Athenians, the whole truth about this
+matter: they like to hear the cross-examination of the pretenders to
+wisdom; there is amusement in it. Now this duty of cross-examining other
+men has been imposed upon me by God; and has been signified to me by
+oracles, visions, and in every way in which the will of divine power was
+ever intimated to any one. This is true, O Athenians, or, if not true,
+would be soon refuted. If I am or have been corrupting the youth, those
+of them who are now grown up and have become sensible that I gave them
+bad advice in the days of their youth should come forward as accusers,
+and take their revenge; or if they do not like to come themselves, some
+of their relatives, fathers, brothers, or other kinsmen, should say what
+evil their families have suffered at my hands. Now is their time. Many
+of them I see in the court. There is Crito, who is of the same age and
+of the same deme with myself, and there is Critobulus his son, whom I
+also see. Then again there is Lysanias of Sphettus, who is the father of
+Aeschines--he is present; and also there is Antiphon of Cephisus, who is
+the father of Epigenes; and there are the brothers of several who have
+associated with me. There is Nicostratus the son of Theosdotides, and
+the brother of Theodotus (now Theodotus himself is dead, and therefore
+he, at any rate, will not seek to stop him); and there is Paralus the
+son of Demodocus, who had a brother Theages; and Adeimantus the son of
+Ariston, whose brother Plato is present; and Aeantodorus, who is the
+brother of Apollodorus, whom I also see. I might mention a great many
+others, some of whom Meletus should have produced as witnesses in
+the course of his speech; and let him still produce them, if he has
+forgotten--I will make way for him. And let him say, if he has any
+testimony of the sort which he can produce. Nay, Athenians, the very
+opposite is the truth. For all these are ready to witness on behalf of
+the corrupter, of the injurer of their kindred, as Meletus and Anytus
+call me; not the corrupted youth only--there might have been a motive
+for that--but their uncorrupted elder relatives. Why should they too
+support me with their testimony? Why, indeed, except for the sake of
+truth and justice, and because they know that I am speaking the truth,
+and that Meletus is a liar.
+
+Well, Athenians, this and the like of this is all the defence which I
+have to offer. Yet a word more. Perhaps there may be some one who is
+offended at me, when he calls to mind how he himself on a similar, or
+even a less serious occasion, prayed and entreated the judges with many
+tears, and how he produced his children in court, which was a moving
+spectacle, together with a host of relations and friends; whereas I,
+who am probably in danger of my life, will do none of these things. The
+contrast may occur to his mind, and he may be set against me, and vote
+in anger because he is displeased at me on this account. Now if there
+be such a person among you,--mind, I do not say that there is,--to him I
+may fairly reply: My friend, I am a man, and like other men, a creature
+of flesh and blood, and not 'of wood or stone,' as Homer says; and I
+have a family, yes, and sons, O Athenians, three in number, one almost a
+man, and two others who are still young; and yet I will not bring any of
+them hither in order to petition you for an acquittal. And why not? Not
+from any self-assertion or want of respect for you. Whether I am or am
+not afraid of death is another question, of which I will not now speak.
+But, having regard to public opinion, I feel that such conduct would be
+discreditable to myself, and to you, and to the whole state. One who
+has reached my years, and who has a name for wisdom, ought not to demean
+himself. Whether this opinion of me be deserved or not, at any rate the
+world has decided that Socrates is in some way superior to other
+men. And if those among you who are said to be superior in wisdom
+and courage, and any other virtue, demean themselves in this way, how
+shameful is their conduct! I have seen men of reputation, when they have
+been condemned, behaving in the strangest manner: they seemed to fancy
+that they were going to suffer something dreadful if they died, and that
+they could be immortal if you only allowed them to live; and I think
+that such are a dishonour to the state, and that any stranger coming in
+would have said of them that the most eminent men of Athens, to whom the
+Athenians themselves give honour and command, are no better than women.
+And I say that these things ought not to be done by those of us who have
+a reputation; and if they are done, you ought not to permit them; you
+ought rather to show that you are far more disposed to condemn the man
+who gets up a doleful scene and makes the city ridiculous, than him who
+holds his peace.
+
+But, setting aside the question of public opinion, there seems to be
+something wrong in asking a favour of a judge, and thus procuring an
+acquittal, instead of informing and convincing him. For his duty is,
+not to make a present of justice, but to give judgment; and he has sworn
+that he will judge according to the laws, and not according to his own
+good pleasure; and we ought not to encourage you, nor should you allow
+yourselves to be encouraged, in this habit of perjury--there can be
+no piety in that. Do not then require me to do what I consider
+dishonourable and impious and wrong, especially now, when I am being
+tried for impiety on the indictment of Meletus. For if, O men of Athens,
+by force of persuasion and entreaty I could overpower your oaths, then
+I should be teaching you to believe that there are no gods, and in
+defending should simply convict myself of the charge of not believing in
+them. But that is not so--far otherwise. For I do believe that there
+are gods, and in a sense higher than that in which any of my accusers
+believe in them. And to you and to God I commit my cause, to be
+determined by you as is best for you and me.
+
+*****
+
+There are many reasons why I am not grieved, O men of Athens, at the
+vote of condemnation. I expected it, and am only surprised that the
+votes are so nearly equal; for I had thought that the majority against
+me would have been far larger; but now, had thirty votes gone over to
+the other side, I should have been acquitted. And I may say, I think,
+that I have escaped Meletus. I may say more; for without the assistance
+of Anytus and Lycon, any one may see that he would not have had a fifth
+part of the votes, as the law requires, in which case he would have
+incurred a fine of a thousand drachmae.
+
+And so he proposes death as the penalty. And what shall I propose on my
+part, O men of Athens? Clearly that which is my due. And what is my due?
+What return shall be made to the man who has never had the wit to be
+idle during his whole life; but has been careless of what the many care
+for--wealth, and family interests, and military offices, and speaking in
+the assembly, and magistracies, and plots, and parties. Reflecting that
+I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live, I did not go
+where I could do no good to you or to myself; but where I could do the
+greatest good privately to every one of you, thither I went, and sought
+to persuade every man among you that he must look to himself, and seek
+virtue and wisdom before he looks to his private interests, and look to
+the state before he looks to the interests of the state; and that this
+should be the order which he observes in all his actions. What shall be
+done to such an one? Doubtless some good thing, O men of Athens, if he
+has his reward; and the good should be of a kind suitable to him. What
+would be a reward suitable to a poor man who is your benefactor, and
+who desires leisure that he may instruct you? There can be no reward so
+fitting as maintenance in the Prytaneum, O men of Athens, a reward which
+he deserves far more than the citizen who has won the prize at Olympia
+in the horse or chariot race, whether the chariots were drawn by two
+horses or by many. For I am in want, and he has enough; and he only
+gives you the appearance of happiness, and I give you the reality. And
+if I am to estimate the penalty fairly, I should say that maintenance in
+the Prytaneum is the just return.
+
+Perhaps you think that I am braving you in what I am saying now, as in
+what I said before about the tears and prayers. But this is not so. I
+speak rather because I am convinced that I never intentionally wronged
+any one, although I cannot convince you--the time has been too short; if
+there were a law at Athens, as there is in other cities, that a capital
+cause should not be decided in one day, then I believe that I should
+have convinced you. But I cannot in a moment refute great slanders; and,
+as I am convinced that I never wronged another, I will assuredly not
+wrong myself. I will not say of myself that I deserve any evil, or
+propose any penalty. Why should I? because I am afraid of the penalty of
+death which Meletus proposes? When I do not know whether death is a good
+or an evil, why should I propose a penalty which would certainly be an
+evil? Shall I say imprisonment? And why should I live in prison, and be
+the slave of the magistrates of the year--of the Eleven? Or shall the
+penalty be a fine, and imprisonment until the fine is paid? There is the
+same objection. I should have to lie in prison, for money I have none,
+and cannot pay. And if I say exile (and this may possibly be the penalty
+which you will affix), I must indeed be blinded by the love of life, if
+I am so irrational as to expect that when you, who are my own citizens,
+cannot endure my discourses and words, and have found them so grievous
+and odious that you will have no more of them, others are likely to
+endure me. No indeed, men of Athens, that is not very likely. And what
+a life should I lead, at my age, wandering from city to city, ever
+changing my place of exile, and always being driven out! For I am quite
+sure that wherever I go, there, as here, the young men will flock to
+me; and if I drive them away, their elders will drive me out at their
+request; and if I let them come, their fathers and friends will drive me
+out for their sakes.
+
+Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and
+then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?
+Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this.
+For if I tell you that to do as you say would be a disobedience to the
+God, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe
+that I am serious; and if I say again that daily to discourse about
+virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining
+myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined
+life is not worth living, you are still less likely to believe me. Yet
+I say what is true, although a thing of which it is hard for me to
+persuade you. Also, I have never been accustomed to think that I deserve
+to suffer any harm. Had I money I might have estimated the offence at
+what I was able to pay, and not have been much the worse. But I have
+none, and therefore I must ask you to proportion the fine to my means.
+Well, perhaps I could afford a mina, and therefore I propose that
+penalty: Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, my friends here, bid
+me say thirty minae, and they will be the sureties. Let thirty minae be
+the penalty; for which sum they will be ample security to you.
+
+*****
+
+Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name
+which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that
+you killed Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise, even
+although I am not wise, when they want to reproach you. If you had
+waited a little while, your desire would have been fulfilled in the
+course of nature. For I am far advanced in years, as you may perceive,
+and not far from death. I am speaking now not to all of you, but only to
+those who have condemned me to death. And I have another thing to say to
+them: you think that I was convicted because I had no words of the sort
+which would have procured my acquittal--I mean, if I had thought fit to
+leave nothing undone or unsaid. Not so; the deficiency which led to my
+conviction was not of words--certainly not. But I had not the boldness
+or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to
+do, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things
+which you have been accustomed to hear from others, and which, as I
+maintain, are unworthy of me. I thought at the time that I ought not to
+do anything common or mean when in danger: nor do I now repent of the
+style of my defence; I would rather die having spoken after my manner,
+than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet at law
+ought I or any man to use every way of escaping death. Often in battle
+there can be no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall
+on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death; and in other
+dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to
+say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death,
+but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. I am old
+and move slowly, and the slower runner has overtaken me, and my accusers
+are keen and quick, and the faster runner, who is unrighteousness, has
+overtaken them. And now I depart hence condemned by you to suffer the
+penalty of death,--they too go their ways condemned by the truth
+to suffer the penalty of villainy and wrong; and I must abide by my
+award--let them abide by theirs. I suppose that these things may be
+regarded as fated,--and I think that they are well.
+
+And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you;
+for I am about to die, and in the hour of death men are gifted with
+prophetic power. And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that
+immediately after my departure punishment far heavier than you have
+inflicted on me will surely await you. Me you have killed because you
+wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an account of your lives.
+But that will not be as you suppose: far otherwise. For I say that there
+will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom
+hitherto I have restrained: and as they are younger they will be more
+inconsiderate with you, and you will be more offended at them. If you
+think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your
+evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is
+either possible or honourable; the easiest and the noblest way is not
+to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves. This is the
+prophecy which I utter before my departure to the judges who have
+condemned me.
+
+Friends, who would have acquitted me, I would like also to talk with you
+about the thing which has come to pass, while the magistrates are busy,
+and before I go to the place at which I must die. Stay then a little,
+for we may as well talk with one another while there is time. You are my
+friends, and I should like to show you the meaning of this event which
+has happened to me. O my judges--for you I may truly call judges--I
+should like to tell you of a wonderful circumstance. Hitherto the divine
+faculty of which the internal oracle is the source has constantly been
+in the habit of opposing me even about trifles, if I was going to make
+a slip or error in any matter; and now as you see there has come upon me
+that which may be thought, and is generally believed to be, the last and
+worst evil. But the oracle made no sign of opposition, either when I was
+leaving my house in the morning, or when I was on my way to the court,
+or while I was speaking, at anything which I was going to say; and yet I
+have often been stopped in the middle of a speech, but now in nothing
+I either said or did touching the matter in hand has the oracle opposed
+me. What do I take to be the explanation of this silence? I will tell
+you. It is an intimation that what has happened to me is a good, and
+that those of us who think that death is an evil are in error. For the
+customary sign would surely have opposed me had I been going to evil and
+not to good.
+
+Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great
+reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things--either death
+is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say,
+there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.
+Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like
+the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an
+unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his
+sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the
+other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many
+days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more
+pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private
+man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights,
+when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say
+that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if
+death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the
+dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than
+this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is
+delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the
+true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus
+and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in
+their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a
+man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and
+Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I myself, too,
+shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and conversing with
+Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other ancient hero who
+has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no
+small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs.
+Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and
+false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next; and I shall find
+out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would
+not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great
+Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men
+and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with
+them and asking them questions! In another world they do not put a man
+to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier
+than we are, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.
+
+Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a
+certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or
+after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own
+approaching end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that the
+time had arrived when it was better for me to die and be released from
+trouble; wherefore the oracle gave no sign. For which reason, also, I am
+not angry with my condemners, or with my accusers; they have done me no
+harm, although they did not mean to do me any good; and for this I may
+gently blame them.
+
+Still I have a favour to ask of them. When my sons are grown up, I would
+ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble
+them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or
+anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something
+when they are really nothing,--then reprove them, as I have reproved
+you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and
+thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And
+if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your
+hands.
+
+The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways--I to die, and you
+to live. Which is better God only knows.
+
+
+
+
+
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+********The Project Gutenberg Etext of Apology, by Plato********
+Also known as The Death of Socrates
+#15 in our series by Plato
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+Apology
+Also known as The Death of Socrates
+
+by Plato
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+February, 1999  [Etext #1656]
+
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+********The Project Gutenberg Etext of Apology, by Plato********
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+
+APOLOGY
+
+by Plato
+
+
+
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+In what relation the Apology of Plato stands to the real defence of
+Socrates, there are no means of determining.  It certainly agrees in tone
+and character with the description of Xenophon, who says in the Memorabilia
+that Socrates might have been acquitted 'if in any moderate degree he would
+have conciliated the favour of the dicasts;' and who informs us in another
+passage, on the testimony of Hermogenes, the friend of Socrates, that he
+had no wish to live; and that the divine sign refused to allow him to
+prepare a defence, and also that Socrates himself declared this to be
+unnecessary, on the ground that all his life long he had been preparing
+against that hour.  For the speech breathes throughout a spirit of
+defiance, (ut non supplex aut reus sed magister aut dominus videretur esse
+judicum' (Cic. de Orat.); and the loose and desultory style is an imitation
+of the 'accustomed manner' in which Socrates spoke in 'the agora and among
+the tables of the money-changers.'  The allusion in the Crito may, perhaps,
+be adduced as a further evidence of the literal accuracy of some parts. 
+But in the main it must be regarded as the ideal of Socrates, according to
+Plato's conception of him, appearing in the greatest and most public scene
+of his life, and in the height of his triumph, when he is weakest, and yet
+his mastery over mankind is greatest, and his habitual irony acquires a new
+meaning and a sort of tragic pathos in the face of death.  The facts of his
+life are summed up, and the features of his character are brought out as if
+by accident in the course of the defence.  The conversational manner, the
+seeming want of arrangement, the ironical simplicity, are found to result
+in a perfect work of art, which is the portrait of Socrates.
+
+Yet some of the topics may have been actually used by Socrates; and the
+recollection of his very words may have rung in the ears of his disciple. 
+The Apology of Plato may be compared generally with those speeches of
+Thucydides in which he has embodied his conception of the lofty character
+and policy of the great Pericles, and which at the same time furnish a
+commentary on the situation of affairs from the point of view of the
+historian.  So in the Apology there is an ideal rather than a literal
+truth; much is said which was not said, and is only Plato's view of the
+situation.  Plato was not, like Xenophon, a chronicler of facts; he does
+not appear in any of his writings to have aimed at literal accuracy.  He is
+not therefore to be supplemented from the Memorabilia and Symposium of
+Xenophon, who belongs to an entirely different class of writers.  The
+Apology of Plato is not the report of what Socrates said, but an elaborate
+composition, quite as much so in fact as one of the Dialogues.  And we may
+perhaps even indulge in the fancy that the actual defence of Socrates was
+as much greater than the Platonic defence as the master was greater than
+the disciple.  But in any case, some of the words used by him must have
+been remembered, and some of the facts recorded must have actually
+occurred.  It is significant that Plato is said to have been present at the
+defence (Apol.), as he is also said to have been absent at the last scene
+in the Phaedo.  Is it fanciful to suppose that he meant to give the stamp
+of authenticity to the one and not to the other?--especially when we
+consider that these two passages are the only ones in which Plato makes
+mention of himself.  The circumstance that Plato was to be one of his
+sureties for the payment of the fine which he proposed has the appearance
+of truth.  More suspicious is the statement that Socrates received the
+first impulse to his favourite calling of cross-examining the world from
+the Oracle of Delphi; for he must already have been famous before
+Chaerephon went to consult the Oracle (Riddell), and the story is of a kind
+which is very likely to have been invented.  On the whole we arrive at the
+conclusion that the Apology is true to the character of Socrates, but we
+cannot show that any single sentence in it was actually spoken by him.  It
+breathes the spirit of Socrates, but has been cast anew in the mould of
+Plato.
+
+There is not much in the other Dialogues which can be compared with the
+Apology.  The same recollection of his master may have been present to the
+mind of Plato when depicting the sufferings of the Just in the Republic. 
+The Crito may also be regarded as a sort of appendage to the Apology, in
+which Socrates, who has defied the judges, is nevertheless represented as
+scrupulously obedient to the laws.  The idealization of the sufferer is
+carried still further in the Gorgias, in which the thesis is maintained,
+that 'to suffer is better than to do evil;' and the art of rhetoric is
+described as only useful for the purpose of self-accusation.  The
+parallelisms which occur in the so-called Apology of Xenophon are not worth
+noticing, because the writing in which they are contained is manifestly
+spurious.  The statements of the Memorabilia respecting the trial and death
+of Socrates agree generally with Plato; but they have lost the flavour of
+Socratic irony in the narrative of Xenophon.
+
+The Apology or Platonic defence of Socrates is divided into three parts: 
+1st. The defence properly so called; 2nd. The shorter address in mitigation
+of the penalty; 3rd. The last words of prophetic rebuke and exhortation.
+
+The first part commences with an apology for his colloquial style; he is,
+as he has always been, the enemy of rhetoric, and knows of no rhetoric but
+truth; he will not falsify his character by making a speech.  Then he
+proceeds to divide his accusers into two classes; first, there is the
+nameless accuser--public opinion.  All the world from their earliest years
+had heard that he was a corrupter of youth, and had seen him caricatured in
+the Clouds of Aristophanes.  Secondly, there are the professed accusers,
+who are but the mouth-piece of the others.  The accusations of both might
+be summed up in a formula.  The first say, 'Socrates is an evil-doer and a
+curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven;
+and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to
+others.'  The second, 'Socrates is an evil-doer and corrupter of the youth,
+who does not receive the gods whom the state receives, but introduces other
+new divinities.'  These last words appear to have been the actual
+indictment (compare Xen. Mem.); and the previous formula, which is a
+summary of public opinion, assumes the same legal style.
+
+The answer begins by clearing up a confusion.  In the representations of
+the Comic poets, and in the opinion of the multitude, he had been
+identified with the teachers of physical science and with the Sophists. 
+But this was an error.  For both of them he professes a respect in the open
+court, which contrasts with his manner of speaking about them in other
+places.  (Compare for Anaxagoras, Phaedo, Laws; for the Sophists, Meno,
+Republic, Tim., Theaet., Soph., etc.)  But at the same time he shows that
+he is not one of them.  Of natural philosophy he knows nothing; not that he
+despises such pursuits, but the fact is that he is ignorant of them, and
+never says a word about them.  Nor is he paid for giving instruction--that
+is another mistaken notion:--he has nothing to teach.  But he commends
+Evenus for teaching virtue at such a 'moderate' rate as five minae. 
+Something of the 'accustomed irony,' which may perhaps be expected to sleep
+in the ear of the multitude, is lurking here.
+
+He then goes on to explain the reason why he is in such an evil name.  That
+had arisen out of a peculiar mission which he had taken upon himself.  The
+enthusiastic Chaerephon (probably in anticipation of the answer which he
+received) had gone to Delphi and asked the oracle if there was any man
+wiser than Socrates; and the answer was, that there was no man wiser.  What
+could be the meaning of this--that he who knew nothing, and knew that he
+knew nothing, should be declared by the oracle to be the wisest of men? 
+Reflecting upon the answer, he determined to refute it by finding 'a
+wiser;' and first he went to the politicians, and then to the poets, and
+then to the craftsmen, but always with the same result--he found that they
+knew nothing, or hardly anything more than himself; and that the little
+advantage which in some cases they possessed was more than counter-balanced
+by their conceit of knowledge.  He knew nothing, and knew that he knew
+nothing:  they knew little or nothing, and imagined that they knew all
+things.  Thus he had passed his life as a sort of missionary in detecting
+the pretended wisdom of mankind; and this occupation had quite absorbed him
+and taken him away both from public and private affairs.  Young men of the
+richer sort had made a pastime of the same pursuit, 'which was not
+unamusing.'  And hence bitter enmities had arisen; the professors of
+knowledge had revenged themselves by calling him a villainous corrupter of
+youth, and by repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and
+sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when
+there is nothing else to be said of them.
+
+The second accusation he meets by interrogating Meletus, who is present and
+can be interrogated.  'If he is the corrupter, who is the improver of the
+citizens?'  (Compare Meno.)  'All men everywhere.'  But how absurd, how
+contrary to analogy is this!  How inconceivable too, that he should make
+the citizens worse when he has to live with them.  This surely cannot be
+intentional; and if unintentional, he ought to have been instructed by
+Meletus, and not accused in the court.
+
+But there is another part of the indictment which says that he teaches men
+not to receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new gods. 
+'Is that the way in which he is supposed to corrupt the youth?'  'Yes, it
+is.'  'Has he only new gods, or none at all?'  'None at all.'  'What, not
+even the sun and moon?'  'No; why, he says that the sun is a stone, and the
+moon earth.'  That, replies Socrates, is the old confusion about
+Anaxagoras; the Athenian people are not so ignorant as to attribute to the
+influence of Socrates notions which have found their way into the drama,
+and may be learned at the theatre.  Socrates undertakes to show that
+Meletus (rather unjustifiably) has been compounding a riddle in this part
+of the indictment:  'There are no gods, but Socrates believes in the
+existence of the sons of gods, which is absurd.'
+
+Leaving Meletus, who has had enough words spent upon him, he returns to the
+original accusation.  The question may be asked, Why will he persist in
+following a profession which leads him to death?  Why?--because he must
+remain at his post where the god has placed him, as he remained at
+Potidaea, and Amphipolis, and Delium, where the generals placed him. 
+Besides, he is not so overwise as to imagine that he knows whether death is
+a good or an evil; and he is certain that desertion of his duty is an evil. 
+Anytus is quite right in saying that they should never have indicted him if
+they meant to let him go.  For he will certainly obey God rather than man;
+and will continue to preach to all men of all ages the necessity of virtue
+and improvement; and if they refuse to listen to him he will still
+persevere and reprove them.  This is his way of corrupting the youth, which
+he will not cease to follow in obedience to the god, even if a thousand
+deaths await him.
+
+He is desirous that they should let him live--not for his own sake, but for
+theirs; because he is their heaven-sent friend (and they will never have
+such another), or, as he may be ludicrously described, he is the gadfly who
+stirs the generous steed into motion.  Why then has he never taken part in
+public affairs?  Because the familiar divine voice has hindered him; if he
+had been a public man, and had fought for the right, as he would certainly
+have fought against the many, he would not have lived, and could therefore
+have done no good.  Twice in public matters he has risked his life for the
+sake of justice--once at the trial of the generals; and again in resistance
+to the tyrannical commands of the Thirty.
+
+But, though not a public man, he has passed his days in instructing the
+citizens without fee or reward--this was his mission.  Whether his
+disciples have turned out well or ill, he cannot justly be charged with the
+result, for he never promised to teach them anything.  They might come if
+they liked, and they might stay away if they liked:  and they did come,
+because they found an amusement in hearing the pretenders to wisdom
+detected.  If they have been corrupted, their elder relatives (if not
+themselves) might surely come into court and witness against him, and there
+is an opportunity still for them to appear.  But their fathers and brothers
+all appear in court (including 'this' Plato), to witness on his behalf; and
+if their relatives are corrupted, at least they are uncorrupted; 'and they
+are my witnesses.  For they know that I am speaking the truth, and that
+Meletus is lying.'
+
+This is about all that he has to say.  He will not entreat the judges to
+spare his life; neither will he present a spectacle of weeping children,
+although he, too, is not made of 'rock or oak.'  Some of the judges
+themselves may have complied with this practice on similar occasions, and
+he trusts that they will not be angry with him for not following their
+example.  But he feels that such conduct brings discredit on the name of
+Athens:  he feels too, that the judge has sworn not to give away justice;
+and he cannot be guilty of the impiety of asking the judge to break his
+oath, when he is himself being tried for impiety.
+
+As he expected, and probably intended, he is convicted.  And now the tone
+of the speech, instead of being more conciliatory, becomes more lofty and
+commanding.  Anytus proposes death as the penalty:  and what counter-
+proposition shall he make?  He, the benefactor of the Athenian people,
+whose whole life has been spent in doing them good, should at least have
+the Olympic victor's reward of maintenance in the Prytaneum.  Or why should
+he propose any counter-penalty when he does not know whether death, which
+Anytus proposes, is a good or an evil?  And he is certain that imprisonment
+is an evil, exile is an evil.  Loss of money might be an evil, but then he
+has none to give; perhaps he can make up a mina.  Let that be the penalty,
+or, if his friends wish, thirty minae; for which they will be excellent
+securities.
+
+(He is condemned to death.)
+
+He is an old man already, and the Athenians will gain nothing but disgrace
+by depriving him of a few years of life.  Perhaps he could have escaped, if
+he had chosen to throw down his arms and entreat for his life.  But he does
+not at all repent of the manner of his defence; he would rather die in his
+own fashion than live in theirs.  For the penalty of unrighteousness is
+swifter than death; that penalty has already overtaken his accusers as
+death will soon overtake him.
+
+And now, as one who is about to die, he will prophesy to them.  They have
+put him to death in order to escape the necessity of giving an account of
+their lives.  But his death 'will be the seed' of many disciples who will
+convince them of their evil ways, and will come forth to reprove them in
+harsher terms, because they are younger and more inconsiderate.
+
+He would like to say a few words, while there is time, to those who would
+have acquitted him.  He wishes them to know that the divine sign never
+interrupted him in the course of his defence; the reason of which, as he
+conjectures, is that the death to which he is going is a good and not an
+evil.  For either death is a long sleep, the best of sleeps, or a journey
+to another world in which the souls of the dead are gathered together, and
+in which there may be a hope of seeing the heroes of old--in which, too,
+there are just judges; and as all are immortal, there can be no fear of any
+one suffering death for his opinions.
+
+Nothing evil can happen to the good man either in life or death, and his
+own death has been permitted by the gods, because it was better for him to
+depart; and therefore he forgives his judges because they have done him no
+harm, although they never meant to do him any good.
+
+He has a last request to make to them--that they will trouble his sons as
+he has troubled them, if they appear to prefer riches to virtue, or to
+think themselves something when they are nothing.
+
+...
+
+'Few persons will be found to wish that Socrates should have defended
+himself otherwise,'--if, as we must add, his defence was that with which
+Plato has provided him.  But leaving this question, which does not admit of
+a precise solution, we may go on to ask what was the impression which Plato
+in the Apology intended to give of the character and conduct of his master
+in the last great scene?  Did he intend to represent him (1) as employing
+sophistries; (2) as designedly irritating the judges?  Or are these
+sophistries to be regarded as belonging to the age in which he lived and to
+his personal character, and this apparent haughtiness as flowing from the
+natural elevation of his position?
+
+For example, when he says that it is absurd to suppose that one man is the
+corrupter and all the rest of the world the improvers of the youth; or,
+when he argues that he never could have corrupted the men with whom he had
+to live; or, when he proves his belief in the gods because he believes in
+the sons of gods, is he serious or jesting?  It may be observed that these
+sophisms all occur in his cross-examination of Meletus, who is easily
+foiled and mastered in the hands of the great dialectician.  Perhaps he
+regarded these answers as good enough for his accuser, of whom he makes
+very light.  Also there is a touch of irony in them, which takes them out
+of the category of sophistry.  (Compare Euthyph.)
+
+That the manner in which he defends himself about the lives of his
+disciples is not satisfactory, can hardly be denied.  Fresh in the memory
+of the Athenians, and detestable as they deserved to be to the newly
+restored democracy, were the names of Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides.  It
+is obviously not a sufficient answer that Socrates had never professed to
+teach them anything, and is therefore not justly chargeable with their
+crimes.  Yet the defence, when taken out of this ironical form, is
+doubtless sound:  that his teaching had nothing to do with their evil
+lives.  Here, then, the sophistry is rather in form than in substance,
+though we might desire that to such a serious charge Socrates had given a
+more serious answer.
+
+Truly characteristic of Socrates is another point in his answer, which may
+also be regarded as sophistical.  He says that 'if he has corrupted the
+youth, he must have corrupted them involuntarily.'  But if, as Socrates
+argues, all evil is involuntary, then all criminals ought to be admonished
+and not punished.  In these words the Socratic doctrine of the
+involuntariness of evil is clearly intended to be conveyed.  Here again, as
+in the former instance, the defence of Socrates is untrue practically, but
+may be true in some ideal or transcendental sense.  The commonplace reply,
+that if he had been guilty of corrupting the youth their relations would
+surely have witnessed against him, with which he concludes this part of his
+defence, is more satisfactory.
+
+Again, when Socrates argues that he must believe in the gods because he
+believes in the sons of gods, we must remember that this is a refutation
+not of the original indictment, which is consistent enough--'Socrates does
+not receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new divinities'
+--but of the interpretation put upon the words by Meletus, who has affirmed
+that he is a downright atheist.  To this Socrates fairly answers, in
+accordance with the ideas of the time, that a downright atheist cannot
+believe in the sons of gods or in divine things.  The notion that demons or
+lesser divinities are the sons of gods is not to be regarded as ironical or
+sceptical.  He is arguing 'ad hominem' according to the notions of
+mythology current in his age.  Yet he abstains from saying that he believed
+in the gods whom the State approved.  He does not defend himself, as
+Xenophon has defended him, by appealing to his practice of religion. 
+Probably he neither wholly believed, nor disbelieved, in the existence of
+the popular gods; he had no means of knowing about them.  According to
+Plato (compare Phaedo; Symp.), as well as Xenophon (Memor.), he was
+punctual in the performance of the least religious duties; and he must have
+believed in his own oracular sign, of which he seemed to have an internal
+witness.  But the existence of Apollo or Zeus, or the other gods whom the
+State approves, would have appeared to him both uncertain and unimportant
+in comparison of the duty of self-examination, and of those principles of
+truth and right which he deemed to be the foundation of religion.  (Compare
+Phaedr.; Euthyph.; Republic.)
+
+The second question, whether Plato meant to represent Socrates as braving
+or irritating his judges, must also be answered in the negative.  His
+irony, his superiority, his audacity, 'regarding not the person of man,'
+necessarily flow out of the loftiness of his situation.  He is not acting a
+part upon a great occasion, but he is what he has been all his life long,
+'a king of men.'  He would rather not appear insolent, if he could avoid it
+(ouch os authadizomenos touto lego).  Neither is he desirous of hastening
+his own end, for life and death are simply indifferent to him.  But such a
+defence as would be acceptable to his judges and might procure an
+acquittal, it is not in his nature to make.  He will not say or do anything
+that might pervert the course of justice; he cannot have his tongue bound
+even 'in the throat of death.'  With his accusers he will only fence and
+play, as he had fenced with other 'improvers of youth,' answering the
+Sophist according to his sophistry all his life long.  He is serious when
+he is speaking of his own mission, which seems to distinguish him from all
+other reformers of mankind, and originates in an accident.  The dedication
+of himself to the improvement of his fellow-citizens is not so remarkable
+as the ironical spirit in which he goes about doing good only in
+vindication of the credit of the oracle, and in the vain hope of finding a
+wiser man than himself.  Yet this singular and almost accidental character
+of his mission agrees with the divine sign which, according to our notions,
+is equally accidental and irrational, and is nevertheless accepted by him
+as the guiding principle of his life.  Socrates is nowhere represented to
+us as a freethinker or sceptic.  There is no reason to doubt his sincerity
+when he speculates on the possibility of seeing and knowing the heroes of
+the Trojan war in another world.  On the other hand, his hope of
+immortality is uncertain;--he also conceives of death as a long sleep (in
+this respect differing from the Phaedo), and at last falls back on
+resignation to the divine will, and the certainty that no evil can happen
+to the good man either in life or death.  His absolute truthfulness seems
+to hinder him from asserting positively more than this; and he makes no
+attempt to veil his ignorance in mythology and figures of speech.  The
+gentleness of the first part of the speech contrasts with the aggravated,
+almost threatening, tone of the conclusion.  He characteristically remarks
+that he will not speak as a rhetorician, that is to say, he will not make a
+regular defence such as Lysias or one of the orators might have composed
+for him, or, according to some accounts, did compose for him.  But he first
+procures himself a hearing by conciliatory words.  He does not attack the
+Sophists; for they were open to the same charges as himself; they were
+equally ridiculed by the Comic poets, and almost equally hateful to Anytus
+and Meletus.  Yet incidentally the antagonism between Socrates and the
+Sophists is allowed to appear.  He is poor and they are rich; his
+profession that he teaches nothing is opposed to their readiness to teach
+all things; his talking in the marketplace to their private instructions;
+his tarry-at-home life to their wandering from city to city.  The tone
+which he assumes towards them is one of real friendliness, but also of
+concealed irony.  Towards Anaxagoras, who had disappointed him in his hopes
+of learning about mind and nature, he shows a less kindly feeling, which is
+also the feeling of Plato in other passages (Laws).  But Anaxagoras had
+been dead thirty years, and was beyond the reach of persecution.
+
+It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers who
+would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more violent
+terms was, as far as we know, never fulfilled.  No inference can be drawn
+from this circumstance as to the probability of the words attributed to him
+having been actually uttered.  They express the aspiration of the first
+martyr of philosophy, that he would leave behind him many followers,
+accompanied by the not unnatural feeling that they would be fiercer and
+more inconsiderate in their words when emancipated from his control.
+
+The above remarks must be understood as applying with any degree of
+certainty to the Platonic Socrates only.  For, although these or similar
+words may have been spoken by Socrates himself, we cannot exclude the
+possibility, that like so much else, e.g. the wisdom of Critias, the poem
+of Solon, the virtues of Charmides, they may have been due only to the
+imagination of Plato.  The arguments of those who maintain that the Apology
+was composed during the process, resting on no evidence, do not require a
+serious refutation.  Nor are the reasonings of Schleiermacher, who argues
+that the Platonic defence is an exact or nearly exact reproduction of the
+words of Socrates, partly because Plato would not have been guilty of the
+impiety of altering them, and also because many points of the defence might
+have been improved and strengthened, at all more conclusive.  (See English
+Translation.)  What effect the death of Socrates produced on the mind of
+Plato, we cannot certainly determine; nor can we say how he would or must
+have written under the circumstances.  We observe that the enmity of
+Aristophanes to Socrates does not prevent Plato from introducing them
+together in the Symposium engaged in friendly intercourse.  Nor is there
+any trace in the Dialogues of an attempt to make Anytus or Meletus
+personally odious in the eyes of the Athenian public.
+
+
+APOLOGY
+
+by
+
+Plato
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+
+How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but
+I know that they almost made me forget who I was--so persuasively did they
+speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth.  But of the many
+falsehoods told by them, there was one which quite amazed me;--I mean when
+they said that you should be upon your guard and not allow yourselves to be
+deceived by the force of my eloquence.  To say this, when they were certain
+to be detected as soon as I opened my lips and proved myself to be anything
+but a great speaker, did indeed appear to me most shameless--unless by the
+force of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for is such is their
+meaning, I admit that I am eloquent.  But in how different a way from
+theirs!  Well, as I was saying, they have scarcely spoken the truth at all;
+but from me you shall hear the whole truth:  not, however, delivered after
+their manner in a set oration duly ornamented with words and phrases. No,
+by heaven! but I shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the
+moment; for I am confident in the justice of my cause (Or, I am certain
+that I am right in taking this course.):  at my time of life I ought not to
+be appearing before you, O men of Athens, in the character of a juvenile
+orator--let no one expect it of me.  And I must beg of you to grant me a
+favour:--If I defend myself in my accustomed manner, and you hear me using
+the words which I have been in the habit of using in the agora, at the
+tables of the money-changers, or anywhere else, I would ask you not to be
+surprised, and not to interrupt me on this account.  For I am more than
+seventy years of age, and appearing now for the first time in a court of
+law, I am quite a stranger to the language of the place; and therefore I
+would have you regard me as if I were really a stranger, whom you would
+excuse if he spoke in his native tongue, and after the fashion of his
+country:--Am I making an unfair request of you?  Never mind the manner,
+which may or may not be good; but think only of the truth of my words, and
+give heed to that:  let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide
+justly.
+
+And first, I have to reply to the older charges and to my first accusers,
+and then I will go on to the later ones.  For of old I have had many
+accusers, who have accused me falsely to you during many years; and I am
+more afraid of them than of Anytus and his associates, who are dangerous,
+too, in their own way.  But far more dangerous are the others, who began
+when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their
+falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the
+heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse
+appear the better cause.  The disseminators of this tale are the accusers
+whom I dread; for their hearers are apt to fancy that such enquirers do not
+believe in the existence of the gods.  And they are many, and their charges
+against me are of ancient date, and they were made by them in the days when
+you were more impressible than you are now--in childhood, or it may have
+been in youth--and the cause when heard went by default, for there was none
+to answer.  And hardest of all, I do not know and cannot tell the names of
+my accusers; unless in the chance case of a Comic poet.  All who from envy
+and malice have persuaded you--some of them having first convinced
+themselves--all this class of men are most difficult to deal with; for I
+cannot have them up here, and cross-examine them, and therefore I must
+simply fight with shadows in my own defence, and argue when there is no one
+who answers.  I will ask you then to assume with me, as I was saying, that
+my opponents are of two kinds; one recent, the other ancient:  and I hope
+that you will see the propriety of my answering the latter first, for these
+accusations you heard long before the others, and much oftener.
+
+Well, then, I must make my defence, and endeavour to clear away in a short
+time, a slander which has lasted a long time.  May I succeed, if to succeed
+be for my good and yours, or likely to avail me in my cause!  The task is
+not an easy one; I quite understand the nature of it.  And so leaving the
+event with God, in obedience to the law I will now make my defence.
+
+I will begin at the beginning, and ask what is the accusation which has
+given rise to the slander of me, and in fact has encouraged Meletus to
+proof this charge against me.  Well, what do the slanderers say?  They
+shall be my prosecutors, and I will sum up their words in an affidavit: 
+'Socrates is an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into things
+under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better
+cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrines to others.'  Such is the
+nature of the accusation:  it is just what you have yourselves seen in the
+comedy of Aristophanes (Aristoph., Clouds.), who has introduced a man whom
+he calls Socrates, going about and saying that he walks in air, and talking
+a deal of nonsense concerning matters of which I do not pretend to know
+either much or little--not that I mean to speak disparagingly of any one
+who is a student of natural philosophy.  I should be very sorry if Meletus
+could bring so grave a charge against me.  But the simple truth is, O
+Athenians, that I have nothing to do with physical speculations.  Very many
+of those here present are witnesses to the truth of this, and to them I
+appeal.  Speak then, you who have heard me, and tell your neighbours
+whether any of you have ever known me hold forth in few words or in many
+upon such matters...You hear their answer.  And from what they say of this
+part of the charge you will be able to judge of the truth of the rest.
+
+As little foundation is there for the report that I am a teacher, and take
+money; this accusation has no more truth in it than the other.  Although,
+if a man were really able to instruct mankind, to receive money for giving
+instruction would, in my opinion, be an honour to him.  There is Gorgias of
+Leontium, and Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis, who go the round of
+the cities, and are able to persuade the young men to leave their own
+citizens by whom they might be taught for nothing, and come to them whom
+they not only pay, but are thankful if they may be allowed to pay them. 
+There is at this time a Parian philosopher residing in Athens, of whom I
+have heard; and I came to hear of him in this way:--I came across a man who
+has spent a world of money on the Sophists, Callias, the son of Hipponicus,
+and knowing that he had sons, I asked him:  'Callias,' I said, 'if your two
+sons were foals or calves, there would be no difficulty in finding some one
+to put over them; we should hire a trainer of horses, or a farmer probably,
+who would improve and perfect them in their own proper virtue and
+excellence; but as they are human beings, whom are you thinking of placing
+over them?  Is there any one who understands human and political virtue? 
+You must have thought about the matter, for you have sons; is there any
+one?'  'There is,' he said.  'Who is he?' said I; 'and of what country? and
+what does he charge?'  'Evenus the Parian,' he replied; 'he is the man, and
+his charge is five minae.'  Happy is Evenus, I said to myself, if he really
+has this wisdom, and teaches at such a moderate charge.  Had I the same, I
+should have been very proud and conceited; but the truth is that I have no
+knowledge of the kind.
+
+I dare say, Athenians, that some one among you will reply, 'Yes, Socrates,
+but what is the origin of these accusations which are brought against you;
+there must have been something strange which you have been doing?  All
+these rumours and this talk about you would never have arisen if you had
+been like other men:  tell us, then, what is the cause of them, for we
+should be sorry to judge hastily of you.'  Now I regard this as a fair
+challenge, and I will endeavour to explain to you the reason why I am
+called wise and have such an evil fame.  Please to attend then.  And
+although some of you may think that I am joking, I declare that I will tell
+you the entire truth.  Men of Athens, this reputation of mine has come of a
+certain sort of wisdom which I possess.  If you ask me what kind of wisdom,
+I reply, wisdom such as may perhaps be attained by man, for to that extent
+I am inclined to believe that I am wise; whereas the persons of whom I was
+speaking have a superhuman wisdom which I may fail to describe, because I
+have it not myself; and he who says that I have, speaks falsely, and is
+taking away my character.  And here, O men of Athens, I must beg you not to
+interrupt me, even if I seem to say something extravagant.  For the word
+which I will speak is not mine.  I will refer you to a witness who is
+worthy of credit; that witness shall be the God of Delphi--he will tell you
+about my wisdom, if I have any, and of what sort it is.  You must have
+known Chaerephon; he was early a friend of mine, and also a friend of
+yours, for he shared in the recent exile of the people, and returned with
+you.  Well, Chaerephon, as you know, was very impetuous in all his doings,
+and he went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether--as I
+was saying, I must beg you not to interrupt--he asked the oracle to tell
+him whether anyone was wiser than I was, and the Pythian prophetess
+answered, that there was no man wiser.  Chaerephon is dead himself; but his
+brother, who is in court, will confirm the truth of what I am saying.
+
+Why do I mention this?  Because I am going to explain to you why I have
+such an evil name.  When I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can the
+god mean? and what is the interpretation of his riddle? for I know that I
+have no wisdom, small or great.  What then can he mean when he says that I
+am the wisest of men?  And yet he is a god, and cannot lie; that would be
+against his nature.  After long consideration, I thought of a method of
+trying the question.  I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser
+than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand.  I
+should say to him, 'Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said that
+I was the wisest.'  Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation of
+wisdom, and observed him--his name I need not mention; he was a politician
+whom I selected for examination--and the result was as follows:  When I
+began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really
+wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and
+thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was
+not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity
+was shared by several who were present and heard me.  So I left him, saying
+to myself, as I went away:  Well, although I do not suppose that either of
+us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,--
+for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think
+that I know.  In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the
+advantage of him.  Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions
+to wisdom, and my conclusion was exactly the same.  Whereupon I made
+another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.
+
+Then I went to one man after another, being not unconscious of the enmity
+which I provoked, and I lamented and feared this:  but necessity was laid
+upon me,--the word of God, I thought, ought to be considered first.  And I
+said to myself, Go I must to all who appear to know, and find out the
+meaning of the oracle.  And I swear to you, Athenians, by the dog I swear!
+--for I must tell you the truth--the result of my mission was just this:  I
+found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that
+others less esteemed were really wiser and better.  I will tell you the
+tale of my wanderings and of the 'Herculean' labours, as I may call them,
+which I endured only to find at last the oracle irrefutable.  After the
+politicians, I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts.  And
+there, I said to myself, you will be instantly detected; now you will find
+out that you are more ignorant than they are.  Accordingly, I took them
+some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what
+was the meaning of them--thinking that they would teach me something.  Will
+you believe me?  I am almost ashamed to confess the truth, but I must say
+that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better
+about their poetry than they did themselves.  Then I knew that not by
+wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they
+are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not
+understand the meaning of them.  The poets appeared to me to be much in the
+same case; and I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry
+they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which
+they were not wise.  So I departed, conceiving myself to be superior to
+them for the same reason that I was superior to the politicians.
+
+At last I went to the artisans.  I was conscious that I knew nothing at
+all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and here
+I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant,
+and in this they certainly were wiser than I was.  But I observed that even
+the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets;--because they were
+good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters,
+and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom; and therefore I asked
+myself on behalf of the oracle, whether I would like to be as I was,
+neither having their knowledge nor their ignorance, or like them in both;
+and I made answer to myself and to the oracle that I was better off as I
+was.
+
+This inquisition has led to my having many enemies of the worst and most
+dangerous kind, and has given occasion also to many calumnies.  And I am
+called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom
+which I find wanting in others:  but the truth is, O men of Athens, that
+God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of
+men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only
+using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the
+wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth
+nothing.  And so I go about the world, obedient to the god, and search and
+make enquiry into the wisdom of any one, whether citizen or stranger, who
+appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the
+oracle I show him that he is not wise; and my occupation quite absorbs me,
+and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to
+any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion
+to the god.
+
+There is another thing:--young men of the richer classes, who have not much
+to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders
+examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine others; there
+are plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who think that they know
+something, but really know little or nothing; and then those who are
+examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me: 
+This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth!--
+and then if somebody asks them, Why, what evil does he practise or teach?
+they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to
+be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all
+philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth,
+and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they
+do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected--
+which is the truth; and as they are numerous and ambitious and energetic,
+and are drawn up in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have
+filled your ears with their loud and inveterate calumnies.  And this is the
+reason why my three accusers, Meletus and Anytus and Lycon, have set upon
+me; Meletus, who has a quarrel with me on behalf of the poets; Anytus, on
+behalf of the craftsmen and politicians; Lycon, on behalf of the
+rhetoricians:  and as I said at the beginning, I cannot expect to get rid
+of such a mass of calumny all in a moment.  And this, O men of Athens, is
+the truth and the whole truth; I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled
+nothing.  And yet, I know that my plainness of speech makes them hate me,
+and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth?--Hence
+has arisen the prejudice against me; and this is the reason of it, as you
+will find out either in this or in any future enquiry.
+
+I have said enough in my defence against the first class of my accusers; I
+turn to the second class.  They are headed by Meletus, that good man and
+true lover of his country, as he calls himself.  Against these, too, I must
+try to make a defence:--Let their affidavit be read:  it contains something
+of this kind:  It says that Socrates is a doer of evil, who corrupts the
+youth; and who does not believe in the gods of the state, but has other new
+divinities of his own.  Such is the charge; and now let us examine the
+particular counts.  He says that I am a doer of evil, and corrupt the
+youth; but I say, O men of Athens, that Meletus is a doer of evil, in that
+he pretends to be in earnest when he is only in jest, and is so eager to
+bring men to trial from a pretended zeal and interest about matters in
+which he really never had the smallest interest.  And the truth of this I
+will endeavour to prove to you.
+
+Come hither, Meletus, and let me ask a question of you.  You think a great
+deal about the improvement of youth?
+
+Yes, I do.
+
+Tell the judges, then, who is their improver; for you must know, as you
+have taken the pains to discover their corrupter, and are citing and
+accusing me before them.  Speak, then, and tell the judges who their
+improver is.--Observe, Meletus, that you are silent, and have nothing to
+say.  But is not this rather disgraceful, and a very considerable proof of
+what I was saying, that you have no interest in the matter?  Speak up,
+friend, and tell us who their improver is.
+
+The laws.
+
+But that, my good sir, is not my meaning.  I want to know who the person
+is, who, in the first place, knows the laws.
+
+The judges, Socrates, who are present in court.
+
+What, do you mean to say, Meletus, that they are able to instruct and
+improve youth?
+
+Certainly they are.
+
+What, all of them, or some only and not others?
+
+All of them.
+
+By the goddess Here, that is good news!  There are plenty of improvers,
+then.  And what do you say of the audience,--do they improve them?
+
+Yes, they do.
+
+And the senators?
+
+Yes, the senators improve them.
+
+But perhaps the members of the assembly corrupt them?--or do they too
+improve them?
+
+They improve them.
+
+Then every Athenian improves and elevates them; all with the exception of
+myself; and I alone am their corrupter?  Is that what you affirm?
+
+That is what I stoutly affirm.
+
+I am very unfortunate if you are right.  But suppose I ask you a question: 
+How about horses?  Does one man do them harm and all the world good?  Is
+not the exact opposite the truth?  One man is able to do them good, or at
+least not many;--the trainer of horses, that is to say, does them good, and
+others who have to do with them rather injure them?  Is not that true,
+Meletus, of horses, or of any other animals?  Most assuredly it is; whether
+you and Anytus say yes or no.  Happy indeed would be the condition of youth
+if they had one corrupter only, and all the rest of the world were their
+improvers.  But you, Meletus, have sufficiently shown that you never had a
+thought about the young:  your carelessness is seen in your not caring
+about the very things which you bring against me.
+
+And now, Meletus, I will ask you another question--by Zeus I will:  Which
+is better, to live among bad citizens, or among good ones?  Answer, friend,
+I say; the question is one which may be easily answered.  Do not the good
+do their neighbours good, and the bad do them evil?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is there anyone who would rather be injured than benefited by those who
+live with him?  Answer, my good friend, the law requires you to answer--
+does any one like to be injured?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And when you accuse me of corrupting and deteriorating the youth, do you
+allege that I corrupt them intentionally or unintentionally?
+
+Intentionally, I say.
+
+But you have just admitted that the good do their neighbours good, and the
+evil do them evil.  Now, is that a truth which your superior wisdom has
+recognized thus early in life, and am I, at my age, in such darkness and
+ignorance as not to know that if a man with whom I have to live is
+corrupted by me, I am very likely to be harmed by him; and yet I corrupt
+him, and intentionally, too--so you say, although neither I nor any other
+human being is ever likely to be convinced by you.  But either I do not
+corrupt them, or I corrupt them unintentionally; and on either view of the
+case you lie.  If my offence is unintentional, the law has no cognizance of
+unintentional offences: you ought to have taken me privately, and warned
+and admonished me; for if I had been better advised, I should have left off
+doing what I only did unintentionally--no doubt I should; but you would
+have nothing to say to me and refused to teach me.  And now you bring me up
+in this court, which is a place not of instruction, but of punishment.
+
+It will be very clear to you, Athenians, as I was saying, that Meletus has
+no care at all, great or small, about the matter.  But still I should like
+to know, Meletus, in what I am affirmed to corrupt the young.  I suppose
+you mean, as I infer from your indictment, that I teach them not to
+acknowledge the gods which the state acknowledges, but some other new
+divinities or spiritual agencies in their stead.  These are the lessons by
+which I corrupt the youth, as you say.
+
+Yes, that I say emphatically.
+
+Then, by the gods, Meletus, of whom we are speaking, tell me and the court,
+in somewhat plainer terms, what you mean! for I do not as yet understand
+whether you affirm that I teach other men to acknowledge some gods, and
+therefore that I do believe in gods, and am not an entire atheist--this you
+do not lay to my charge,--but only you say that they are not the same gods
+which the city recognizes--the charge is that they are different gods.  Or,
+do you mean that I am an atheist simply, and a teacher of atheism?
+
+I mean the latter--that you are a complete atheist.
+
+What an extraordinary statement!  Why do you think so, Meletus?  Do you
+mean that I do not believe in the godhead of the sun or moon, like other
+men?
+
+I assure you, judges, that he does not:  for he says that the sun is stone,
+and the moon earth.
+
+Friend Meletus, you think that you are accusing Anaxagoras:  and you have
+but a bad opinion of the judges, if you fancy them illiterate to such a
+degree as not to know that these doctrines are found in the books of
+Anaxagoras the Clazomenian, which are full of them.  And so, forsooth, the
+youth are said to be taught them by Socrates, when there are not
+unfrequently exhibitions of them at the theatre (Probably in allusion to
+Aristophanes who caricatured, and to Euripides who borrowed the notions of
+Anaxagoras, as well as to other dramatic poets.) (price of admission one
+drachma at the most); and they might pay their money, and laugh at Socrates
+if he pretends to father these extraordinary views.  And so, Meletus, you
+really think that I do not believe in any god?
+
+I swear by Zeus that you believe absolutely in none at all.
+
+Nobody will believe you, Meletus, and I am pretty sure that you do not
+believe yourself.  I cannot help thinking, men of Athens, that Meletus is
+reckless and impudent, and that he has written this indictment in a spirit
+of mere wantonness and youthful bravado.  Has he not compounded a riddle,
+thinking to try me?  He said to himself:--I shall see whether the wise
+Socrates will discover my facetious contradiction, or whether I shall be
+able to deceive him and the rest of them.  For he certainly does appear to
+me to contradict himself in the indictment as much as if he said that
+Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods, and yet of believing in
+them--but this is not like a person who is in earnest.
+
+I should like you, O men of Athens, to join me in examining what I conceive
+to be his inconsistency; and do you, Meletus, answer.  And I must remind
+the audience of my request that they would not make a disturbance if I
+speak in my accustomed manner:
+
+Did ever man, Meletus, believe in the existence of human things, and not of
+human beings?...I wish, men of Athens, that he would answer, and not be
+always trying to get up an interruption.  Did ever any man believe in
+horsemanship, and not in horses? or in flute-playing, and not in flute-
+players?  No, my friend; I will answer to you and to the court, as you
+refuse to answer for yourself.  There is no man who ever did.  But now
+please to answer the next question:  Can a man believe in spiritual and
+divine agencies, and not in spirits or demigods?
+
+He cannot.
+
+How lucky I am to have extracted that answer, by the assistance of the
+court!  But then you swear in the indictment that I teach and believe in
+divine or spiritual agencies (new or old, no matter for that); at any rate,
+I believe in spiritual agencies,--so you say and swear in the affidavit;
+and yet if I believe in divine beings, how can I help believing in spirits
+or demigods;--must I not?  To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume
+that your silence gives consent.  Now what are spirits or demigods?  Are
+they not either gods or the sons of gods?
+
+Certainly they are.
+
+But this is what I call the facetious riddle invented by you:  the demigods
+or spirits are gods, and you say first that I do not believe in gods, and
+then again that I do believe in gods; that is, if I believe in demigods. 
+For if the demigods are the illegitimate sons of gods, whether by the
+nymphs or by any other mothers, of whom they are said to be the sons--what
+human being will ever believe that there are no gods if they are the sons
+of gods?  You might as well affirm the existence of mules, and deny that of
+horses and asses.  Such nonsense, Meletus, could only have been intended by
+you to make trial of me.  You have put this into the indictment because you
+had nothing real of which to accuse me.  But no one who has a particle of
+understanding will ever be convinced by you that the same men can believe
+in divine and superhuman things, and yet not believe that there are gods
+and demigods and heroes.
+
+I have said enough in answer to the charge of Meletus:  any elaborate
+defence is unnecessary, but I know only too well how many are the enmities
+which I have incurred, and this is what will be my destruction if I am
+destroyed;--not Meletus, nor yet Anytus, but the envy and detraction of the
+world, which has been the death of many good men, and will probably be the
+death of many more; there is no danger of my being the last of them.
+
+Some one will say:  And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life
+which is likely to bring you to an untimely end?  To him I may fairly
+answer:  There you are mistaken:  a man who is good for anything ought not
+to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider
+whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong--acting the part of a
+good man or of a bad.  Whereas, upon your view, the heroes who fell at Troy
+were not good for much, and the son of Thetis above all, who altogether
+despised danger in comparison with disgrace; and when he was so eager to
+slay Hector, his goddess mother said to him, that if he avenged his
+companion Patroclus, and slew Hector, he would die himself--'Fate,' she
+said, in these or the like words, 'waits for you next after Hector;' he,
+receiving this warning, utterly despised danger and death, and instead of
+fearing them, feared rather to live in dishonour, and not to avenge his
+friend.  'Let me die forthwith,' he replies, 'and be avenged of my enemy,
+rather than abide here by the beaked ships, a laughing-stock and a burden
+of the earth.'  Had Achilles any thought of death and danger?  For wherever
+a man's place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he
+has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of
+danger; he should not think of death or of anything but of disgrace.  And
+this, O men of Athens, is a true saying.
+
+Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I was
+ordered by the generals whom you chose to command me at Potidaea and
+Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any other man,
+facing death--if now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to
+fulfil the philosopher's mission of searching into myself and other men, I
+were to desert my post through fear of death, or any other fear; that would
+indeed be strange, and I might justly be arraigned in court for denying the
+existence of the gods, if I disobeyed the oracle because I was afraid of
+death, fancying that I was wise when I was not wise.  For the fear of death
+is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretence of
+knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their
+fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.  Is
+not this ignorance of a disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the
+conceit that a man knows what he does not know?  And in this respect only I
+believe myself to differ from men in general, and may perhaps claim to be
+wiser than they are:--that whereas I know but little of the world below, I
+do not suppose that I know:  but I do know that injustice and disobedience
+to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonourable, and I will
+never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil.  And
+therefore if you let me go now, and are not convinced by Anytus, who said
+that since I had been prosecuted I must be put to death; (or if not that I
+ought never to have been prosecuted at all); and that if I escape now, your
+sons will all be utterly ruined by listening to my words--if you say to me,
+Socrates, this time we will not mind Anytus, and you shall be let off, but
+upon one condition, that you are not to enquire and speculate in this way
+any more, and that if you are caught doing so again you shall die;--if this
+was the condition on which you let me go, I should reply:  Men of Athens, I
+honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have
+life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of
+philosophy, exhorting any one whom I meet and saying to him after my
+manner:  You, my friend,--a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city
+of Athens,--are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money
+and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and
+the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at
+all?  And if the person with whom I am arguing, says:  Yes, but I do care;
+then I do not leave him or let him go at once; but I proceed to interrogate
+and examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue in
+him, but only says that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the
+greater, and overvaluing the less.  And I shall repeat the same words to
+every one whom I meet, young and old, citizen and alien, but especially to
+the citizens, inasmuch as they are my brethren.  For know that this is the
+command of God; and I believe that no greater good has ever happened in the
+state than my service to the God.  For I do nothing but go about persuading
+you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your
+properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of
+the soul.  I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from
+virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private.
+This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth,
+I am a mischievous person.  But if any one says that this is not my
+teaching, he is speaking an untruth.  Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to
+you, do as Anytus bids or not as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not;
+but whichever you do, understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even
+if I have to die many times.
+
+Men of Athens, do not interrupt, but hear me; there was an understanding
+between us that you should hear me to the end:  I have something more to
+say, at which you may be inclined to cry out; but I believe that to hear me
+will be good for you, and therefore I beg that you will not cry out.  I
+would have you know, that if you kill such an one as I am, you will injure
+yourselves more than you will injure me.  Nothing will injure me, not
+Meletus nor yet Anytus--they cannot, for a bad man is not permitted to
+injure a better than himself.  I do not deny that Anytus may, perhaps, kill
+him, or drive him into exile, or deprive him of civil rights; and he may
+imagine, and others may imagine, that he is inflicting a great injury upon
+him:  but there I do not agree.  For the evil of doing as he is doing--the
+evil of unjustly taking away the life of another--is greater far.
+
+And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may
+think, but for yours, that you may not sin against the God by condemning
+me, who am his gift to you.  For if you kill me you will not easily find a
+successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a
+sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and
+noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and
+requires to be stirred into life.  I am that gadfly which God has attached
+to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon
+you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.  You will not easily find
+another like me, and therefore I would advise you to spare me.  I dare say
+that you may feel out of temper (like a person who is suddenly awakened
+from sleep), and you think that you might easily strike me dead as Anytus
+advises, and then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives,
+unless God in his care of you sent you another gadfly.  When I say that I
+am given to you by God, the proof of my mission is this:--if I had been
+like other men, I should not have neglected all my own concerns or
+patiently seen the neglect of them during all these years, and have been
+doing yours, coming to you individually like a father or elder brother,
+exhorting you to regard virtue; such conduct, I say, would be unlike human
+nature.  If I had gained anything, or if my exhortations had been paid,
+there would have been some sense in my doing so; but now, as you will
+perceive, not even the impudence of my accusers dares to say that I have
+ever exacted or sought pay of any one; of that they have no witness.  And I
+have a sufficient witness to the truth of what I say--my poverty.
+
+Some one may wonder why I go about in private giving advice and busying
+myself with the concerns of others, but do not venture to come forward in
+public and advise the state.  I will tell you why.  You have heard me speak
+at sundry times and in divers places of an oracle or sign which comes to
+me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment.  This
+sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a
+child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am
+going to do.  This is what deters me from being a politician.  And rightly,
+as I think.  For I am certain, O men of Athens, that if I had engaged in
+politics, I should have perished long ago, and done no good either to you
+or to myself.  And do not be offended at my telling you the truth:  for the
+truth is, that no man who goes to war with you or any other multitude,
+honestly striving against the many lawless and unrighteous deeds which are
+done in a state, will save his life; he who will fight for the right, if he
+would live even for a brief space, must have a private station and not a
+public one.
+
+I can give you convincing evidence of what I say, not words only, but what
+you value far more--actions.  Let me relate to you a passage of my own life
+which will prove to you that I should never have yielded to injustice from
+any fear of death, and that 'as I should have refused to yield' I must have
+died at once.  I will tell you a tale of the courts, not very interesting
+perhaps, but nevertheless true.  The only office of state which I ever
+held, O men of Athens, was that of senator:  the tribe Antiochis, which is
+my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken
+up the bodies of the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed
+to try them in a body, contrary to law, as you all thought afterwards; but
+at the time I was the only one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the
+illegality, and I gave my vote against you; and when the orators threatened
+to impeach and arrest me, and you called and shouted, I made up my mind
+that I would run the risk, having law and justice with me, rather than take
+part in your injustice because I feared imprisonment and death.  This
+happened in the days of the democracy.  But when the oligarchy of the
+Thirty was in power, they sent for me and four others into the rotunda, and
+bade us bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis, as they wanted to put him
+to death.  This was a specimen of the sort of commands which they were
+always giving with the view of implicating as many as possible in their
+crimes; and then I showed, not in word only but in deed, that, if I may be
+allowed to use such an expression, I cared not a straw for death, and that
+my great and only care was lest I should do an unrighteous or unholy thing. 
+For the strong arm of that oppressive power did not frighten me into doing
+wrong; and when we came out of the rotunda the other four went to Salamis
+and fetched Leon, but I went quietly home.  For which I might have lost my
+life, had not the power of the Thirty shortly afterwards come to an end. 
+And many will witness to my words.
+
+Now do you really imagine that I could have survived all these years, if I
+had led a public life, supposing that like a good man I had always
+maintained the right and had made justice, as I ought, the first thing?  No
+indeed, men of Athens, neither I nor any other man.  But I have been always
+the same in all my actions, public as well as private, and never have I
+yielded any base compliance to those who are slanderously termed my
+disciples, or to any other.  Not that I have any regular disciples.  But if
+any one likes to come and hear me while I am pursuing my mission, whether
+he be young or old, he is not excluded.  Nor do I converse only with those
+who pay; but any one, whether he be rich or poor, may ask and answer me and
+listen to my words; and whether he turns out to be a bad man or a good one,
+neither result can be justly imputed to me; for I never taught or professed
+to teach him anything.  And if any one says that he has ever learned or
+heard anything from me in private which all the world has not heard, let me
+tell you that he is lying.
+
+But I shall be asked, Why do people delight in continually conversing with
+you?  I have told you already, Athenians, the whole truth about this
+matter:  they like to hear the cross-examination of the pretenders to
+wisdom; there is amusement in it.  Now this duty of cross-examining other
+men has been imposed upon me by God; and has been signified to me by
+oracles, visions, and in every way in which the will of divine power was
+ever intimated to any one.  This is true, O Athenians, or, if not true,
+would be soon refuted.  If I am or have been corrupting the youth, those of
+them who are now grown up and have become sensible that I gave them bad
+advice in the days of their youth should come forward as accusers, and take
+their revenge; or if they do not like to come themselves, some of their
+relatives, fathers, brothers, or other kinsmen, should say what evil their
+families have suffered at my hands.  Now is their time.  Many of them I see
+in the court.  There is Crito, who is of the same age and of the same deme
+with myself, and there is Critobulus his son, whom I also see.  Then again
+there is Lysanias of Sphettus, who is the father of Aeschines--he is
+present; and also there is Antiphon of Cephisus, who is the father of
+Epigenes; and there are the brothers of several who have associated with
+me.  There is Nicostratus the son of Theosdotides, and the brother of
+Theodotus (now Theodotus himself is dead, and therefore he, at any rate,
+will not seek to stop him); and there is Paralus the son of Demodocus, who
+had a brother Theages; and Adeimantus the son of Ariston, whose brother
+Plato is present; and Aeantodorus, who is the brother of Apollodorus, whom
+I also see.  I might mention a great many others, some of whom Meletus
+should have produced as witnesses in the course of his speech; and let him
+still produce them, if he has forgotten--I will make way for him.  And let
+him say, if he has any testimony of the sort which he can produce.  Nay,
+Athenians, the very opposite is the truth.  For all these are ready to
+witness on behalf of the corrupter, of the injurer of their kindred, as
+Meletus and Anytus call me; not the corrupted youth only--there might have
+been a motive for that--but their uncorrupted elder relatives.  Why should
+they too support me with their testimony?  Why, indeed, except for the sake
+of truth and justice, and because they know that I am speaking the truth,
+and that Meletus is a liar.
+
+Well, Athenians, this and the like of this is all the defence which I have
+to offer.  Yet a word more.  Perhaps there may be some one who is offended
+at me, when he calls to mind how he himself on a similar, or even a less
+serious occasion, prayed and entreated the judges with many tears, and how
+he produced his children in court, which was a moving spectacle, together
+with a host of relations and friends; whereas I, who am probably in danger
+of my life, will do none of these things.  The contrast may occur to his
+mind, and he may be set against me, and vote in anger because he is
+displeased at me on this account.  Now if there be such a person among
+you,--mind, I do not say that there is,--to him I may fairly reply:  My
+friend, I am a man, and like other men, a creature of flesh and blood, and
+not 'of wood or stone,' as Homer says; and I have a family, yes, and sons,
+O Athenians, three in number, one almost a man, and two others who are
+still young; and yet I will not bring any of them hither in order to
+petition you for an acquittal.  And why not?  Not from any self-assertion
+or want of respect for you.  Whether I am or am not afraid of death is
+another question, of which I will not now speak.  But, having regard to
+public opinion, I feel that such conduct would be discreditable to myself,
+and to you, and to the whole state.  One who has reached my years, and who
+has a name for wisdom, ought not to demean himself.  Whether this opinion
+of me be deserved or not, at any rate the world has decided that Socrates
+is in some way superior to other men.  And if those among you who are said
+to be superior in wisdom and courage, and any other virtue, demean
+themselves in this way, how shameful is their conduct!  I have seen men of
+reputation, when they have been condemned, behaving in the strangest
+manner:  they seemed to fancy that they were going to suffer something
+dreadful if they died, and that they could be immortal if you only allowed
+them to live; and I think that such are a dishonour to the state, and that
+any stranger coming in would have said of them that the most eminent men of
+Athens, to whom the Athenians themselves give honour and command, are no
+better than women.  And I say that these things ought not to be done by
+those of us who have a reputation; and if they are done, you ought not to
+permit them; you ought rather to show that you are far more disposed to
+condemn the man who gets up a doleful scene and makes the city ridiculous,
+than him who holds his peace.
+
+But, setting aside the question of public opinion, there seems to be
+something wrong in asking a favour of a judge, and thus procuring an
+acquittal, instead of informing and convincing him.  For his duty is, not
+to make a present of justice, but to give judgment; and he has sworn that
+he will judge according to the laws, and not according to his own good
+pleasure; and we ought not to encourage you, nor should you allow
+yourselves to be encouraged, in this habit of perjury--there can be no
+piety in that.  Do not then require me to do what I consider dishonourable
+and impious and wrong, especially now, when I am being tried for impiety on
+the indictment of Meletus.  For if, O men of Athens, by force of persuasion
+and entreaty I could overpower your oaths, then I should be teaching you to
+believe that there are no gods, and in defending should simply convict
+myself of the charge of not believing in them.  But that is not so--far
+otherwise.  For I do believe that there are gods, and in a sense higher
+than that in which any of my accusers believe in them.  And to you and to
+God I commit my cause, to be determined by you as is best for you and me.
+
+...
+
+There are many reasons why I am not grieved, O men of Athens, at the vote
+of condemnation.  I expected it, and am only surprised that the votes are
+so nearly equal; for I had thought that the majority against me would have
+been far larger; but now, had thirty votes gone over to the other side, I
+should have been acquitted.  And I may say, I think, that I have escaped
+Meletus.  I may say more; for without the assistance of Anytus and Lycon,
+any one may see that he would not have had a fifth part of the votes, as
+the law requires, in which case he would have incurred a fine of a thousand
+drachmae.
+
+And so he proposes death as the penalty.  And what shall I propose on my
+part, O men of Athens?  Clearly that which is my due.  And what is my due?
+What return shall be made to the man who has never had the wit to be idle
+during his whole life; but has been careless of what the many care for--
+wealth, and family interests, and military offices, and speaking in the
+assembly, and magistracies, and plots, and parties.  Reflecting that I was
+really too honest a man to be a politician and live, I did not go where I
+could do no good to you or to myself; but where I could do the greatest
+good privately to every one of you, thither I went, and sought to persuade
+every man among you that he must look to himself, and seek virtue and
+wisdom before he looks to his private interests, and look to the state
+before he looks to the interests of the state; and that this should be the
+order which he observes in all his actions.  What shall be done to such an
+one?  Doubtless some good thing, O men of Athens, if he has his reward; and
+the good should be of a kind suitable to him.  What would be a reward
+suitable to a poor man who is your benefactor, and who desires leisure that
+he may instruct you?  There can be no reward so fitting as maintenance in
+the Prytaneum, O men of Athens, a reward which he deserves far more than
+the citizen who has won the prize at Olympia in the horse or chariot race,
+whether the chariots were drawn by two horses or by many.  For I am in
+want, and he has enough; and he only gives you the appearance of happiness,
+and I give you the reality.  And if I am to estimate the penalty fairly, I
+should say that maintenance in the Prytaneum is the just return.
+
+Perhaps you think that I am braving you in what I am saying now, as in what
+I said before about the tears and prayers.  But this is not so.  I speak
+rather because I am convinced that I never intentionally wronged any one,
+although I cannot convince you--the time has been too short; if there were
+a law at Athens, as there is in other cities, that a capital cause should
+not be decided in one day, then I believe that I should have convinced you.
+But I cannot in a moment refute great slanders; and, as I am convinced that
+I never wronged another, I will assuredly not wrong myself.  I will not say
+of myself that I deserve any evil, or propose any penalty.  Why should I?
+because I am afraid of the penalty of death which Meletus proposes?  When I
+do not know whether death is a good or an evil, why should I propose a
+penalty which would certainly be an evil?  Shall I say imprisonment?  And
+why should I live in prison, and be the slave of the magistrates of the
+year--of the Eleven?  Or shall the penalty be a fine, and imprisonment
+until the fine is paid?  There is the same objection.  I should have to lie
+in prison, for money I have none, and cannot pay.  And if I say exile (and
+this may possibly be the penalty which you will affix), I must indeed be
+blinded by the love of life, if I am so irrational as to expect that when
+you, who are my own citizens, cannot endure my discourses and words, and
+have found them so grievous and odious that you will have no more of them,
+others are likely to endure me.  No indeed, men of Athens, that is not very
+likely.  And what a life should I lead, at my age, wandering from city to
+city, ever changing my place of exile, and always being driven out!  For I
+am quite sure that wherever I go, there, as here, the young men will flock
+to me; and if I drive them away, their elders will drive me out at their
+request; and if I let them come, their fathers and friends will drive me
+out for their sakes.
+
+Some one will say:  Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and
+then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? 
+Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. 
+For if I tell you that to do as you say would be a disobedience to the God,
+and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am
+serious; and if I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of
+those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is
+the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living,
+you are still less likely to believe me.  Yet I say what is true, although
+a thing of which it is hard for me to persuade you.  Also, I have never
+been accustomed to think that I deserve to suffer any harm.  Had I money I
+might have estimated the offence at what I was able to pay, and not have
+been much the worse.  But I have none, and therefore I must ask you to
+proportion the fine to my means.  Well, perhaps I could afford a mina, and
+therefore I propose that penalty:  Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and
+Apollodorus, my friends here, bid me say thirty minae, and they will be the
+sureties.  Let thirty minae be the penalty; for which sum they will be
+ample security to you.
+
+...
+
+Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name
+which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that you
+killed Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise, even although I am
+not wise, when they want to reproach you.  If you had waited a little
+while, your desire would have been fulfilled in the course of nature.  For
+I am far advanced in years, as you may perceive, and not far from death.  I
+am speaking now not to all of you, but only to those who have condemned me
+to death.  And I have another thing to say to them:  you think that I was
+convicted because I had no words of the sort which would have procured my
+acquittal--I mean, if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone or unsaid.
+Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words--
+certainly not.  But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to
+address you as you would have liked me to do, weeping and wailing and
+lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed
+to hear from others, and which, as I maintain, are unworthy of me.  I
+thought at the time that I ought not to do anything common or mean when in
+danger:  nor do I now repent of the style of my defence; I would rather die
+having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.  For
+neither in war nor yet at law ought I or any man to use every way of
+escaping death.  Often in battle there can be no doubt that if a man will
+throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may
+escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death,
+if a man is willing to say and do anything.  The difficulty, my friends, is
+not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than
+death.  I am old and move slowly, and the slower runner has overtaken me,
+and my accusers are keen and quick, and the faster runner, who is
+unrighteousness, has overtaken them.  And now I depart hence condemned by
+you to suffer the penalty of death,--they too go their ways condemned by
+the truth to suffer the penalty of villainy and wrong; and I must abide by
+my award--let them abide by theirs.  I suppose that these things may be
+regarded as fated,--and I think that they are well.
+
+And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I
+am about to die, and in the hour of death men are gifted with prophetic
+power.  And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after
+my departure punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will
+surely await you.  Me you have killed because you wanted to escape the
+accuser, and not to give an account of your lives.  But that will not be as
+you suppose:  far otherwise.  For I say that there will be more accusers of
+you than there are now; accusers whom hitherto I have restrained:  and as
+they are younger they will be more inconsiderate with you, and you will be
+more offended at them.  If you think that by killing men you can prevent
+some one from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a
+way of escape which is either possible or honourable; the easiest and the
+noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves. 
+This is the prophecy which I utter before my departure to the judges who
+have condemned me.
+
+Friends, who would have acquitted me, I would like also to talk with you
+about the thing which has come to pass, while the magistrates are busy, and
+before I go to the place at which I must die.  Stay then a little, for we
+may as well talk with one another while there is time.  You are my friends,
+and I should like to show you the meaning of this event which has happened
+to me.  O my judges--for you I may truly call judges--I should like to tell
+you of a wonderful circumstance.  Hitherto the divine faculty of which the
+internal oracle is the source has constantly been in the habit of opposing
+me even about trifles, if I was going to make a slip or error in any
+matter; and now as you see there has come upon me that which may be
+thought, and is generally believed to be, the last and worst evil.  But the
+oracle made no sign of opposition, either when I was leaving my house in
+the morning, or when I was on my way to the court, or while I was speaking,
+at anything which I was going to say; and yet I have often been stopped in
+the middle of a speech, but now in nothing I either said or did touching
+the matter in hand has the oracle opposed me.  What do I take to be the
+explanation of this silence?  I will tell you.  It is an intimation that
+what has happened to me is a good, and that those of us who think that
+death is an evil are in error.  For the customary sign would surely have
+opposed me had I been going to evil and not to good.
+
+Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason
+to hope that death is a good; for one of two things--either death is a
+state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a
+change and migration of the soul from this world to another.  Now if you
+suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him
+who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain.  For
+if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed
+even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of
+his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed
+in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think
+that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will
+not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.  Now if
+death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then
+only a single night.  But if death is the journey to another place, and
+there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges,
+can be greater than this?  If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world
+below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and
+finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and
+Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were
+righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making.  What
+would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and
+Hesiod and Homer?  Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.  I
+myself, too, shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and
+conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other
+ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there
+will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with
+theirs.  Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true
+and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next; and I shall
+find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not.  What would
+not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great
+Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and
+women too!  What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them
+and asking them questions!  In another world they do not put a man to death
+for asking questions:  assuredly not.  For besides being happier than we
+are, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.
+
+Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty,
+that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.  He
+and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own approaching end
+happened by mere chance.  But I see clearly that the time had arrived when
+it was better for me to die and be released from trouble; wherefore the
+oracle gave no sign.  For which reason, also, I am not angry with my
+condemners, or with my accusers; they have done me no harm, although they
+did not mean to do me any good; and for this I may gently blame them.
+
+Still I have a favour to ask of them.  When my sons are grown up, I would
+ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them,
+as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything,
+more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are
+really nothing,--then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring
+about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are
+something when they are really nothing.  And if you do this, both I and my
+sons will have received justice at your hands.
+
+The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways--I to die, and you to
+live.  Which is better God only knows.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Apology, by Plato
+
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