In 399 BCE an Athenian named Socrates, more than seventy years old, stood in a law court to answer two charges that could cost him his life: that he did not believe in the gods the city believed in and brought in strange new divinities of his own, and that he corrupted the young. He had never written a book, never given a lecture for money, never held an office worth the name. He had spent decades doing one strange thing: stopping people in the marketplace and asking them what they meant by the big words everyone used, justice, courage, piety, and taking their confident answers apart. Enough of Athens had come to find this intolerable that three citizens brought him to trial. He was convicted, and he was sentenced to drink poison. The speech he gave in his own defense, as his pupil Plato later wrote it down, is the Apology, the founding text of the idea that philosophy is a way of living one might die for rather than abandon.
Two facts shape every sentence of this work. The first is the title. "Apology" is a slightly misleading coat of English paint over the Greek apologia, which simply means a defense: a defense speech, the kind a man on trial gives. It carries none of the modern sense of saying sorry. Socrates is not contrite; he is defiant from the first word to the last, and at one point he proposes that the city, instead of punishing him, ought to reward him with free meals for life. The second fact is harder. We do not have Socrates' real courtroom words and never will. Socrates wrote nothing; the speech survives only because Plato composed a version of it some years after the trial. Plato was there in the room, the text names him present, but he is writing a crafted work of literature, not a transcript, and we know it is not verbatim because another follower, Xenophon, wrote a different defense of Socrates that doesn't match. So everything here is "the speech Plato gives Socrates," not a recording. That seam stays visible throughout.
The break
An Athenian courtroom speech was a craft of persuasion, and everyone knew the moves. A defendant hired a professional speechwriter, flattered the large citizen jury, wept, brought his small children up front to soften them, and said whatever it took to win the vote. The goal of a defense was a single thing: acquittal, by any rhetorical means available, and a defendant facing a capital charge was expected to beg for his life. That was not thought shameful. It was thought normal.
Plato's Socrates inverts the entire genre. He opens by disclaiming oratory altogether, promising to speak plainly in the everyday language he uses in the marketplace rather than in a polished set speech. He refuses to flatter the jury, refuses to weep, refuses to bring his three sons forward to win pity. After he is convicted, when the rules of the trial let him propose his own punishment as a counter to the prosecution's demand for death, he refuses even to propose a real penalty, half-joking that what he truly deserves is the public dinner-honor the city gives its Olympic champions. He treats the whole proceeding not as a contest to survive but as the last and largest instance of his life's work: cross-examining the city about what it only thinks it knows. The speech turns a defense into a demonstration: that the examined life, the life of relentless questioning, is the only life worth living, and that the one thing a person should fear is not death but acting unjustly.
That is the break to hold. The Apology is the first text to make a man's death the proof of his philosophy. Socrates uses the machinery of an Athenian capital trial to argue, calmly, that an unexamined life is not worth living and that a good man cannot really be harmed by his enemies, and then accepts execution rather than contradict either claim. Earlier thinkers had taught how to live; this is the work where the teacher dies for the lesson on purpose, in public, and makes the dying part of the argument.
Chapter 1
A plain man, and a defense that won't apologize
"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."
The speech opens with a complaint about the prosecution's eloquence. Socrates says his accusers spoke so persuasively that they nearly made him forget who he was, and yet, he adds, they had "hardly uttered a word of truth." The one true thing they said, he goes on, was a warning to the jury: don't be taken in by Socrates, because he is a clever speaker. At this he protests. He is no orator at all. He will use no "set oration duly ornamented with words and phrases," but will say whatever occurs to him at the moment, in the same plain words he uses in the agora and at the tables of the money-changers. The agora was the marketplace and open public square at the heart of an Athenian city, where citizens gathered, argued, shopped, and tried their cases; the money-changers were the bankers who set up shop there. He is over seventy and has never once been in a courtroom, so the formal language of the law is foreign to him, and he asks to be heard as a stranger to the place would be.
The speech depends on a move it never quite admits. A trained speaker disclaiming all skill at speaking is itself one of the oldest tricks in oratory: the plain-man pose, which flatters the audience and disarms them by pretending there is nothing to disarm. Plato knows this; he has built a Socrates who is a devastating arguer precisely while insisting he can't argue. The reader is being asked to trust a man on the grounds that he is too honest to persuade, by a writer using every resource of persuasion to win that trust. The Apology is at once a sincere portrait of a man who really did speak plainly and a piece of literary advocacy for his memory. Both are true at the same time.
Socrates is in a dikastērion (dih-kas-TAIR-ee-on), an Athenian law court, and the same Greek word names the body he is addressing: the panel of citizen-jurors who would both decide guilt and, in a capital case, fix the penalty. There was no judge in our sense and no professional lawyers; ordinary citizens, chosen by lot, sat in large numbers and voted. By the usual scholarly reckoning the panel here was around five hundred men (the conventional figure is 500 or 501). The speech itself never states the number, that round figure is a modern convention, not something Socrates says, but the text does tell us the verdict was close, which is the detail that matters. He addresses these men throughout as "men of Athens" and "O Athenians," and the whole speech is pitched at them as a crowd to be reasoned with, not flattered.
The Greek title is Apologia (ah-poh-loh-GEE-ah), and it means "defense": specifically a defense speech, a legal term for what a man says to answer a charge. It does not mean an apology in our sense. Socrates is not sorry, does not become sorry, and apologizes for nothing across the entire work. He defends his life as having been exactly right and refuses to take back a word of it. The single most common misunderstanding of this text is built into mishearing its name: people expect a man humbled, asking forgiveness, and what they get is a man on trial for his life who tells the jury, more or less, that he has done them a great favor and they should be grateful. The defense is unrepentant from end to end, and the title is a legal label, not a confession.
Chapter 2
The old slander, and the men who finally brought the charge
"For of old I have had many accusers, who have accused me falsely to you during many years... But far more dangerous are the others, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods."
Socrates splits his accusers in two, and insists the dangerous ones are not the men who actually filed the charge. There is an old set of accusers, a diffuse, years-deep slander that has "accused me falsely to you during many years," and these he fears more than the three named prosecutors standing against him today. The old accusers are worse, he says, for a precise reason: they "began when you were children," planting their version of him in the jurors' minds before any of them could judge it, and they have no face and no name, so he cannot put them on the stand and question them. He has to "fight with shadows." A man can be cross-examined; a rumor that the whole city absorbed in childhood cannot.
The rumor has a definite shape. It says there is "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 caricature is two accusations welded into one. The first half, speculating about the heavens and searching the earth, paints Socrates as a natural philosopher, one of the thinkers who tried to explain the sun, stars, and the makeup of the physical world by natural causes rather than by the gods, the kind of inquiry that made ordinary Athenians suspect a man of not believing in the gods at all. The second half, making "the worse appear the better cause," paints him as a sophist, one of the traveling professional teachers who took fees to train young men in clever argument and the art of winning any case, fairly or not. Socrates is being remembered as both: an impious sky-gazer (a man who dishonors the city's gods) and a paid trickster of words.
He names where the picture came from. "It is just what you have yourselves seen in the comedy of Aristophanes," he tells the jury, Aristophanes being the great comic playwright of Athens, whose play the Clouds (staged in 423 BCE, a quarter-century before this trial) put a character named Socrates on stage "going about and saying that he walks in air, and talking a deal of nonsense." A comedy had built a clownish version of him for laughs, and that version had hardened over twenty-five years into something the city half-believed. Socrates denies both halves of it flatly. He has nothing to do with natural philosophy; he does not pretend to know "either much or little" about what is under the earth or in the heavens. And he is no paid teacher: the report that he takes money for instruction, he says, "has no more truth in it than the other." He names the real sophists to make the contrast: "Gorgias of Leontium, and Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis" (Gorgias, GOR-jee-as; Prodicus, PRAH-dih-kus; Hippias, HIP-ee-as), famous teachers who "go the round of the cities" charging fees, and a certain "Evenus the Parian" (eh-VEE-nus) whose price is "five minae" (a mina was a substantial sum of silver; five of them was real money for a course of instruction). Socrates charges nothing and teaches no set doctrine. He only asks questions.
Only now does he turn to the men who actually brought him to court. There are three. "My three accusers, Meletus and Anytus and Lycon, have set upon me." Each, in Socrates' telling, represents an injured group. Meletus (meh-LEE-tus) comes "on behalf of the poets." He is the nominal lead prosecutor, the one whose name is on the charge, and the one Socrates will shortly cross-examine; the text presents him as young and reckless. Anytus (AN-ih-tus) comes "on behalf of the craftsmen and politicians," and he is the dangerous one: a prominent and powerful democratic politician, the weight behind the prosecution and, as the speech later makes clear, the one pushing hardest for death. Lycon (LY-kon) comes "on behalf of the rhetoricians," the professional speechmakers (men who wrote and delivered courtroom and public speeches for hire, a trade close to the sophists' but aimed at the law courts rather than the lecture hall). Three men, three sets of resentments, one indictment. But Socrates has just told the jury that these three are not really why he is here. They are the visible tip of the old slander, the moment a quarter-century of rumor finally found a legal form.
Chapter 3
The oracle at Delphi, and a wisdom that knows it knows nothing
"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."
If Socrates is neither a sky-philosopher nor a paid sophist, where did the reputation for wisdom come from? He answers with a story, and offers a witness for it he calls "worthy of credit": the god of Delphi himself. Delphi was the most famous oracle in the Greek world, a sanctuary of Apollo where a priestess, the Pythia (PITH-ee-ah, the "Pythian prophetess"), delivered the god's answers to questions put to her, and her pronouncements were treated across Greece as carrying divine authority. Socrates had an old friend, an impetuous man named Chaerephon (KAIR-eh-fon), who once went to Delphi and "boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether anyone was wiser than" Socrates. The Pythia answered "that there was no man wiser." Chaerephon is dead by the time of the trial, Socrates notes, but his brother is in the courtroom and will confirm the story.
Socrates reads the oracle's answer with great precision. The Pythia did not say "Socrates is the wisest man." She said, in the negative, that no man is wiser than he is, which is a riddle, not a compliment. And Socrates says he was genuinely baffled by it, because, in his own estimate, "I know that I have no wisdom, small or great." He did not take the god's word as flattery to be enjoyed. He took it as a puzzle to be solved, even refuted: surely, he thought, he could find some man who was plainly wiser, and so prove the oracle wrong, or at least force it to mean something he could understand. So he set out, deliberately, to test the god by cross-examining the people in Athens with the biggest reputations for wisdom.
He went, he says, in three waves, and found the same thing each time. He went first to the politicians, the men everyone (including themselves) believed to be wise. He questioned one of the most reputed, and concluded the man only seemed wise without being so; and when Socrates gently showed him this, the man hated him for it, as did the bystanders. He went next to the poets, expecting that the makers of such beautiful and famous work must understand it deeply, and found that they wrote their finest things "not by wisdom... but by a sort of genius and inspiration," the way prophets and seers say profound things without being able to explain them, and yet believed their gift for poetry made them wise about everything else, which it did not. He went last to the artisans, the skilled craftsmen, and here, he admits, was a real difference: they genuinely did know their crafts, things Socrates himself did not know, so on that score they were wiser than he was. But the same flaw undid them: "because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters," mistaking skill at one thing for understanding of everything.
The conclusion the whole argument builds toward is far subtler than the slogan it usually gets compressed into. Each "wise" man, Socrates found, did not actually know the great things he claimed to know; worse, he did not know that he didn't, and went on confidently thinking he did. Socrates was different on exactly one count. Comparing himself to such a man, he says: "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." That is the famous Socratic wisdom, stated precisely. It is often shrunk to the tag "I know that I know nothing," but that compression is not what Socrates says, and it gets him wrong. He does not claim to know that he knows nothing, which would itself be a bold claim to knowledge. He claims only the more modest and more exact thing: that, unlike the men who know nothing and think they know, he does not pretend to a knowledge he lacks. The wisdom is in not over-claiming, not in some paradoxical certainty of total ignorance.
So what did the god mean? Socrates' final reading is that the oracle was not really talking about him at all. "God only is wise," he decides, "and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing." The god was "only using my name by way of illustration," as if to say that the wisest human being is the one who, "like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing." That is the meaning he settles on, and it is also where his troubles came from. He took the oracle as a command to keep testing every reputation for wisdom in the city, a god-given mission he could not put down. Each exposure made a fresh enemy. And because the mission left him no time for ordinary money-making, it left him, in his own words, in deep poverty. The reputation, the resentment, and the eventual indictment all grew from this one errand for the god.
Chapter 4
Cross-examining Meletus
"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."
Having dealt with the old slander, Socrates turns to the formal indictment and reads it into the record: "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." Two charges. The first is corrupting the young (making the city's youth worse rather than better). The second is impiety, which in Athens was a real crime: failing to honor the gods the city officially recognized, and here compounded by the odd extra claim that Socrates was importing "new divinities of his own." These are serious; impiety could be a capital matter, because the Greeks held that a city which tolerated offense to its gods invited their anger on everyone. And then Socrates does the one thing the rest of the work otherwise never does: he stops giving a speech and starts asking questions. He calls Meletus up and cross-examines him directly, the only stretch of back-and-forth dialogue in the whole Apology, and it is a small clinic in his method: corner a man into a confident claim, then ask follow-ups until the claim falls apart.
On the charge of corrupting the young, he traps Meletus with an analogy about horses. Pressed on who improves the youth if Socrates corrupts them, Meletus is maneuvered into saying that everyone in Athens improves them (the laws, the jurors, the audience in the assembly, the whole citizenry) and that Socrates alone corrupts them. Socrates springs the comparison: "How about horses? Does one man do them harm and all the world good?" Plainly not. With horses it is the opposite: one person, "the trainer of horses," knows how to make them better, and the crowd of people who merely handle them tend to do them harm. Expertise, in other words, lives in the skilled few, not in the unskilled many. So Meletus has it exactly backwards: he is claiming that with the young, uniquely, every untrained person improves them and only the one man corrupts. Which, Socrates says, shows that Meletus has never given a moment's serious thought to the youth he claims to be protecting. He adds a second twist: nobody knowingly makes the people around him worse, since bad neighbors are dangerous to live beside, so if Socrates really were corrupting anyone it could only be unintentional, and the cure for an honest mistake is private correction, a quiet word, not a public trial for a capital crime.
On the charge of impiety he springs the cleaner trap, by getting Meletus to contradict the indictment itself. Pushed to say what exactly he means, Meletus overreaches and accuses Socrates of being a complete atheist, one who believes in no gods whatsoever, holding instead that "the sun is stone, and the moon earth." Socrates points out that this is not even his own view but the doctrine of Anaxagoras (an-ax-AG-or-as), an earlier natural philosopher whose books anyone could buy cheaply in the marketplace; Meletus has confused him with somebody else. But the deeper problem is that Meletus has now wrecked his own charge. The indictment accused Socrates of believing in "new divinities," strange spiritual and divine agencies. Yet no one can believe in divine agencies, Socrates argues, without believing in divine beings, spirits or demigods, and spirits are either gods or the sons of gods. So the very same indictment now says, in one breath, that Socrates believes in no gods at all and that he believes in divine beings of his own. It contradicts itself. Meletus has charged him with atheism and with importing gods simultaneously, which cannot both be true, and the prosecution's own paper undoes the prosecution.
The cross-examination sits at the center of the work because it is the thing Socrates was actually accused of doing, performed live in front of the jury: taking a confident man's claim and showing, by patient questioning, that he had never really thought it through. This is exactly the activity that made his enemies, exposing the gap between what people assert and what they can defend, and he is doing it, unrepentant, to one of the men trying to kill him, in the courtroom, as his defense. The method is the man, and the trial does not change the method one bit.
Chapter 5
The gadfly, the inner sign, and a life that won't beg
"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."
Here the defense stops being narrow and becomes a defense of an entire way of life. Suppose, Socrates says, someone asks whether he is not ashamed of a life that has now brought him to the edge of execution. His answer is the example of Achilles, the hero of Homer's Iliad, who was warned he would die soon after killing Hector and chose to do it anyway rather than live with the dishonor of holding back. A man worth anything, Socrates says, "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." He has done this before, under fire: he names three battles where he was a soldier and held the position his commanders assigned him, at the risk of his life. He will not now desert the position the god assigned him (the examined life, the questioning) out of mere fear of death. And to fear death, he adds, is itself a kind of false wisdom, "the conceit that a man knows what he does not know," because no one actually knows whether death is an evil at all; people dread it as the worst of things while having no idea what it is.
Then he makes the claim that hardened the room against him. Suppose, he says, the jury offered to let him go free on one condition: that he stop philosophizing, stop questioning people, and fall silent for the rest of his days. He would refuse. "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." He would rather die doing the thing he believes the god set him to do than buy his life by abandoning it. This is the spine of the whole speech: the trial offers him survival at the price of his life's meaning, and he names that price too high, openly, to the faces of the men who set it.
He reframes himself, then, not as the city's enemy but as its gift, and gives the image that became the most famous in the work. Athens, he says, is "a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size," a big, valuable horse grown slow and drowsy, and Socrates is the gadfly (the stinging fly), "given to the state by God," set on the horse to keep it awake. "All day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you." Swat the fly, he warns, and the horse will simply go back to sleep: kill Socrates and "you will sleep on for the remainder of your lives," because the city is unlikely to find another like him. He insists, too, that killing him would hurt the city more than it hurts him: "a bad man is not permitted to injure a better than himself," a claim that sounds outrageous until it is read as following from everything before: if the only real harm is to one's own soul through doing wrong, then the man who unjustly executes is the one truly damaged, not the man unjustly killed. His poverty, again, is offered as the proof the mission was genuine: a paid teacher takes fees, and Socrates, who took none and is destitute, was clearly not in it for himself.
Why, then, did he never take his message into politics, where it might have done the city the most good? Here he introduces the strangest and most personal element of the defense: his daimonion (die-MOH-nee-on), a private divine sign. Since childhood, he says, "a kind of voice," "an oracle or sign," has come to him, and its one defining feature is an asymmetry worth getting exactly right. "It always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do." The sign only ever stops him. It never tells him to act, never advises a course, never points him toward the good; it only vetoes, holding him back when he is about to do something. It is not a guardian angel and not a conscience whispering what is right; it is purely a brake, never a steering wheel. And this sign, he says, is what kept him out of public life. It deterred him from becoming a politician, and rightly so, because an honest man who openly fights the injustices of a city like Athens, he says, "will not save his life." The only way to survive while fighting public wrong is to do it privately, one person at a time, which is exactly what he did.
He offers two pieces of evidence that he means it: two times he defied unjust orders at real risk of death, one under each kind of government Athens had. The first was under the democracy. After a naval battle at Arginusae (ar-jih-NOO-see, in 406 BCE), Athens put its own victorious generals on trial for failing to recover the bodies of the dead after the fight. The Athenians held that leaving the war-dead unburied was a grave religious offense, so grief and fury turned on the generals, and the assembly wanted to try them all together in a single illegal vote. Socrates happened to be the councillor presiding over the assembly that day, the one man whose job was to decide what could be put to a vote, and he alone refused to allow the illegal mass trial, defying the shouting crowd. The second was under the oligarchy of the Thirty (oligarchy meaning rule by a small clique rather than by the whole citizen body), a junta of thirty men installed after Athens lost the long Peloponnesian War to Sparta in 404 BCE, who for about a year ruled by execution and confiscation, killing and robbing citizens at will. They ordered Socrates and four others to arrest a man named Leon of Salamis so they could put him to death and seize his property. The other four went and fetched Leon; Socrates simply "went quietly home" rather than take part in a judicial murder, and, he says, would have died for it had the Thirty not soon fallen from power. The symmetry is the point: he defied a democratic mob and an oligarchic tyranny alike, because in both cases he was being told to do something unjust, and that, not the form of government, was what he refused.
Finally, he refuses the standard theatrics. Other defendants, he notes, weep, plead, and parade their children before the jury to win pity, and he has three sons of his own. He will not bring them in. To do so would be undignified, and worse, it would be unjust: a juror has sworn an oath to judge by the law, not to "make a present of justice" to whoever cries hardest, and a defendant who begs is asking the jury to break that oath. He will not ask it. He commits his cause, he says, "to you and to God," and lets the jury decide. They find him guilty. By the usual scholarly reckoning the margin was narrow, and Socrates himself tells us only that it was close, saying later that a shift of thirty votes would have acquitted him. The often-cited specific tallies are modern reconstructions from that clue, not numbers the text gives.
Chapter 6
Convicted: a counter-penalty that asks to be honored
"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."
An Athenian capital trial had a second stage. Once a defendant was found guilty, the prosecution proposed a penalty and the defendant proposed a counter-penalty, and the jury chose between the two; there was no third option, no splitting the difference. Meletus had proposed death. The expected move, the only sane one, was for Socrates to counter with something heavy enough to look like real punishment (a steep fine, exile) so that the jury, choosing between death and a serious penalty, might spare him. Socrates does almost the opposite. He asks what a man like him actually deserves.
And the answer he gives is a provocation. What does a poor man deserve who has spent his life as the city's unpaid benefactor, neglecting his own affairs and his own wealth to go around rousing each Athenian to care about virtue? "There can be no reward so fitting as maintenance in the Prytaneum." The Prytaneum (prit-uh-NEE-um) was the civic hearth of an Athenian city, a public building where the state fed its greatest benefactors and its Olympic victors at public expense, free meals for life, one of the highest honors the city could bestow. Socrates says he deserves it "far more than the citizen who has won the prize at Olympia in the horse or chariot race," because the athlete only seems to make the city happy while Socrates actually does. He is, in other words, proposing that instead of punishing him the city should honor him with one of its rarest public rewards. This is not contrition; it is the defiance of the whole work carried into the sentencing, the man told to name his punishment instead naming his prize.
He does, finally, get realistic enough to name actual penalties, only to reject each in turn. Imprisonment? That would just make him a slave to whichever magistrates ran the jail. A fine he cannot pay? He is too poor. Exile, leaving Athens to wander? He sees exactly how that would go: driven from one city to the next, an old man whose questioning would get him expelled wherever he landed, because he cannot and will not stop. And he cannot promise to stop, because "the unexamined life is not worth living." To go on living while keeping silent, refusing to examine himself and others, would be to keep the part of life that he thinks makes it worth having. So exile-with-silence is no escape; it is the death of the only life he values, on the installment plan.
He ends by proposing a token: a fine of one mina, a small sum, a near-insulting counter to a death sentence. The jury must choose one of the two proposals outright, with no splitting the difference, so offering a trivial fine against a demand for death is very close to choosing death himself. At this his friends intervene. The text names them: "Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, my friends here, bid me say thirty minæ, and they will be the sureties." They raise the offer thirty-fold and pledge to stand surety for it themselves, putting up a real fine in his place. Plato's name is first on that list: the author of the Apology has written himself into the courtroom, by name, as one of the friends trying to save Socrates' life, a quiet reminder, inside the text, that the man composing this defense was actually there. But thirty minae against a demand for death is still, to the jury, an offer that fails to take the proceeding seriously. The counter-penalty is not a plea. It is one more refusal to grovel, and the jury answers it with death.
Chapter 7
Sentenced: what he says to the men who killed him
"the difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death."
Sentenced to die, Socrates is allowed to speak one last time, and he divides his closing in two: first to the majority who voted to condemn him, then to the minority who would have let him go. To those who condemned him he is unsparing. They have gained very little, he says, and lost a great deal: "they will say that you killed Socrates, a wise man," for his enemies will call him wise precisely when they want to reproach Athens for the killing, whether or not he really was. He was convicted, he insists, not for any lack of clever words but for his refusal to say the grovelling things a jury wants to hear. And here he draws the moral that crowns the whole speech. The hard thing, he tells them, is not staying alive: "the difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death." He is old and slow, and the slow runner (death) has caught him; but his accusers, quick and clever, have been caught by the faster runner still, which is wrongdoing. They escaped nothing by winning. He prophesies, too, that killing him will not silence the questioning of Athens but multiply it: harsher critics, whom he had until now held back, will rise against the city once he is gone.
Then he turns to the others, the jurors who voted to acquit, whom alone, pointedly, he is willing to call "judges," since they judged rightly. To them he offers not a warning but a strange and serene consolation about death, and it rests on his daimonion, the forbidding inner sign. All day, he tells them, through the whole trial, the sign gave him no opposition at all: not when he left his house that morning, not on his way to the court, not at any point while he was speaking. And given that the sign always stops him when he is about to go wrong, its total silence today must mean that what is happening to him is not an evil. "It is an intimation that what has happened to me is a good." The sign that only ever forbids has, by not forbidding, given its verdict: dying, here and now, is no harm to him.
He spells out why, with a piece of reasoning he plainly finds comforting. Death, he says, must be one of two things, and either of them is good. Either it is "a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness," in which case it is like a dreamless sleep, and he points out, in a wonderful aside, that a single night of sleep so deep it holds no dreams is better than most of the days and nights of a whole life; if death is an eternity of that, it is "an unspeakable gain." Or else death is what people say it is: "a change and migration of the soul from this world to another," a journey to wherever the dead have gone. And if that is true, Socrates says, it is wonderful past reckoning, for then he could meet and talk with the great dead, "converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer," the legendary poets and singers of Greek tradition (Musaeus, mew-SEE-us, a mythical singer paired with Orpheus in that tradition), and would gladly "die again and again" for the chance. Best of all, he could go on doing the one thing he loves: examining people, testing the famous heroes of the past to see who really has wisdom and who only thinks he does. "In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions." The activity that got him executed in Athens would, in the land of the dead, be safe and endless.
There is no anger in it, and that is the deliberate effect. He bears his accusers no grudge, he says; he asks of the jury only one thing: that when his sons grow up, the men of Athens should trouble them exactly as he troubled the city, rebuking them if they ever come to value money or reputation above being good. And then the last sentence of the work, which is also the last thing Plato gives him to say: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows." He goes to his death with the calm of a man who has just argued, and believes, that there is nothing here to fear, and with one final, unanswered question hanging over the whole courtroom, the same kind of question he had been asking all his life.
Chapter 8
What the speech leaves us, and what it can't be
"The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."
Step back from the courtroom and the shape of the thing comes clear. The Apology is not a dialogue and not a treatise; it is a courtroom speech in three movements, mirroring the three stages of an Athenian capital trial. First the defense proper: the plain-speaker pose, the old slander answered before the new charge, the oracle story, the cross-examination of Meletus, the gadfly, the inner sign, the refusal to beg. Then, after the guilty verdict, the counter-penalty, not a plea but the demand for free meals at the Prytaneum, settling for a fine. Then, after the death sentence, the closing addresses: the rebuke to those who condemned him, the consolation to those who would have spared him, the serene speculation on death. Across all three, the defendant never once does the thing a defendant is supposed to do. He never tries, by any means that would compromise him, to save his life.
The reason that matters is the work's central claim, made not in the abstract but with the speaker's own life on the table. Two things Socrates argues, and then refuses to take back even at the cost of dying: that the unexamined life is not worth living, and that a good man cannot really be harmed, because the only genuine harm a person can suffer is to become unjust, which no enemy can inflict from outside, only the self can do to the self. If those two claims are true, then his execution is no disaster: he keeps the examined life to his last breath, and his accusers, by doing him an injustice, harm only themselves. The whole speech is an argument for those propositions, and the acceptance of the hemlock is the argument's final and unanswerable step. That is what makes the Apology the founding image of philosophy as a way of life, the first text in which a thinker's death becomes the proof of his thought, on purpose, in public.
Set against that achievement, the work's limits have to be stated plainly, because they are easy to forget once the speech has done its work on a reader. This is Plato's Apology, his literary reconstruction of the defense, written some years after 399 BCE. Socrates wrote nothing, and we have no transcript of the trial. Plato was in the room, which gives his version some claim to fidelity, and because the Apology is one of Plato's early works, most scholars take its Socrates as relatively close to the historical man, closer than the elaborate philosopher of Plato's later dialogues, who became a mouthpiece for Plato's own system. But "relatively close" is not "verbatim," and the proof is that another of Socrates' followers, Xenophon, wrote a different defense of Socrates that does not match Plato's in its details. Both cannot be the real words, and we cannot recover which, if either, is. What we are reading is the speech Plato wanted us to remember Socrates giving, composed by the most gifted writer of the age to make sure the city that killed his teacher would never live it down. It is one of the most powerful things in the Western tradition. It is not a recording, and Socrates' actual courtroom words are gone for good.