Plato's Apology for Seekers

Dear reader — he wasn't. The Greek word apologia means a defense, not an expression of regret, and the whole speech is a seventy-year-old man declining, in front of a jury of several hundred, to say anything he doesn't believe. It's Plato's version of what Socrates said at his trial in Athens in 399 BCE, where he was charged with impiety and with corrupting the young. He speaks three times: his defense, a short speech on the penalty after he's found guilty, and a few last words after he's sentenced to death. You can read the whole thing in an hour or two, and it's easier than most of Plato.

Who's In The Room

Athens had recently lost a long war with Sparta, lived through the brief rule of an oligarchy called the Thirty, and restored its democracy. Some of Socrates' old companions had been in the Thirty's circle, which colored how plenty of people saw him. Three men brought the charges, Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon, in front of a court of ordinary citizens picked by lot. Not experts. Not professional judges. Guys with a day off who'd sworn an oath to judge by the laws.

One more thing before we start: Socrates wrote nothing. What we have comes from his students, mainly Plato and Xenophon, and from a comic caricature by Aristophanes. Plato wrote this speech within a few years of the trial and he shapes it. Scholars have argued for generations about how close it is to what Socrates actually said. A lot of them take it as a faithful picture of his character and method, if not a transcript. I'll take that answer. I can't improve on it.

He Starts By Fighting Shadows

First move: his real enemies aren't Meletus and Anytus, it's the old rumors, that he studies the sky and the underworld and "makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger." Those have been told to these jurors since they were kids, and he can't answer them well because he can't name the people who spread them or cross-examine them. Jowett's translation has him say, "I must simply fight with shadows in my own defence." Anybody who's tried to correct a rumor knows that feeling.

To show he's not one of the paid sophists, he tells a story about asking a rich man, Callias, who he'd hired to teach his sons virtue. If they were colts or calves, Socrates says, you'd get a trainer who knew horses. Callias names a teacher who charges five minae. Socrates says that guy's lucky if he really knows, because Socrates doesn't.

The Oracle Did This To Him

The center of the speech. His friend Chaerephon once went to the oracle at Delphi and asked if anyone was wiser than Socrates. The priestess said no one was. Chaerephon's dead by the time of the trial, but his brother's in the courtroom to confirm it.

Socrates knew he wasn't wise, so he set out to disprove the oracle by finding somebody who was. He went to a politician, then the poets, then the craftsmen. The politician thought he was wise and wasn't. The poets couldn't explain their own poems, which Socrates took to mean they work by "a sort of genius and inspiration," like diviners, who say lots of fine things without understanding them. The craftsmen really did know their crafts, but figured that made them wise about everything else. Every time, he made enemies.

His conclusion: the god meant something different on the surface. Only God is wise, and the oracle was using Socrates's name as an example. "He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing." So he kept going around testing people as a kind of service, which left no time for politics or his own affairs, and he's poor because of it.

Cross-Examining The Guy Who Wrote The Indictment

The only real dialogue in the speech. Socrates asks Meletus who improves the young. Meletus pauses, then says the laws. Then the judges. Then the audience, the senators, the whole assembly. Everyone improves them, apparently, except Socrates, who alone corrupts them. So Socrates goes to horses: is it one guy who harms horses and everybody else who helps them? It's the reverse. Only a trainer, a few people, does them good. "Happy indeed would be the condition of youth if they had one corrupter only, and all the rest of the world were their improvers."

Then he argues he can't be doing it on purpose: bad people harm the people around them, nobody wants to be harmed by his neighbors, so he wouldn't deliberately make his neighbors worse. And if it's not on purpose, the law has no place for a charge. The right move would've been to take him aside and teach him, not drag him into "a place not of instruction, but of punishment."

On atheism, Meletus claims Socrates says the sun is stone and the moon is earth. Socrates points out that's Anaxagoras, whose books are on sale and whose ideas get staged in the theater. Then he shows the indictment contradicts itself: it says he brings in new spiritual beings, which means he believes in spirits, and also that he believes in no gods at all. "Nobody will believe you, Meletus, and I am pretty sure that you do not believe yourself."

The Gadfly And The Soldier's Post

Asked if he's ashamed of a life that could end early, he says a good man shouldn't weigh life against death, only whether he's acting rightly. He brings up Achilles, who chose to avenge his friend and die rather than live in dishonor, and says he stood his ground as a soldier at Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium and won't leave his post now. Fear of death, he says, is "the pretence of wisdom," because it's claiming to know about something nobody knows.

If the jury says they'll let him go provided he quits philosophizing, he says he honors and loves them, "but I shall obey God rather than you." And the gadfly image: Athens is a great slow horse that needs stirring, and he's the fly God attached to it. His proof is his poverty. No ordinary man would have neglected his own business for years to do this.

He gives private advice but stays out of public life, and explains why: a divine sign, an inner voice since childhood that only ever holds him back and never urges him on. It forbade politics, and he thinks it was right, since a man who honestly opposes a state's wrongs won't live long.

Two stories show he wouldn't go along with injustice. On the council, he was the one man who voted against trying the generals of Arginusae together, which was illegal, and held his ground while the crowd shouted. Under the Thirty, he and four others were ordered to arrest a man named Leon for execution. The other four went. He went home.

He says he never took money, never taught anything in private that the whole world hadn't heard, and challenges Meletus to produce any grown-up former follower who says he was corrupted. Instead, the men in the room on his side include Crito and Plato's brother.

No Tears, Guilty By Thirty

Before the vote he won't do what other defendants do, which is bring his kids in and cry. He's got three sons, he's a person of flesh and blood, but he thinks it would shame himself and the city. A judge's job is "not to make a present of justice, but to give judgment."

Guilty. He says he's not upset, he expected it, and the surprise is how close it was: "had thirty votes gone over to the other side, I should have been acquitted." Asked to name his own penalty, he says what he deserves is a reward: free meals at the town hall, the honor Olympic winners get. Eventually, with friends offering to guarantee it, he proposes a fine of thirty minae. And in there is the most famous sentence in the speech: keeping quiet would be disobeying the god, and "the unexamined life is not worth living."

What He Says After They Vote For Death

Sentenced, he says it wasn't lack of words that lost the case. He'd rather die having spoken his way than live having spoken theirs. "The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death." He's old and slow and death caught him. His accusers are quick, and unrighteousness caught them.

To the friends who would've acquitted him: his divine sign said nothing all day, not in the morning, not on the way, not during the speech. He takes that to mean what's happened is good. And he gives two options for death. Either it's nothingness, like a dreamless sleep, which is a gain, or it's a journey somewhere he can talk with the great dead and keep searching. "No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death."

Last request: when his sons grow up, trouble them the way he troubled Athens if they seem to care more about money or reputation than virtue. Then, flat: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."

So Why Did They Do It

Three common readings, and I think they're all partly right. The oldest says martyr: a man killed by a city that couldn't stand being questioned. The Stoics took him as their patron, and early Christians saw a parallel to Jesus. A harder reading asks why fair-minded Athenians voted to convict. He'd questioned the city's leaders, undermined confidence in its institutions, taught men who later harmed it, and said out loud he'd never stop. Some modern readers think the democracy was acting within its own logic. And then there's Xenophon's version, which is shorter, calmer, and wants you to see a pious, conventional man who picked his time to die. Put them side by side and you see how much each writer shaped his Socrates.

I don't know which one's right. I never claimed to. What I'll say is that he never claimed to know either, and that's the whole point of the speech.

Read it in an hour. The translation quoted here is Jowett's, which is free and sounds more formal than Socrates probably did. A modern one will usually sound closer to spoken argument. Go read it.