PATIENT
The Apology of Socrates
COMPOSED
c. 399–390 BCE (approx.)
FORM
A defense speech
SETTING
An Athenian jury, the trial of Socrates
CHIEF COMPLAINT
Is a life worth keeping if you have to stop examining it to save it?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
An old man is on trial for his life in Athens, charged with not honoring the gods and with corrupting the young. He does not beg, does not weep and does not promise to stop. He tells the jury how a question put to an oracle turned him into the city's gadfly, and why he would rather die than give that up. The jury finds him guilty by a close vote and sentences him to death. He answers calmly: death is either a dreamless sleep or a journey to meet the great dead, and no evil can happen to a good man.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
ELENCHUS
Testing a claim by cross-examination. The method that earned Socrates his enemies and his reputation.
ARETĒ
Excellence, virtue. What Socrates says to care about first, ahead of money and reputation.
DAIMONION
The inner sign that only ever held him back. The source of the charge of introducing new divinities.
APOLOGIA
A defense speech. Socrates defends a way of life and does not apologize for it.
DEATH
Not known to be an evil. Either nothingness or a change of place, and in neither case a reason to give up doing right.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —A speech, not a dialogue: Socrates addresses the jury directly. He answers his old accusers first, then the formal charge.
- —Builds in movements: the defense, then the counter-proposal on the penalty, then a last talk about death with the friends who stood by him.
- —Plain and short, with no technical vocabulary. The famous lines arrive in the middle of ordinary talk.
- —Plato's Socrates, which is not necessarily the Socrates of the trial. The speech is Plato's account.
- —Easy to read in one sitting, and rewarding to reread.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
One of the most quoted texts in philosophy, and a natural companion to the Republic: the Republic asks what a just city would look like, and the Apology shows a real city judging a just man. It also leads on to the Phaedo, where Socrates faces the end he predicts here. For a first read, try G. M. A. Grube (Hackett), Tom and Grace West (Cornell) or the Penguin Last Days of Socrates; the full guide quotes Benjamin Jowett's public-domain translation.