Apology (Plato)

• 1. Introduction

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  Plato's Apology of Socrates records the words a philosopher spoke at his own trial in 399 BC, before a jury of perhaps five hundred Athenian men deciding whether he should live or die. The charges were stark: corrupting the youth of Athens, and failing to believe in the gods the city recognized. Socrates was seventy years old, and he had spent a lifetime interrogating the powerful. The question hanging over the trial was not only whether the charges were true, but whether Athens could tolerate the kind of man who made its most respected citizens look like fools. How did a philosopher end up on trial for his life? Who were the men who brought him there, and what did they actually want? What did Socrates say in his own defence, and why did his words make things worse rather than better? These are the questions the Apology answers, imperfectly and unforgettably, across three distinct acts of a single dramatic day.

• 2. The Three Accusers

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  Anytus was a rich and socially prominent Athenian who opposed the Sophists on principle, and Socrates identified him as the true enemy behind the prosecution. In the earlier dialogue known as the Meno, Anytus had already given Socrates a warning: that stepping on people's toes, which Socrates called kakós legein, could someday cause trouble (Meno 94e-95a). Socrates had offended him by arguing, before a visitor named Meno, that virtue cannot be taught, and adducing that many prominent Athenians had produced sons inferior to themselves as fathers. He named Pericles and Thucydides in that context. Anytus was vexed, Socrates told the court, "on behalf of the craftsmen and politicians" (23e-24a).

  Meletus was younger and less prominent, described by Socrates at trial as an unknown man with an aquiline nose. Socrates said Meletus was angry "on behalf of the poets" (23e). He was the only accuser to speak during Socrates's self-defence, yet Socrates treated him more as a tool of Anytus than as an independent force. In the Euthyphro dialogue, Meletus also appears as a figure who filed the very complaint that set the trial in motion.

  Lycon represented the interests of professional rhetoricians, and Socrates said he was vexed "on behalf of the rhetoricians" (24a). Lycon had a personal grievance beyond professional solidarity: his son Autolycus had been killed by the Oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants in 404 BC, and Lycon associated Socrates with that pro-Spartan faction. Before the trial, Lycon had already risen to become a successful democratic politician after the fall of the Oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 BC, and a figure of ridicule in a play by Aristophanes. Each accuser brought a different constituency and a different wound to the prosecution.

• 3. The Oracle and the Gadfly

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  Chaerephon, reputed to be impetuous, had gone to the Oracle of Delphi and asked the prophetess Pythia whether any man was wiser than Socrates. The Oracle answered that no man was wiser, and when this report reached Socrates, he told the jury it left him astounded. He reasoned that the Oracle could not lie by its nature, yet he knew he possessed no wisdom. The only way to resolve the paradox was to go looking for someone wiser, so he could bring that person to the Oracle as a counter-example.

  He tested politicians, poets, and craftsmen in turn. Socrates told the jury his finding: the politicians were not wise, though they believed themselves to be. The poets did not understand their own poetry; the prophets and seers did not understand what they said. The craftsmen knew real things, but their competence in a craft made them believe they also understood matters where they had no knowledge at all. After each interrogation, Socrates concluded he was the better off, not because he knew more, but because he was at least aware of knowing nothing. In his own words before the jury: "I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not" (21d).

  This quest earned him a bad reputation among the politically powerful people of Athens. The young, wealthy men of the city followed him around the agora watching him expose the pretensions of their elders. When those elders were embarrassed, they turned their anger on Socrates rather than on themselves. Socrates saw himself, he told the jury, as a spokesman for the Oracle at Delphi (22e): a social gadfly assigned to sting Athens into greater ethical awareness. He described his mission to the court in pointed terms, asking his fellow citizens whether they were not ashamed to give all their attention to acquiring money, reputation, and honour, while giving no thought to truth, understanding, or the perfection of the soul (29e).

• 4. The Trial as Theatre

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  Before answering the formal accusations, Socrates addressed a complaint about the way he used language. His accusers had warned the jury to guard against his eloquence, and Socrates responded by noting that he would speak extemporaneously, in the common idiom of the Greek language, in the manner he used in the agora and at the money tables. He explicitly mocked the ornamented, carefully arranged language of trained orators, contrasting it with his own plain interrogation.

  The Apology as a text is almost entirely in the first-person voice of Socrates, with one significant interruption: his two dialogues with Meletus, in which Socrates cross-examines his accuser directly (24d-25d and 26b-27d). Aristotle later classified the Apology as a genre of fiction, but he also praised the scene where Socrates questions Meletus as a good example of interrogation. In that exchange, Socrates maneuvered Meletus into contradicting himself, simultaneously accusing Socrates of atheism and of believing in spiritual agencies and demigods, which Socrates pointed out cannot both be true at once.

  Plato notes in the text that Socrates twice mentioned during his speech that Plato himself was present at the trial (34a and 38b). The comic poet Aristophanes had already put a damaging version of Socrates before a popular audience in his play The Clouds, produced in 423 BC, twenty-four years before the trial. In that play, Aristophanes lampooned Socrates as a charlatan and the paradigm philosopher of atheist sophistry. Socrates argued to the jury that Aristophanes had already poisoned their minds when they were young and impressionable, making the corruption charge both circular and impossible to refute fairly. Some scholars have since read the entire trial scene not as a rejection of rhetoric but as an implicit demonstration of a broader practice of rhetoric that Socrates had conducted across his whole public life.

• 5. Penalty and Defiance

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  When the jury voted Socrates guilty by a relatively narrow margin, Athenian law required both sides to propose a penalty. The prosecution proposed death. Socrates, rather than proposing a serious counter-penalty, proposed a reward: that he be given free meals in perpetuity at the Prytaneum, the public dining hall of Athens. That honour was normally reserved for Olympic athletes, prominent citizens, and recognized benefactors of the city. The proposal was not taken as a joke but as a provocation.

  Socrates also used the sentencing phase to point out, with what the text suggests is dark humour, that Meletus had narrowly escaped a significant fine himself. Athenian law penalized plaintiffs whose accusations failed to win at least one-fifth of the jury's votes, and Socrates noted the financial consequence Meletus would need to reckon with as a result of the vote.

  Finally, after the court rejected free meals at the Prytaneum, Socrates worked through imprisonment and banishment before settling on a fine of one hundred drachmae. He noted his own poverty but said the proposal was genuine. His supporters in the courtroom, named in the text as Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, offered to underwrite a far larger fine of three thousand drachmae, equivalent to thirty minae. The judges found even that offer insufficient. Most of the jurors then voted for the death penalty (38c), a outcome Diogenes Laertius later recorded with more precision: 280 in favour of death and 220 in favour of a fine (2.42).

• 6. Departing Words

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  Addressing the jurors who had voted for his death, Socrates told them that instead of waiting a short while for him to die of old age, they would now face harsher critics from among his supporters. He prophesied that younger men would replace him as a social gadfly, pressing ethical demands on Athens in a manner more vexing than anything he had managed (39d).

  To the jurors who had voted to acquit him, Socrates offered a different message. His supernatural daimonion had not interfered with his self-defence at any point, which he interpreted as a sign that his conduct of the trial had been correct. He reasoned from this that death might not be a bad thing at all: either it was a state of annihilation, which meant release from earthly worry, or it was a migration to a higher plane where the souls of figures such as Hesiod, Homer, and Odysseus already resided.

  Socrates closed by declaring no ill-will toward Lycon, Anytus, Meletus, or the jurors. He then turned to a practical request: that the Athenians correct his three sons if those sons ever valued material wealth above virtuous living, or if they grew too prideful. He asked that Athens do to his sons exactly what he had done to Athens, applying the same correction he had spent his life administering to others. The Apology ends not with a philosophical argument but with a father's final instruction.

• 7. Afterlife of the Text

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  Plato's Apology was one of many defence texts about Socrates published in the decade after the trial in 399 BC, a period when Socrates's circle felt pressure to justify his life and respond to his condemnation. Aristotle, who classified it as a genre of fiction, still found it a useful historical source for understanding Socrates. Scholars have debated ever since how accurately the text reflects what Socrates actually said in court that day, and whether Plato shaped the speech to serve a philosophic argument rather than a factual record.

  The text forms part of a group of four dialogues through which Plato traces the final days of Socrates: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo. Together they move from the charge being filed, through the trial and sentencing, to the final conversation in the prison cell before the execution. Roberto Rossellini drew directly on the Apology for his 1971 television film Socrates, lifting much of the action and script from the dialogue. In 2007, Andrew David Irvine wrote Socrates on Trial, a contemporary stage play drawing on The Clouds, the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo, with the explicit aim of showing Socrates as both philosopher and man. Harold North Fowler's Greek-with-translation edition for the Loeb Classical Library, first published in 1914 and reissued by Harvard University Press, remains among the standard scholarly texts alongside an updated Loeb edition from 2017 with translations by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy. A BBC radio play adapted from Hugh Tredennick's 1954 translation was produced in 1986, extending the life of the text into yet another medium.