The Apology

Socrates opens not with a statement but with an admission: his accusers spoke so persuasively that they almost made him forget who he was. It is a remarkable thing to say at the start of a trial for your life. It signals immediately that Socrates is paying attention not just to what is being said, but to how it is being said — and that he finds the distinction important. The accusers, he notes, warned the jury against being deceived by his eloquence. Socrates finds this almost funny. They were "certain to be detected as soon as I opened my lips," since anyone listening could tell he was no polished speaker. The accusation exposes their dishonesty before he has said a word. But then he turns the charge back on them: if eloquence means the force of truth, he says, then he will accept the label. His eloquence and theirs are simply different things. What follows is Socrates' only concession to the jury — and it is not really a concession at all. He asks them not to be surprised or put off by his manner of speaking. He is over seventy years old and appearing in a court of law for the first time in his life. The language of the courtroom is foreign to him. He speaks the way he has always spoken: in the agora, at the tables of the money-changers, in the streets of Athens. He asks to be treated like a stranger speaking in his native tongue — not excused from judgment, but heard on his own terms. The request is modest in form and radical in substance. What Socrates is really asking is that the jury separate the man from the performance — that they set aside the theatrical conventions of the courtroom, where a polished speech is taken as a sign of credibility, and judge his words on their truth alone. "Let the speaker speak truly," he says, "and the judge decide justly." That is all. He is confident in the justice of his cause, and that confidence, he implies, is the only preparation he needs. This short opening does two things at once. It establishes who Socrates is — unhurried, ironic, entirely himself — and it establishes what this defense will be: not an argument designed to win, but a statement designed to be true.