The Apology

Having disposed of the old accusers, Socrates turns to the formal indictment — and to Meletus, whom he introduces with deliberate irony as "that good man and true lover of his country, as he calls himself." The charge is twofold: corrupting the youth, and failing to believe in the gods of the state while introducing new divinities of his own. Socrates takes each in turn. On the corruption charge, he calls Meletus forward and asks him a simple question: if Socrates corrupts the youth, who improves them? Meletus hesitates — his silence, Socrates tells the jury, is already proof that he has no genuine interest in the matter. Pressed, Meletus answers in increasingly sweeping terms: the judges improve them, then the entire audience, then all the senators, then every member of the assembly. Every Athenian improves the youth, he affirms, except Socrates alone. Socrates finds this remarkable. He offers the analogy of horse training: it is not every horseman but precisely the trained specialist who benefits horses, while the uninstructed do harm. The same logic applies to the young. If Meletus were right, the youth of Athens would be extraordinarily fortunate — one corrupter surrounded by thousands of improvers. This, Socrates says, makes it clear that Meletus has never given the matter a single thought. He presses further. Meletus has claimed the corruption is intentional. But Socrates argues this is incoherent: a rational man who must live among his neighbors would never deliberately corrupt them, since he would then have to suffer the consequences. Either the corruption is unintentional — in which case the remedy is instruction, not prosecution — or it is not happening at all. Either way, Meletus is lying. Turning to the impiety charge, Socrates forces Meletus to clarify his accusation. Does he claim that Socrates worships different gods, or no gods at all? Under pressure, Meletus commits to the more extreme position: complete atheism. Socrates then springs the trap. The indictment itself mentions that he teaches about spiritual and divine agencies — demigods. But demigods are, by any accepted account, either gods or the offspring of gods. Can a man believe in the sons of gods and not in gods? It is, Socrates says, as absurd as affirming the existence of mules while denying the existence of horses and asses. The indictment contains a contradiction so glaring, he suggests, that Meletus could only have included it as a kind of riddle — a test to see whether Socrates would notice. Meletus, he concludes, has written this indictment in a spirit of youthful bravado, without a particle of real seriousness, and no one paying attention will be taken in by it.