The Apology

Socrates closes his answer to Meletus and turns to what he considers the real threat: not the men who brought formal charges, but the envy and detraction of the world. This, he tells the jury, is what has destroyed many good men before him and will likely destroy many more. The named accusers are almost beside the point. Someone, he imagines, will ask whether he is not ashamed of pursuing a course of life that is bringing him to an early death. His answer is uncompromising: a man worth anything does not calculate the odds of living or dying. He considers only whether what he is doing is right or wrong. To illustrate, he reaches for Achilles — who was warned by his goddess mother that killing Hector would mean his own death, and who responded with contempt for the warning. "Let me die forthwith and be avenged of my enemy," Achilles said, "rather than abide here by the beaked ships, a laughing-stock and a burden of the earth." A man's only business, wherever he is placed, is to stay at his post. Everything else is disgrace. Socrates then draws the parallel to his own situation. At Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium, he stood where his commanders placed him and faced death like any other soldier. It would be strange indeed — and genuinely impious, he suggests — if he now abandoned the post God has assigned him out of fear. The fear of death, he argues, is itself a form of false wisdom: a pretense of knowing something that no one actually knows. No one can say with certainty whether death is a great evil. It may, for all anyone knows, be a great good. To treat it as the worst thing that can happen to a person is the disgraceful ignorance of a man who believes he knows what he does not know. In this alone, Socrates says, he may claim to be wiser than others: he does not suppose he knows what lies beyond. He then puts the matter in the starkest terms possible. Suppose the jury offered him a deal — go free, but stop philosophising. His answer is immediate: he would refuse. He will obey God rather than the jury. While he has life and strength, he will never stop questioning, never stop exhorting everyone he meets — young and old, citizen and foreigner — to care less for money and reputation and more for wisdom, truth, and the improvement of the soul. Virtue, he insists, is not given by money. Money and every other good flow from virtue. That is his teaching. If this is what corrupting the youth means, then he is guilty of it. He will never alter his ways, he says — not even if he has to die many times.