The Apology

Socrates opens this section with a claim that would sound like vanity from almost anyone else, and from him sounds like a statement of fact: if you kill me, he tells the jury, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me. Nothing Meletus or Anytus can do — execution, exile, loss of civil rights — constitutes a genuine injury to a good man. The evil of unjustly taking a life falls entirely on the one who does it. He is not arguing for himself, he says, but for them. They should not sin against God by condemning his gift to the city. And then comes the image that will follow him through history: he is a gadfly, attached to Athens by God as to a great and noble horse grown sluggish from its own size. All day long he fastens upon the city, arousing and reproaching and persuading. Kill him, and Athens will sleep undisturbed for the rest of its days — unless God, in his care, sends another. The proof of his mission, Socrates argues, is his poverty. No man neglects his own affairs for years and runs himself into destitution for the benefit of others unless compelled by something beyond ordinary human motivation. He has gone about the city like a father or elder brother, exhorting people to care for virtue. He has never charged money — his accusers, notably, cannot produce a single witness who paid him anything. He then addresses the question many must have wondered about: why, if he is genuinely concerned with the welfare of Athens, has he never entered politics? The answer is his divine sign — an inner voice that has accompanied him since childhood, which forbids but never commands. It has always prevented him from taking a public role. And he explains why that is fortunate: no man who fights honestly against the lawless deeds of a multitude survives long. A man who intends to do right must keep to private life. He offers two pieces of evidence — not words but actions. When the democratic assembly proposed to try the generals of Arginusae illegally as a group, he was the only member of the presiding council who voted against it. He stood his ground while the orators threatened to arrest him and the crowd shouted. Later, under the Thirty Tyrants, he and four others were summoned and ordered to bring Leon of Salamis to be executed. The other four went to Salamis and fetched him. Socrates went quietly home. He might have been killed for it, had the Thirty not fallen shortly after. Finally, he turns the corruption charge back on the jury with a roll call. He names the fathers, brothers, and relatives of his supposed victims who are present in court: Crito, Lysanias, Antiphon, Nicostratus, Adeimantus — whose brother Plato is sitting in the room — and many others. All of them, he says, are prepared to testify for the man Meletus calls a corrupter. Not the young men themselves, who might have reasons to be loyal, but their uncorrupted elder relatives. Why would they do that, except because they know he is telling the truth and Meletus is lying?