A man of seventy stands in front of five hundred of his fellow citizens, on a capital charge, and declines to do any of the things a defendant is supposed to do.

He does not bring his family in to weep. He does not plead. When convicted and invited to propose his own penalty — the convention being to name something severe enough that the jury takes it instead of death — he suggests that the city should give him free meals for life, as it does for Olympic victors. He then allows that he could perhaps manage a small fine.

They sentence him to death by a larger margin than they convicted him by.

What it is like to read

About 12,000 words. An hour, at most, and it is the easiest entry to Greek philosophy there is.

Unlike almost everything else Plato wrote, it is barely a dialogue. It is a speech in three parts, matching the procedure of an Athenian trial — the defense, then the counter-penalty after conviction, then a closing address to the jury. The only exchange is a short, devastating cross-examination of his accuser Meletus in the middle.

That makes it readable in a way the dialogues are not, and it is the reason this is the one text of Plato's that people outside philosophy have generally read.

The defense

Socrates separates his accusers into two sets, and the distinction is the shrewdest thing in the speech.

The formal charges — impiety, corrupting the young — were brought by Meletus, Anytus and Lycon in 399 BCE. He dismantles them quickly, getting Meletus to assert within a few minutes both that Socrates is an atheist and that he believes in new divinities.

The old accusers are the real problem and cannot be cross-examined: a diffuse Athenian dislike, decades old, of the man who asks questions. He names Aristophanes' Clouds, which had put him on stage twenty-four years earlier as a sophist charging fees for clever nonsense. You cannot answer a reputation, and he says so.

The positive account is the Delphic oracle story. Told that no one was wiser than Socrates, he set out to refute it by finding someone wiser, and found instead that the people with reputations for wisdom could not give an account of what they claimed to know. His advantage is knowing that he does not know. The examining is a service to the city, unpaid, and he cannot stop it without disobeying the god.

Then the sentence the speech is built to reach: he will not stop. Not for acquittal, not on condition, not to save his life.

Key passages

  • 20e–23b — the Delphic oracle, and the origin of the mission.
  • 28b–29b — a man who is good for anything should not be calculating his chances of living or dying.
  • 30c–30d — Anytus and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot harm me.
  • 38a — the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.
  • 40c–41d — the closing meditation: death is either dreamless sleep or a migration, and both are gains.

What is actually in dispute

Not whether the trial happened. Whether this is what was said.

Xenophon wrote an Apology too, and the two differ substantially. The scholarly consensus is that Plato's is a reconstruction rather than a transcript — he was about twenty-eight and present at the trial, writing some years later, with purposes of his own.

The political background is usually left out and changes the reading. Athens had recently come through the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, several of whom had been in Socrates' circle, including Plato's own relative Critias. An amnesty prevented prosecuting anyone for the coup itself. A charge of corrupting the young, against the man who had taught those particular young men, is not obviously the pure clash of philosophy and intolerance that later readers made of it.

Both things can be true: the charge was a proxy, and his answer to it founded a tradition.