Apology

Introduction

The Apology (Greek Apologia, literally defense speech) is Plato's account of the defense Socrates gave at his trial in Athens in 399 BCE on charges of impiety and corrupting the young. Of the four early dialogues that surround Socrates's death (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo), it is the only one structured as a public speech rather than a private conversation, and it is one of the most-read works in the Western philosophical tradition.

The historical accuracy of the Apology is contested. Xenophon also composed an Apology of Socrates, and the two accounts differ substantially. The standard view among scholars is that Plato's Apology is not a verbatim transcript but a reconstruction shaped by Plato's later philosophical purposes — likely faithful to the broad outlines of Socrates's actual defense but more philosophically pointed than the original. The work has been read, throughout its reception, both as a historical document and as a literary-philosophical statement of what the philosophical life is.

Form, length, date, language

The Apology is formally a speech in three parts, delivered by Socrates before a jury of five hundred Athenian citizens. It is approximately 12,000 words in Greek — unusually short among Plato's dialogues, taking roughly an hour to read. The composition date is contested; the most common scholarly placement is in the first decade after Socrates's execution (between 399 and 388 BCE), making it among the earliest of Plato's works. The original language is Attic Greek.

Unlike most Platonic dialogues, the Apology contains almost no dialogue. The only exchanges are a short cross-examination of the accuser Meletus in the middle section and the brief closing exchanges with the jury. The work is essentially a monologue — a fact that has shaped both its accessibility (readers can follow it without tracking interlocutors) and its philosophical character (we hear Socrates without the dialectical pressure of an interlocutor's questions).

Why it was written

The Apology responds to a specific historical event: Socrates was prosecuted in 399 BCE by Anytus, Meletus, and Lycon on charges of not believing in the gods the city believes in and corrupting the young. The political background was the recent restoration of Athenian democracy after the brief tyranny of the Thirty (404–403 BCE), some of whom had been associates of Socrates. The prosecution was almost certainly less about religion than about Socrates's political and intellectual associations and the social disruption his constant questioning produced. He was convicted by a narrow majority, refused the conventional move of proposing a moderate counter-penalty, and was sentenced to death by hemlock.

For Plato, then about twenty-eight, the trial was a defining event. The Apology is the first installment of his life-long response to it. The work serves three purposes: it preserves a record of Socrates's defense for posterity; it presents Socrates as the model of the philosophical life, vindicated by his refusal to compromise; and it articulates a positive account of what philosophy is, against the slanderous picture of Socrates the prosecution had relied on.

Structure and argument

The Apology divides into three parts corresponding to the procedural structure of an Athenian trial.

The defense speech (17a–35d). Socrates addresses two sets of accusers — the old accusers (the diffuse Athenian prejudice against him, of which Aristophanes's Clouds is the most concrete expression) and the new accusers (Meletus, Anytus, Lycon). He responds to the old accusations first, denying that he is a sophist who takes fees, a natural philosopher of the Anaxagoran sort, or a teacher of disreputable opinions. He then narrates the origin of his philosophical mission: the Delphic oracle had declared no one wiser than Socrates, and Socrates, puzzled, set out to refute the oracle by finding wiser people. His investigation revealed that those reputed to be wise (politicians, poets, craftsmen) were not in fact wise about what they pretended to be wise about; his own superiority consisted only in knowing that he did not know. The mission of the elenchus — the cross-examination that has made him hated — follows from this discovery as a kind of service to the god.

He then cross-examines Meletus, demonstrating the incoherence of the formal charges (Meletus contradicts himself within minutes: is Socrates an atheist or someone who believes in new gods?). He closes the defense by affirming that he will not stop philosophizing under any circumstances, including the threat of death: I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to philosophize. The famous formulation — the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being (38a) — belongs to this section.

The counter-penalty (35e–38b). After conviction by a narrow majority, the Athenian procedure called for the prosecution to propose a penalty (death) and the defendant to propose an alternative. The convention was to propose a serious counter-penalty likely to be accepted in lieu of the death sentence. Socrates instead provocatively suggests that what he deserves is to be maintained at public expense in the Prytaneum (the highest civic honor), then ironically proposes a small fine. The jury, predictably angered, votes for the death penalty by a wider margin than they had voted for conviction.

The closing address (38c–42a). Socrates addresses first those who voted to convict, predicting that they will face later, harsher critics; then those who voted to acquit, distinguishing the real misfortune (becoming an unjust person) from the apparent misfortune (being killed by an unjust city). He closes with the famous reflection that death is either a dreamless sleep or a migration to another place, both of which are good rather than bad. The final line: Now it is time to go away, I to die and you to live; but which of us goes to the better thing is unclear to anyone except the god.

Key passages

• 20e–23b — the Delphic oracle and the origin of the philosophical mission.
• 28b–29b — A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying. The doctrine that the philosopher fears injustice rather than death.
• 30c–30d — Anytus and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot harm me. The Socratic doctrine that no genuine harm can come to a good person from an external agent.
• 38a — The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.
• 40c–41d — the closing meditation on death as either dreamless sleep or migration of the soul.
• 42a — the final line.

Reception history

The Apology has been read continuously since antiquity as the founding statement of philosophy's relation to political authority. In late antiquity it shaped the Christian martyr tradition (Justin Martyr explicitly compared Socrates to Christ as a witness killed for truth). The medieval Latin West knew the work only in fragments until the Renaissance recovery; Marsilio Ficino's Latin translation (1484) made the complete text widely available in Europe for the first time in centuries.

The Renaissance and Enlightenment reception treated the Apology as the supreme document of intellectual freedom against political authority. Erasmus, Montaigne, and the broader humanist tradition cited it constantly. The Enlightenment philosophes (especially Diderot and Voltaire) made Socrates's trial a stock reference for the persecution of freethinkers; the implicit comparison to ecclesiastical and royal authority did the political work.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced more variegated readings. Hegel, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, treated the trial as a genuine world-historical conflict between two valid principles (Socrates's individual conscience against the ethical substance of the Greek polis), with both sides tragically right. Nietzsche was hostile, reading the trial as the moment Socratic rationalism began the long destruction of Greek vitality. I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates (1988) is the most-read recent revisionist account, arguing that Athens had legitimate political grounds for the prosecution and that Socrates's antidemocratic associations were the actual issue.

Contemporary engagement

The standard scholarly editions include the Loeb (H.N. Fowler), the Oxford Classical Texts, and individual commentary editions by C.D.C. Reeve (Hackett, Apology of Socrates), Thomas G. West (Cornell, with extensive translator's introduction), and the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. Major recent scholarly monographs include Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith's Socrates on Trial (1989), C.D.C. Reeve's Socrates in the Apology (1989), and the relevant chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992) and Gregory Vlastos's Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (1991).

Active scholarly questions concern the relation between Plato's Apology and Xenophon's; the historicity of specific elements (especially the oracle story); the philosophical adequacy of Socrates's argument that no harm can come to a good person; the political reading of the trial against the post-Thirty Tyrants context; and the role of the Apology in the broader Platonic project of vindicating philosophy against the city.

Further reading

• Socrates — the speaker
• Plato — the author
• Platonism — the tradition the work helped found
• Dialectic — the method the Apology defends
• Aporia — the productive perplexity the elenchus produces
• Virtue — the central ethical concept Socrates defends

The foundational text on the relation between philosophy and the political community. The shortest of the four Socratic dialogues and the most-read.