Apology of Socrates: not calendar wisdom

Plato's Apology of Socrates is short enough to read in an afternoon, and that is exactly what is worth doing before repeating the most famous line it holds. Plato's text reconstructs the trial of Socrates in Athens, in the year 399 BC, and is the closest account we have of the words he said before the court that would go on to condemn him to death.

What the work is

"Apology" here does not mean an expression of regret: it comes from the Greek apología, defense. That is exactly what the text is, a speech of defense, divided into three moments that follow the Athenian court's own ritual. First, Socrates answers the charges, and the trial ends in a guilty verdict by a narrow margin. Then, already condemned, he has the right to propose an alternative penalty to the one the accusers asked for. Finally, he speaks to both groups, those who voted for death and those who voted for acquittal, in two different farewells.

It is not a treatise. It is a man speaking to save, or not save, his own life, and that difference is what makes the text so direct to read.

The passages that fame simplified

Much of what gets repeated about Socrates comes from this work, almost always cut in half. The best known is the line "I know that I know nothing," which is not in the Apology in that form. What the text says, in 21d, is stricter: "I do not believe I know what I do not know" (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 21d). Further on, in 29d, he explains why he spent his life bothering the Athenians: to remind each one to care for his own soul before money and reputation. Neither passage is the focus of this article, and neither needs to be here, because the one that matters now is the third, and it is the one almost no one reads in the context in which it was said.

The line said at the worst possible moment

Already condemned, at the moment of proposing his own penalty, Socrates sums up, in a single line, what he had argued throughout the whole speech, that it is worth examining one's own life and the lives of others:

"An unexamined life is not worth living." (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 38a; passage translated from the Portuguese edition As Grandes Obras de Platão, Mimética, 2019, trans. Carlos Alberto Nunes)

Today that line circulates as calendar wisdom, a pretty phrase to open the year. It was not born that way. It was said by a seventy-year-old man, in a court, in the one opening he still had to save his own skin: Athenian custom allowed a condemned man to propose an alternative penalty to the one the accusation asked for, and exile, which the court almost always accepted, was the obvious way out. All he had to do was agree to live in silence in another city.

Socrates refuses. And it is in refusing that he says the line: they are offering him his life in exchange for silence, and he answers that such a life is not a life worth calling human.

After the verdict, there was still time

The Apology ends with the conviction, but the story of Socrates does not. Afterward there were still days, friends who arranged an escape, and one last conversation about whether escaping would be just. That conversation is another short dialogue by Plato, the Crito, and it is worth reading the two together.

Why the whole text is worth reading

What the Apology delivers, and no summary replaces, is its tone: the calm of a man who had already decided what a life is worth before knowing whether he would lose his own. It is only a few pages long, and it is on our list of recommended readings for anyone who wants to know Socrates through his own words, not through the lines that survived him.

Continue: Crito, by Plato: why Socrates didn't escape · Why Athens condemned Socrates · I know that I know nothing: what Socrates said · Living the questions, by Rilke
Source class: Sócrates e o conhece-te a ti mesmo: autoconhecimento, virtude e maiêutica