Apology | Page 8

of Apollo or Zeus, or the other gods whom the State
approves, would have appeared to him both uncertain and unimportant
in comparison of the duty of self-examination, and of those principles
of truth and right which he deemed to be the foundation of religion.
(Compare Phaedr.; Euthyph.; Republic.)
The second question, whether Plato meant to represent Socrates as
braving or irritating his judges, must also be answered in the negative.
His irony, his superiority, his audacity, 'regarding not the person of
man,' necessarily flow out of the loftiness of his situation. He is not
acting a part upon a great occasion, but he is what he has been all his
life long, 'a king of men.' He would rather not appear insolent, if he
could avoid it (ouch os authadizomenos touto lego). Neither is he
desirous of hastening his own end, for life and death are simply

indifferent to him. But such a defence as would be acceptable to his
judges and might procure an acquittal, it is not in his nature to make.
He will not say or do anything that might pervert the course of justice;
he cannot have his tongue bound even 'in the throat of death.' With his
accusers he will only fence and play, as he had fenced with other
'improvers of youth,' answering the Sophist according to his sophistry
all his life long. He is serious when he is speaking of his own mission,
which seems to distinguish him from all other reformers of mankind,
and originates in an accident. The dedication of himself to the
improvement of his fellow-citizens is not so remarkable as the ironical
spirit in which he goes about doing good only in vindication of the
credit of the oracle, and in the vain hope of finding a wiser man than
himself. Yet this singular and almost accidental character of his
mission agrees with the divine sign which, according to our notions, is
equally accidental and irrational, and is nevertheless accepted by him as
the guiding principle of his life. Socrates is nowhere represented to us
as a freethinker or sceptic. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity
when he speculates on the possibility of seeing and knowing the heroes
of the Trojan war in another world. On the other hand, his hope of
immortality is uncertain;--he also conceives of death as a long sleep (in
this respect differing from the Phaedo), and at last falls back on
resignation to the divine will, and the certainty that no evil can happen
to the good man either in life or death. His absolute truthfulness seems
to hinder him from asserting positively more than this; and he makes no
attempt to veil his ignorance in mythology and figures of speech. The
gentleness of the first part of the speech contrasts with the aggravated,
almost threatening, tone of the conclusion. He characteristically
remarks that he will not speak as a rhetorician, that is to say, he will not
make a regular defence such as Lysias or one of the orators might have
composed for him, or, according to some accounts, did compose for
him. But he first procures himself a hearing by conciliatory words. He
does not attack the Sophists; for they were open to the same charges as
himself; they were equally ridiculed by the Comic poets, and almost
equally hateful to Anytus and Meletus. Yet incidentally the antagonism
between Socrates and the Sophists is allowed to appear. He is poor and
they are rich; his profession that he teaches nothing is opposed to their
readiness to teach all things; his talking in the marketplace to their

private instructions; his tarry-at-home life to their wandering from city
to city. The tone which he assumes towards them is one of real
friendliness, but also of concealed irony. Towards Anaxagoras, who
had disappointed him in his hopes of learning about mind and nature,
he shows a less kindly feeling, which is also the feeling of Plato in
other passages (Laws). But Anaxagoras had been dead thirty years, and
was beyond the reach of persecution.
It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers
who would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more
violent terms was, as far as we know, never fulfilled. No inference can
be drawn from this circumstance as to the probability of the words
attributed to him having been actually uttered. They express the
aspiration of the first martyr of philosophy, that he would leave behind
him many followers, accompanied by the not unnatural feeling that
they would be fiercer and more inconsiderate in their words when
emancipated from his control.
The above remarks must be understood as applying with any degree of
certainty to the Platonic Socrates only. For, although these or similar