Apology

Take out any of the three speeches and the work stops being what it is. The oracle story (21a to 23b) is the warrant for the whole life: without it the examination is impertinence, with it obedience. The cross-examination of Meletus is required, the one place the method is performed rather than described, on the accuser, in court. The public record (31c to 33a) answers why a man so certain of his duty kept out of politics. The counter-penalty is the hinge, where the proposal of meals in the Prytaneum turns the defence into a refusal to bargain, and the farewell reads the death from the far side of it. Little is idle; some of it is longer than it need be. The cross-examination runs three arguments where one would convict Meletus of never having thought about the young: the horses and their trainers, the proof that no one corrupts willingly (25c to 26a), and the trap about the children of gods that ends in mules born of horses and asses (27d to e). The record under the democracy and the Thirty is a second answer to a question the first has settled, and the round of politicians, poets and craftsmen comes three times to the same result.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds without Socrates’ god. The one who knows that he does not know is wiser than those who think they know, and the conceit he exposes is that of men competent in a part and presuming on the whole. The fear of death is itself a claim to know what no one knows (29a to b). The city that silences its examiner harms itself more than him; and, in the work’s own sentence, “ho de anexetastos bios ou biōtos anthrōpōi”
“the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (38a). It discloses a condition still true: a democracy can kill by lawful process the man whose offence is to ask its citizens what they mean, out of the shame of being asked. These are meanings, not moods, and they are disclosed through action: the man who says them is convicted by thirty votes and does not alter the speech. Held off the top because the account of the soul and of death is a wager, argued as a possibility rather than shown, and because the portrait is an advocate’s: the jurors’ reasons, the Thirty, Critias, Alcibiades, are never given their weight.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The height is gathered in the last speech, and it is among the strongest endings in Greek prose. Death is either a dreamless sleep, which would be gain, or a journey to where one may question Homer and Hesiod, Palamedes and Ajax (40c to 41c); no evil comes to a good man, living or dead (41d); and then the close: “alla gar ēdē hōra apienai, emoi men apothanoumenōi, humin de biōsomenois”
“now it is time to go, I to die and you to live” (42a). Earlier heights recur once the stakes are named: Achilles choosing death over disgrace (28c to d), the refusal of an acquittal bought with silence (29c to d), the gadfly (30e), the refusal to bring three sons weeping before the court (34c to 35b), and the proposal of meals in the Prytaneum, a comic sublime. Held at 8.8 by frequency: for most of its length the work is argument at the pitch of conversation, the oracle story dry, the cross-examination comic, the public record testimony, and its elevation there is moral steadiness rather than transport.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One mythic structure is built, and it bears the load: the oracle. The god’s word that no one is wiser is a riddle, and the first speech is the quest to solve it, inquiries Socrates himself calls labours (22a), each ending in the same discovery, until the riddle is read: the wisest is the one who knows his wisdom is worth nothing. The quest then governs the action. He cannot stop because the god has posted him; the daimonion, the sign that only ever forbids, turns him from politics; and in the farewell he means to keep the mission among the dead. It stays particular throughout: a man of seventy, a named accuser, thirty votes, thirty minae. Held below 9.0 because outside the oracle quest the myth comes as comparison. Achilles, the soldier at his post, the gadfly on a large and sluggish horse (30e), Palamedes and Ajax unjustly judged are figures in a forensic speech, evoked rather than built; and the archetype of the just man condemned by his city is completed outside this work, for the death is told in the Phaedo, and this myth ends at the courtroom door.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The inheritance is Attic forensic oratory, Antiphon, Andocides and Lysias, with its exordium, narration, proofs and appeal for pity; the model defence already existed in Gorgias’ Defence of Palamedes, and Palamedes is named in the work (41b). The Socratic literature grew up after 399 too: Xenophon wrote his own Apology, and Polycrates’ prosecution pamphlet answered such works. The swerve is the defence that refuses to defend, turning every convention against itself: an exordium that disowns eloquence and means it, proofs that become cross-examination, a refusal of the appeal for pity (34c to 35b), a counter-penalty that proposes reward, and a defeat made the proof of the case. The defence speech becomes the self-portrait of a philosophical life. The stake was real: Plato wrote within a few years of the execution, in the city that ordered it, and named himself present (34a). Held at 8.7 because the instrument is the courts’ own and the Palamedes precedent is close; the swerve is in the use, not the mould, and Plato’s larger departure was the dialogue, which this work largely sets aside.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The work knows that philosophy is answerable to the city and that the city’s answer is a vote, and only a speech at trial can say it: the audience is the jury, and the reader is placed among the voters. The speech is addressed to the men of Athens until the end, when Socrates gives the title “ō andres dikastai”
“men of the jury” (40a) to those who voted to acquit, since only they have judged. The two unspoken votes are the form’s hinges: the defence that could not persuade becomes, after the verdict, a speech that no longer needs to, and after the sentence one that addresses two juries apart. In the Meletus passage the practice on trial is performed inside the form that condemns it, and the jurors’ unheard noise (20e, 30c) builds the hostile crowd into the monologue. Recast as a dialogue, the work loses the city as listener; recast as narrative, it loses the reader’s place on the jury. Held off the top because the middle of the defence, from 31c to 35d, slackens into the forensic container.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Evidence over some twenty-four centuries, and the questions stay open. Is the profession of ignorance sincere or ironic, and how does it square with the knowledge claimed at 29b and the certainty that no harm comes to a good man? Does Socrates seek acquittal, or, as Xenophon’s Apology suggests, prefer to die? How does the man who would disobey a court that ordered him to stop philosophising (29c to d) agree with the Socrates of the Crito, who will not break the city’s laws? What is the daimonion? Does the work defend democracy or indict it? Each has a large literature, and every age that argues about conscience and the state reads the work anew: as Stoic exemplum, as Christian prefiguration, in Montaigne’s “Of Physiognomy”, in Hegel and in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony (1841), in Nietzsche against Socrates, in Arendt on thinking and politics, in Gregory Vlastos on Socratic irony and in I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates (1988). Held below the top because the work is short and its arguments, once grasped, can be stated, and part of what passes for its depth, how much is Socrates and how much Plato, is a question about history rather than a yield of the text.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The field is Greek prose of the early fourth century BC, Attic oratory, history and the new Socratic literature, and with it philosophy as it was then forming; the work is weighed on literature and thought both. Its intrinsic force: it made philosophy a way of life answerable to a divine command rather than to the majority, set its first-person justification in public before the city, and made the examined life and the knowledge of one’s ignorance the measure of what philosophy is. Achieved reach, named: it fixed the image of Socrates for antiquity and after; it stands behind the Stoic and Cynic exempla, the Socrates of Cicero and Seneca, and the Christian apologists, Justin Martyr setting Socrates beside Christians condemned for impiety and taking the genre’s name, Tertullian’s Apologeticum after him, Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua centuries later; then Montaigne on death, and the modern defence of conscience and free inquiry against the state, from Mill’s On Liberty, which invokes the trial, to King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, which names Socrates and the gadfly. Held at 9.1 because much of that reach belongs to the figure of Socrates more than to this text, and is shared with the Phaedo, the Crito and the Socrates of other hands.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, over some twenty-four centuries. The text survives whole, transmitted in the Plato corpus through late antiquity and Byzantium in medieval manuscripts, and was printed in the Aldine Plato of 1513 and in Stephanus’ edition of 1578, whose pages give its references; nothing is charged to form. Presence is of the widest kind: read in Greek without a break in the East, its close put into Latin by Cicero, and since the Renaissance read, translated and cited without interruption; it is now among the most taught texts of ancient prose and the usual first reading in philosophy across much of the world. Its surface is fixed to Athenian procedure, the counter-penalty, the water clock, the minae, and that is history: the work is read for what it pressed on. What sets it at the lower part of the figure for a text read whole for millennia is the Latin West, where it went unread for most of the Middle Ages, when only the Timaeus and, late, the Meno and Phaedo were in Latin, until Ficino’s translation of the whole corpus, printed in 1484. The text was never lost and lived in Greek throughout.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Judged on Plato’s Attic. The command is of a plain style made a weapon. The first sentence, “hoti men humeis, ō andres Athēnaioi, peponthate hupo tōn emōn katēgorōn, ouk oida”
“how you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers, I do not know” (17a), opens with a profession of not knowing and so states the theme of the whole in its first clause; the disclaimer of eloquence is itself eloquence, and the work knows it. The voice holds one register through comedy, testimony, defiance and consolation, and a man is drawn complete by his manner of speech, never described. The turns are timed: the Prytaneum proposal follows the verdict without a pause, the farewell divides the two juries, and the last sentence balances “I to die” against “you to live” and ends on the god. Held at 9.0 because the making is uneven within the work: the cross-examination wins by trap rather than argument, the horses and their trainers and the mules of 27d to e among it; the round of the examinations (21b to 22e) is schematic; and the middle of the defence, from 31c to 35d, runs on in forensic routine.

Score: 9.0 / 10

One law governs the whole: the god’s command to examine, and the care of the soul before everything else (29d to 30b). Socrates states his part of it at the outset, that he will speak plainly and say only what he believes (17b to c), and gives it its form at 29d: “peisomai de mallon tōi theōi ē humin”
“I shall obey the god rather than you”. Take the two most distant elements, the comic trap that ends in Meletus’ mules and the farewell’s hope of questioning Palamedes and Ajax among the dead. They obey the same law: the mission continues past death, and the comedy of the cross-examination is the same act as the eschatology. The old slanders, the soldier’s post, the refusal of pity and the proposed reward are all applications of it. The apparent contradictions a severe reader presses resolve under it: the knowledge disclaimed is of the greatest things, the knowledge claimed (29b) is of what the mission forbids. Held at 9.0 because the range, though it spans comedy and death, is a single speaker’s on a single occasion, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged at the speech’s scale, where it holds more than its length suggests, and all of it joined by one trial: the soul and its care (29d to 30b); the city, its courts and the Council; democracy and the oligarchy of the Thirty; war, at Potidaea, Amphipolis and Delium (28e); the gods, the oracle and the charge of new divine things; politicians, poets and craftsmen, the three classes examined, and the comic stage of the Clouds; the family, three sons kept from the court and commended to the jurors at the close (41e); death and what may follow it. They are integrated, not listed: each is weighed by the question of what a life is answerable to. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that every order passes through one speaker on one day: there is one person in depth, no woman speaks or is named, nature is absent, and labour is seen only as the craftsmen’s competence.

Score: 8.0 / 10