Plato's Apology 30 C - 31 CDefense Against the Second AccusersThat Socrates is a gift to the city | |
| Do not make a disturbance, men of
Athens; continue to do what I asked of
you, not to interrupt my speech by
disturbances, but to hear me; and I
believe you will profit by hearing. Now
I am going to say some things to you at
which you will perhaps cry out; but do
not do so by any means. For know that
if you kill me, I being such a man as I
say I am, you will not injure me so
much as yourselves; for neither
Meletus nor Anytus could injure me;
that would be impossible, for I believe
it is not God's will that a better man be
injured by a worse. He might, however,
perhaps kill me or banish me or
disfranchise me; and perhaps he thinks
he would thus inflict great injuries upon
me, and others may think so, but I do
not; I think he does himself a much
greater injury by doing what he is doing
now—killing a man unjustly. And so,
men of Athens, I am now making my
defence not for my own sake, as one
might imagine, but far more for yours,
that you may not by condemning me
err in your treatment of the gift the God
gave you. For if you put me to death, you will not easily find another, who, to use a rather absurd figure, attaches himself to the city as a gadfly to a horse, which, though large and well bred, is sluggish on account of his size and needs to be aroused by stinging. I think the god fastened me upon the city in some such capacity, and I go about arousing, and urging and reproaching each one of you, constantly alighting upon you everywhere the whole day long. Such another is not likely to come to you, gentlemen; but if you take my advice, you will spare me. But you, perhaps, might be angry, like people awakened from a nap, and might slap me, as Anytus advises, and easily kill me; then you would pass the rest of your lives in slumber, unless God, in his care for you, should send someone else to sting you. And that I am, as I say, a kind of gift from the god to the city, you might understand from this; for I have neglected all my own affairs and have been enduring the neglect of my concerns all these years, but I am always busy in your interest, coming to each one of you individually like a father or an elder brother and urging you to care for virtue; now that is not like human conduct. If I derived any profit from this and received pay for these exhortations, there would be some sense in it; but now you yourselves see that my accusers, though they accuse me of everything else in such a shameless way, have not been able to work themselves up to such a pitch of shamelessness as to produce a witness to testify that I ever exacted or asked pay of anyone. For I think I have a sufficient witness that I speak the truth, namely, my poverty. | Student name: |