Plato's Apology

Plato's Apology

At the elderly age of seventy, Socrates found himself fighting against an indictment of impiety. He was unsuccessful at trial in the year 399 B.C. The charges were corrupting the youth of Athens, not believing in the traditional gods in whom the city believed, and finally, that he believed in other new divinities. In Plato's Apology, Socrates defends himself against these charges. He claims that the jurors' opinions are biased because they had probably all seen Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds. The Socrates portrayed in Aristophanes' Clouds is an altogether different character than that of the Apology. The two different impressions of Socrates lead to quite opposite opinions with regard to his guilt. In The Clouds, Socrates' actions provide evidence of his guilt on all three charges. However, in the Apology, Socrates is fairly convincing in defending his innocence on the first two charges, but falls short on the third charge. Socrates, in The Clouds, is portrayed as an idiot who thinks he's walking on air and is interested primarily in gnats' rumps. He is delineated as a natural philosopher/sophist. He is hired to teach Pheidippides to make the "worse argument", the argument that is really incorrect and unjust the "better"—to his father's creditors— so that Strepsiades, Pheidippides' father, will not have to pay his debts. While this in itself is corrupt, it was that he changed Pheidippides from the time he entered Socrates' "Thinkery" into a corrupt scoundrel, completely devoid of morality that was even more deplorable. At the beginning, Pheidippides is a respectful son who loves his father, but after "graduating" from the Thinkery he is beating his father with a stick (lines 1321-1333). Socrates ...

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...revailing notion that the gods control the behavior of mortals like puppeteers as was often espoused in Greek lore. But rather, that gods are benevolent towards their human subjects. Thus, Socrates seems to have conjured up a new kind of divinity, thereby making him guilty of Meletus' third charge. Although neither depiction of Socrates is entirely accurate, they each illustrate some guilt on Socrates' part. The Aristophanic Socrates is completely guilty while the Platonic Socrates is only guilty on one account. In both works, he probably did not deserve to be condemned to death but more so in Plato's work it seems that Socrates has wrongfully been put to death. For an argument can be made that not only was Socrates not guilty of the charges, (at least most of them), but that his pursuit of morality and his view of the gods was invaluable to the society at large.

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