INTRODUCTION TO THE APOLOGY OF SOCRATES.

Two charges were brought against Socrates, one, that he did not believe in the gods received by the state, the other, that he corrupted the Athenian youth by teaching them not to believe.

Plato, who was present at the trial, probably gives us the very arguments employed by the accused on that occasion. Socrates disdained to have recourse to the usual methods adopted by the popular orators of the day to secure an acquittal; and, having devoted his whole life to the search after and the inculcation of religious, philosophical, and moral truth, resolved to bear himself in this extremity in a manner consistent with his established character, and to take his stand on his own integrity and innocence, utterly uninfluenced by that imaginary evil, death. From this cause it is that his defence is so little artificial. In his discussions with others, on whatever subject, it was his constant habit to keep his opponents to the question before them, and he would never suffer them to evade it, but by a connected series of the most subtle questions or arguments compelled them to retract any erroneous opinion they might have advanced: whereas, in defending himself, he never once fairly grapples with either of the charges brought against him. With regard to the first accusation, that he did not believe in the established religion, he neither confesses nor denies it, but shews that he had in some instances conformed to the religious customs of his country, and that he did believe 2in God, so much so indeed that even if they would acquit him on condition of his abandoning his practice of teaching others, he could not consent to such terms, but must persevere in fulfilling the mission on which the Deity had sent him, for that he feared God rather than man. With reference to the second charge which he meets first, by his usual method of a brief but close cross-examination of his accuser Melitus, he brings him to this dilemma, that he must either charge him with corrupting the youth designedly, which would be absurd, or with doing so undesignedly, for which he could not be liable to punishment.

The Defence itself properly ends with the twenty-fourth section. The second division to the twenty-ninth section relates only to the sentence which ought to be passed on him. And in the third and concluding part, with a dignity and fulness of hope worthy even of a Christian, he expresses his belief that the death to which he is going is only a passage to a better and a happier life.

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