SOCRATES. FROM THE GREEK OF PLATO's "DIALOGUES." THE ACCUSATION. HE dialogue begins with a meeting between Socrates and Euthyphro in the neighborhood of one of the courts of law. EUTHYPHRO. What novelty has happened, Socrates, that you have left the walls of the lyceum and are now pacing the king's portico? You surely have not a lawsuit in the court which sits there? SOCRATES. The Athenians, Euthyphro, do not call my business a suit, but an indictment-not a civil, but a criminal, process. Eu. How say you? Has any one brought an indictment against you? For I will never believe that you have brought one against another person. Soc. No, certainly. Eu. Then another has indicted you? Soc. Even so. Eu. And who? Soc. I do not myself, Euthyphro, exactly know the man. He seems to me a young man and an ignorant one. His name is, I think, Meletus. He is of the district of Pitthis. Do you happen to know any Meletus of that district, a man with long smooth hair, a thin beard and a hook-nose? Eu. I do not know him, Socrates. But what is his indictment against you, Socrates? Soc. What is it? A very weighty and high-pitched one indeed, as seems to me. That he, young man as he is, should be master of so great a subject is no small thing. He knows, as he says, in what way the minds of young men are corrupted, and who are the persons who corrupt them. He must be a very wise man, and, looking with displeasure at me as a person who by my erroneous views corrupt young men of his own age, he runs to the city as a boy runs to his mother, and lays an accusation against me. He seems to me to be the only one of our politicians who begins at the right end. It is quite right to attend to the improvement of the young men first, to make them good, as the husbandman considers the young plants as the most important. Meletus will in the first place mend us who spoil, he says, these young plants, and then no doubt afterward attend to the older men, and so do infinite good to the state. We cannot fail to see the indignation that is masked under this ironical praise, calm as the manner is. Euthyphro expresses this feeling more directly: "I wish it may so turn out, Socrates, but I am afraid that the opposite result will happen. Those who attack you seem to me to begin the destruction of the city by tearing up the hearthstone. But tell me what he do what he means by corsays that you rupting young men." Soc. It is really an absurd story, my He says that I make new gods friend. and do not acknowledge the established powerful speaker. It did appear to me su ones. Eu. I understand, Socrates: he means your dæmon, or divine guide, that you say accompanies you. And this he makes a point to found his accusation upon, and brings you before the court of justice, knowing that such accusations produce an effect on the many. And so it is. They laugh at me also whenever I pretend to prophesy, and yet I always prophesy truly. It is all envy, but we must not heed them. Soc. Well, Euthyphro, perhaps there is no great harm in being laughed at. But it seems to me that, though the Athenians are not angry with a man for being wise, they are very angry with any one who makes others wise. If they only laugh at me, as you say they do at you, it may be easy to let them have their laugh and have done with it; but if they take the matter in earnest, it is difficult for any one to know what course things will take, except for a prophet like you. Eu. But I hope, Socrates, no harm will come of it, and that you will win your cause. FROM SOCRATES' DEFENCE BEFORE HIS JUDGES. premely audacious in them to make such an assertion, which must immediately afterward be disproved by the fact; for you will soon see that I have no skill in speaking, unless they call a man a powerful speaker because he says what is true. If they mean this, I certainly must allow that I am a speaker of a very different kind from them; for they, as I have said, have not spoken a word of truth: from me you shall hear the whole truth, and that not clothed in ornate sentences with studied terms and expressions; you will have from me plain facts expressed in the plainest language. Indeed, Athenians, it would ill become me at my age to come before you with a studied discourse like a boy. And there is one thing, O Athenians, which I must beg and entreat of you: if I use in my defence the same terms which I have been accustomed to use in the marketplace and in the shops, where most of you have heard me talking, do not wonder at that, nor take offence. For this is the fact. I now enter a court of justice for the first time, though I am more than seventy years old. I am therefore altogether strange to the kind of language used here. And therefore excuse me as if I really were a stranger if I speak to you in that tone and in that manner in which I have been brought up. I ask you a thing which is, I think, reasonable, that you take no account of the manner of my address to you-it might be better, it might be worse, perhaps but to consider this, to attend to this, whether I say what is right or not; for that is the virtue of a judge, as to speak truly is the virtue of How you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers I know not, but, for my part, in listening to them I no longer knew myself, so persuasively did they speak. And yet there is not a word of truth in what they have said. But among the false statements which they made there was one at which I especially marvelled-namely, when they warned you to take care that you were an advocate. not led astray by me, inasmuch as I was a Let us go back to the beginning and that and induce them to come to them on condition of making large payments, and consider themselves as under an obligation besides. I hear, too, that there is another very clever man arrived, a Parian; for I was lately with a person who spends more money on these Sophists than all the rest. together, Callias, the son of Hipponicus, and I asked him (he has two sons), "If, Callias, your sons were colts or calves, we should have been able to find and to hire a manager for them who would bring them into good condition and make them good of their kind; but who can make them good in their actual kind-good as men and as citizens? II suppose that, as you have sons, you have considered this question. Is there any such person or no?"-" Certainly there is," said he.-"And who and what is he, and what are his terms of teaching?"-"It is," he said, "Socrates, Euenus, a Parian, and his terms are five minæ." And I thought to myself what a highly favored man this Euenus must be to have this talent and to exercise it so readily. I should have thought great things of myself if I had had this talent, but, men of Athens, I have it not. consider what this calumny is which Me- And if you have heard from any one that I pretend to teach men, and receive money for so doing, that also is false. I think it is a very admirable talent, if any one has the power of teaching men, like Gorgias of Leontium, and Prodicus of Keos, and Hippias of Elis. Any one of these, O judges, can go into of our cities and so attract the youth that, though they might have the conversation of their fellow-citizens for nothing, they leave any But perhaps some one will take me up and say, "But, Socrates, what is your real case? How did these calumnies arise? If you had done nothing different from other people, there would not have been so much talk about you. Tell us what you really have done, that we may not be left to guesswork." If any one says this, he seems to me to speak reasonably; and I will try to tell you what has made for me this unfortunate reputation. Attend, then, to my account of myself: perhaps some of you will think I am in jest, but I assure you it is the | It cannot be false; he cannot tell a lie. For exact truth which I tell you. I got this rep- a long time I was at a loss what he could utation in consequence of a certain kind of wisdom which I have. What kind of wisdom is this? It is a human wisdom; I have no wisdom but the wisdom of a man. Those whom I have just been speaking of are perhaps wiser in some wisdom more than human; I do not know how to describe it. I have it not, and he who pretends that I have pretends falsely and calumniates me. And now, Athenians, do not take it amiss if I seem to claim something extraordinary; for I shall not make the claim on my own authority, but shall refer to an authority which you will allow to be sufficient. I shall refer you to the deity who gives oracles at Delphi to testify whether I have any wisdom, and of what kind it is. You know Chærephon; he has been my companion from my youth up, and is known to most of you. He was driven into exile with you, and was restored with you. You know the character of Chærephon-how earnest he is in all that he gives his mind to. He upon a time ventured to go to Delphi and to propound this question to the oracle, and-O judges, do not be offended--he asked whether any one was wiser than I was. The Pythoness answered that no one was wiser. His brother, who is here, can testify this to you; for he himself is dead. And pray attend to the object which I have in saying this: I want to show you how the calumnies against me had their origin. I, then, when I heard this, thought thus within myself: What does the god mean, and to what does he refer? For I am not conscious to myself of having any wisdom, great or small; what, then, does he mean when he says that I am the wisest of men? mean. At last, with great hesitation, I was led to this line of inquiry. I went to one of the men, who is reckoned wise, thinking that in that case I should test the oracle and be able to say to it, "Here, at least, is a man wiser than I man wiser than I am, and yet you have said that I am the wisest of men." Examining this man, then-I have no occasion to mention names: he was one of our wise statesmen-examining him, O Athenians, I came to this result. In conversing with him it appeared to me that he was so accounted wise by many other persons, and especially by himself, but was not really wise. I then attempted to show him that he thought himself wise, but was not so. And then I became odious to him, and to many who were present. And then, returning into myself, I reasoned thus: I am wiser than this man, for it is tolerably plain that neither of us knows what is right and good, but he thinks he does know; I, as I do not know, do not think that I know. I have this small advantage over him, that what I do not know I do not think that I do know. I then went to another of those who were reckoned wiser than he, and arrived at the same conclusion; and so I became odious to him too, and to many others. After this I still went on, seeing with grief and with fear that I was making myself hated, but still thinking that the answer of the deity must be attended to at any rate, and that therefore I must go on trying to make out the meaning of the oracle by application to all who were supposed to know anything. And by heavens, O Athenians--for I must tell you the truth-I seemed to come to this conclusion: Those who had the highest reputation seemed to me, thus inquiring, to be most deficient, and others who were less thought of seemed to have more reasonable claims to some wisdom. I am obliged to tell you my wanderings in this way, like a man who had a series of tasks imposed upon him, that the oracle might be duly tested. For after the politicians I went to the poets-the tragedians and the dithyrambic poets, and the rest-that I might then at least catch myself in the manifest case of being more ignorant than them. I took them the poems which they had most carefully written, and I asked them in detail what they meant, that I might then learn something from them. And I am really ashamed, O Athenians, to tell you how this turned out, but I must speak the truth. In almost every case all the other persons who were present were better able to tell the meaning of that which they had composed. So I soon came to the conclusion that poets did not make their poems by any wisdom which they had, but by a sort of inspiration, like that of those who deliver oracles, for they too utter many a beautiful and wonderful thing, but know not what it means. The poets seemed to me to be in the like case. And yet I saw that, in consequence of their poems, they were thought to be wiser than other men in other things, though they were not so. So I left them, thinking that I had the same advantage over them as over the politicians. And at last I went to the artisans. In their department I was conscious that I knew almost nothing, and I knew that I should find that they knew many beauti ful arts. And here I was not disappointed. They knew things which I did not know, and were in this way wiser than I was. But, O men of Athens, they seemed to me to have the same defect as the poets and other artists. Because they had mastered their own art each thought that he was also very wise in other things of the greatest moment, and this conceit of theirs spoilt their wisdom. So I asked myself whether I had rather be as I was, not possessing their knowledge and not having their ignorance, or to have both, as they had. And I answered to myself and to the oracle that it was better for me to be as I was. As the result of this course of inquiry, O Athenians, I have incurred much and heavy odium, and have been the subject of many calumnies, and have got the name of being wise. For all who are present when I prove a man to be ignorant think that I am wise in that subject. But the conclusion seems to be, O men of Athens, that the deity who gave the oracle is really wise, and that the oracle means this-that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that the oracle did not mean me, Socrates, in particular, but used my name as an example; as if it had said, "He, O men, is most wise who, like Socrates, knows that in truth he has no wisdom that is of any value." And so I still go on asking, as the oracle suggests, of all persons, citizens and strangers, if any one is thought to be wiser; and when I find that he is not, I add this to the proofs that the oracle is in the right. And I have been so occupied with this inquiry that I have had no time to attend to any business, public or private, and have re |