Apology, by Plato. 
This work is universally known as Plato's 'Apology'
of Socrates, in deference to the word
apologia that stands in its Greek title.
Actually, the word means not an apology 
but a defense speech in a legal proceeding,
and that is what we get. Certainly,
Socrates does not apologize for anything.
This is not really a dialogue. Except for
an interlude when he engages one of his
accusers in the sort of question-and-
answer discussion characteristic of
Plato's 'Socratic' dialogues, we see
Socrates delivering a speech before his
jury of 501 fellow male Athenians. 
At the age of seventy he had
been indicted for breaking the law
against 'impiety' -- for offending the
Olympian gods (Zeus, Apollo, and the rest)
recognized in the city's festivals and
other official activities. The basis of
the charge, such as it was, lay in the way
that, for many years, Socrates had been
carrying on his philosophical work in
Athens. It has often been thought that
the real basis for it lay in 'guilt by
association': 
several of Socrates' known associates
had been prominent malfeasants in
Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian War
only a few years earlier and the oligarchic 
reign of terror that followed; but
an amnesty had forbidden suits based on
political offenses during that time.
However much those associations may 
have been in the minds of his accusers -- and
his jurors, too -- Plato makes him respond
sincerely to the charges as lodged.
After all, these would be the ultimate basis on
which he should or should not be found
guilty of anything. So he takes the
occasion to explain and defend his
devotion to philosophy, in the particular
ways he has pursued that in discussions
with select young men and with people
prominent in the city -- discussions like
those we see in Plato's other 'Socratic'
works. He argues that, so far from
offending the gods through his
philosophizing, or showing disbelief in
them, he has piously followed their lead
(particularly that of Apollo, through his
Oracle at Delphi) in making himself as
good a person as he can and encouraging
(even goading) others to do the same. 
The gods want, more than anything else, that
we shall be good, and goodness depends
principally
upon the quality of our understanding of
what to care about and how to behave in
our lives: philosophy, through Socratic
discussion, is the pursuit of that
understanding. This is, of course, no
record of the actual defense Socrates
mounted at his trial in 399 B.C., but a
composition of Plato's own. We have no
way of knowing how closely, if at all, it
conforms to Socrates' real speech. In
it Plato gives us the best, most serious,
response to the charges that, on his own
knowledge of Socrates, Socrates was
entitled to give. Was Socrates
nonetheless guilty as charged?
In deciding this, readers should notice
that, however sincere Plato's Socrates
may be in claiming that a pious
motivation for his philosophical
work, he does set up human reason in his
own person as the final arbiter of what
is right and wrong, and so of what the
gods want us to do: he interprets Apollo,
through his Oracle at Delphi, to have
told him to do that. As we see also from
Euthyphro, he has no truck with the
authority of myths or ancient poets or
religious tradition and 'divination' to
tell us what to think about the gods and
their commands or wishes as regards
ourselves. In democratic Athens, juries
were randomly selected subsets --
representatives -- of the whole people.
Hence, as Socrates makes clear, he is
addressing the Democratic people of
Athens, and when the jury find him guilty
and condemn him to death, they act as
and for the Athenian people. Did Socrates
bring on his own condemnation, whether
wittingly or not, by refusing to say the
sorts of things and to comport himself
in the sort of way that would have won
his acquittal? Perhaps. True to his
philosophical calling, he requires that
the Athenians think, honestly and 
dispassionately, and decide the truth of the
charges by reasoning from the facts as
they actually were. This was his final
challenge to them to care more for
their souls -- their minds, their power of
reason -- than for their peace and 
comfort, undisturbed by the likes of him.
Seen in that light, as Plato wants us to see it,
the failure was theirs.
