I repeat, don’t be shocked because, you see, with me, it is like this: I am seventy years old and yet this is the very first time I have ever appeared here, in a court of law and so I am totally unprepared and unacquainted with the ways people speak here. Gentlemen, expect from me nothing else.īecause I do not believe, fellow Athenians, that I should be appearing before you, at my age, behaving like a child, trying to construct over-adorned speeches and so, gentlemen this is the only thing I ask of you: Don’t be surprised or disturbed in the slightest, if, as I go on with my defence speech, I use words which I always use in public, at the tables in the market place, say, or elsewhere in the city, places where many of you would have heard me speak. So, let me repeat then that, though from these men you have heard hardly a single word of truth, from me you will hear nothing but the truth.Īnd, by Zeus, men of Athens, you will also not hear from me a speech that is highly cultivated like that spoken by my accusers, with elegant and highly adorned words and phrases but a speech made up of words that come to me spontaneously, words that speak the honest truth. Well, if that is the case, then I must admit, gentlemen that I am indeed a “skillful orator” though not in the sense in which they use the term.

How well you have been persuaded by the words of my accusers I do not know but well, while listening to them, I had completely lost any sense of who I was, so persuasively did they speak!Īnd yet, I can assure you, fellow Athenians, they did not utter a single word of truth and of all those untruths they’ve uttered I marveled at one in particular: the one where they’ve warned you to be careful of me lest I deceived you with my “skillful oratory.” I wondered at their lack of shame for making that comment because they would be found to be lying the very moment I opened my mouth when it would become obvious to all of you that I am not at all a very good orator! Unless, of course, what they meant by the words “skillful oratory” is that I speak the truth. “Virtue is sufficient for happiness, and for virtue nothing is requisite but the strength of Socrates.”- Antisthenes (The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers) The Apology of Socrates

Plato apology full text