Apology

What It Is

Not an apology in the modern sense. The Greek apologia means a defence speech, and this is Plato's version of the speech Socrates made at his trial in Athens in 399 BC, charged with impiety and with corrupting the young.

It is short: thirty or forty pages, an hour of an evening. It is also unusual among Plato's works in not being a dialogue. One man talks, which makes it the easiest door into Plato by some distance. No technical vocabulary, no theory of forms, no metaphysics to master before you can begin.

How much of it is Socrates and how much is Plato is one of the oldest unresolved questions in philosophy, and you should carry it with you as you read. Plato was in the room. He was also an artist with a purpose.

Why It Matters

This is where philosophy stops being a subject and becomes a way of living. The claims made in this speech founded the Western intellectual conscience, and a handful of its sentences have been carried out of it into every century since.

It is the founding text of the individual against the crowd, and of the duty to keep asking a question after the room has made it clear it would rather you stopped. Which is why it keeps being picked up by exactly the people you would expect. The Stoics, Montaigne, Mill in On Liberty, Gandhi, who translated it, and the tradition of civil disobedience running from Thoreau through King.

The historical setting is not decoration. Athens in 399 BC was a shaken city: a long war behind it, an oligarchic coup barely over, its restored democracy nervous and unforgiving. Socrates had spent decades in conversation with young men from families that democracy had reason to loathe. The trial is about philosophy, and it is also about a city's fear. The speech reads completely differently once you can feel the room.

Before You Read

An hour. Sentence by sentence it is the least difficult work of philosophy on this list, which is exactly why you should go slowly. Socratic irony is easy to miss at speed. He is often at his most serious when he sounds most modest, and at his most dangerous when he sounds most agreeable.

Read Euthyphro first. It takes twenty minutes, every standard edition prints it in the same volume, and it shows you Socrates doing the very thing he is about to be tried for.

Which Translation to Read

• G. M. A. Grube, revised by John Cooper (Hackett) — recommended. The standard English Socrates, taught across the English-speaking world. Exact, unfussy, clear without being flattened. You will find it in Hackett's Five Dialogues, which pairs it with Euthyphro, Crito, Meno and Phaedo for the price of a sandwich. The cost: Grube is plain. He makes no attempt at the rhetorical music of the Greek, and the paperback is a student book, not an object for the shelf. View on Amazon →
• Christopher Rowe (Penguin Classics, 2010), in the volume titled The Last Days of Socrates. The best introduction and commentary in any popular edition. Rowe is illuminating on what Plato is doing as a writer, and his English is more literary than Grube's. The cost: the introduction and commentary are long and opinionated, and they discuss the dialogues in full, so save them for afterwards.
• Thomas West and Grace Starry West, Four Texts on Socrates (Cornell University Press). The most literal version available, sacrificing elegance for accuracy on purpose. It includes Aristophanes' Clouds, which shows what an Athenian audience had been laughing at Socrates about for twenty-five years. The cost: the English is wooden by design. This is a study text.

Take Grube for the best all-round reading text, with the companion dialogues thrown in. Take Rowe for the finest guide, and the Wests if you want to argue about the Greek. Benjamin Jowett's Victorian version is free and everywhere, and dated enough that you should not rely on it.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it aloud. It is a speech, and reading it silently is like reading a score instead of hearing the music. Read the introduction afterwards; almost all of them take the whole affair in view.

Read it twice in one sitting. It takes an hour, and the second pass, once you can hear the tone, is the one that stays with you.

Watch the tone rather than the argument. Ask, at each turn, whether Socrates is trying to persuade the men in front of him or to say something for the record.

And do not read it as a transcript. It is Plato's art, shaped for Plato's purposes. The five hundred Athenians who heard the original had to make up their minds about the man standing there. Read it as though you were sitting among them, and make up yours.