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Socrates Benefits the CityAn Excerpt from the Apology of Socrates
Socrates:
Men
of
I would have you know, that if you kill such a one as I am, you will
injure yourselves more than you will injure me. Nothing will injure me,
not Meletus nor yet Anytus—they cannot, for a bad man is not permitted
to injure a better than himself. I do not deny that Anytus may, perhaps,
kill him, or drive him into exile, or deprive him of civil rights. He
may imagine, and others may imagine, that he is inflicting a great
injury upon him. But there I do not agree. For the evil of doing as he
is doing—the evil of unjustly taking away the life of another—is greater
by far.
And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may
think, but for yours, that you may not sin against the God by condemning
me, who am his gift to you. For if you kill me, you will not easily find
a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech,
am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great
and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and
requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has
attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always
fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You
will not easily find another like me, and therefore I would advise you
to spare me. I dare say that you may feel out of temper (like a person
who is suddenly awakened from sleep), and you think that you might
easily strike me dead as Anytus advises, and then you would sleep on for
the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you sent you
another gadfly. When I say that I am given to you by God, the proof of
my mission is this: if I had been like other men, I should not have
neglected all my own concerns or patiently seen the neglect of them
during all these years, and have been doing yours, coming to you
individually like a father or elder brother, exhorting you to regard
virtue. Such conduct, I say, would be unlike human nature. If I had
gained anything, or if my exhortations had been paid, there would have
been some sense in my doing so. But now, as you will perceive, not even
the impudence of my accusers dares to say that I have ever exacted or
sought pay of any one; of that they have no witness. And I have a
sufficient witness to the truth of what I say—my poverty.
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