Trial of Socrates

Socrates: Offering Legal Counsel Socrates, the charges that you face are serious ones. For many years, you were allowed to wander the streets of Athens, advocating your moral philosophy of ideal governance. Your concept of 'philosopher kings' having the right to rule, versus the ordinary populace, was profoundly at odds with the ideology commonly espoused in democratic Athens. For many years, you were allowed to speak as you wished.

But gradually, as fears of tyranny began to creep into the average Athenian citizen's mind, your ideas began to fall out of favor. The first charge against you is impiety. Your attackers claim that you worship no gods at all. However, you must point out that in Athens, the freedom of speech that is advocated in our land has always allowed us to address the gods in humorous as well as a serious fashion.

Just as you, Socrates, have been mocked in the public theater in the plays of our most distinguished comedic playwrights, so has great Zeus himself. Furthermore, if you have ever ignored religious rituals or talked about the gods in a manner that seemed disrespectful, it was to prove a philosophical contention, not out of disrespect.

You did so in the same spirit that dramatists depict the gods, for effect, and did not view yourself as making any greater offense to the object of your discourse than when Aristophanes mocked yourself in his plays. Furthermore, you must stress that your words were in fact pious, and by your teaching you hoped all Athenians would live a more examined and mindful life, and therefore a more moral life.

When confronted with the notion that happy men are powerful and rich men, you always denied this, and instead stressed that truth, and fitness to govern one's self was the greatest moral ideal, not the ability to merely dominate others. The second charge against you is the corruption of the youth, alleging that you have inflamed the young to agitate against the state. Some of your students have had spotted histories, such as Critias, who strove to overthrow the democratic government, and succeeded briefly.

However, you must point out that you have never advocated outright sedition. Although you may have spoke of an ideal, philosophical kingdom, you did not say that people should overthrow our current system of government to attain it. You have always enjoyed the freedom of speech offered by Athens, and had Critias had his way, you could not have sustained yourself as a philosopher, given that you would likely have fallen afoul of his antidemocratic principles.

Make it seem as though your speculation about an ideal philosopher's kingdom was an intellectual exercise, like all of your other debate about philosophy, rather than something to be put into real practice. Only by making an argument based upon the principles of free speech do you have a hope of leaving the courtroom a free man. Secondly, you must stress that the actions of some of your former pupils was not based upon your teachings or your urgings, but was rather rooted in their own base nature.

Because of the fears stoked by the recent overthrow and restitution of the.