The Apology — who's who

Seventy years old. A stonecutter's son who never charged a fee for his teaching, served bravely as an infantryman at Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium, and has spent forty years questioning his fellow Athenians in the marketplace. He is on trial for impiety and corrupting the youth. He could have begged for mercy; he could have proposed exile; he could have promised to stop philosophizing. He does none of these. The whole speech is his — three parts, two votes, one sentence at the end.

The young poet who has formally brought the indictment. Socrates calls him to the witness stand in the middle of his own defense and cross-examines him on the spot. Within a few exchanges Meletus has been led into self-contradiction — he claims Socrates is the only Athenian who corrupts the young, and that Socrates is at once an atheist and a believer in new divine beings. Plato lets the contradictions stand. Meletus is the visible accuser, but the trial is not really about him.

A wealthy democratic politician, prominent in the restoration of democracy after the Thirty Tyrants brought it down four years earlier. He considers Socrates a threat to the recovered city — Socrates was associated with Critias and Alcibiades, the two most notorious products of his teaching, and Anytus has not forgotten. He does not speak in the Apology, but Socrates names him repeatedly as the dangerous one, the figure whose political weight will determine the verdict. Plato writes him as the force behind the prosecution, not the figurehead.

An Athenian orator, the third name on the indictment, brought in to represent the city's rhetoricians whom Socrates's questioning has embarrassed over the years. He has no speaking role in the Apology and almost no presence in the speech. Socrates names him only in passing, as one of the three faces of the prosecution alongside Meletus and Anytus, and otherwise lets him stand silent. His usefulness to the case is the constituency he speaks for, not anything he himself contributes.

Five hundred and one ordinary citizens, chosen by lot from the rolls of Athens, who vote on guilt and on sentence. Socrates addresses them throughout — sometimes respectfully, often with pointed irony, occasionally with what reads as contempt. They convict him by a margin of about thirty votes. After he proposes free meals at public expense as his counter-penalty, they vote death by a much larger margin. He calls them "men of Athens"; he calls only those who voted for him "judges."

Twenty-eight years old at the time of the trial, present in the courtroom. Socrates names him in the second speech as one of the friends who will guarantee the thirty-mina fine. The Apology is Plato's reconstruction of his teacher's defense, written sometime in the years after — close enough to the event that other witnesses could have contradicted it, far enough away that artistic shaping is doing real work. Every dialogue Plato ever wrote is in some sense an answer to this day.

Socrates's longtime friend, an Athenian democrat who shared the city's exile under the Thirty Tyrants and returned with the restoration. Years before the trial, he went to the oracle at Delphi and asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The priestess answered that no one was. That answer, and Socrates's decades-long attempt to refute it, is the origin of the philosophical mission the Apology is defending. Chaerephon is dead by 399 BCE, but his brother is in the courtroom and can confirm the story.

The Pythian priestess at the temple of Apollo in Delphi, whose answer to Chaerephon's question — that no one is wiser than Socrates — Socrates treats throughout the speech as a divine commission. He spent decades trying to disprove the oracle and discovered, by failing, what it meant: that human wisdom is little or nothing, and that the wisest person is the one who has noticed this. The oracle never speaks in the Apology, but the whole speech is, in a sense, Socrates's report back.

The world's first democracy, fresh from defeat in the Peloponnesian War, fresh from the brief tyranny of the Thirty, anxious about its identity and its losses. It is about to execute its most famous philosopher for asking uncomfortable questions about whether anyone in the city actually knows what they claim to know. Socrates predicts in the closing speech that the verdict will be remembered as a stain on the city. He was right; the Apology is the document that made it so.