The defense — the oracle, the gadfly, and the refusal to stop

Socrates warns the jury he will not speak in the polished style of the orators. He is over seventy, has never been in a courtroom, and will speak the way he speaks in the agora. He has two sets of accusers, he says: the recent ones — Meletus, Anytus, Lycon — and a much older set, the rumor and slander that have followed him for decades. The older are harder to answer; he cannot call them to the stand. He has to fight shadows.

The shadows trace back to one moment. His friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, and the priestess answered that no one was. Socrates, baffled, set out to refute the god. He went to the politicians, who had the greatest reputation for wisdom and the smallest awareness of what they did not know. He went to the poets, who could not explain their own poems. He went to the craftsmen, who knew real things but on the strength of their craft claimed to know everything else. None survived questioning. Eventually he understood: human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and the wisest person is the one who has noticed it. Forty years of examination made forty years of enemies — who are really who is prosecuting him today.

He calls Meletus to the stand and within a few exchanges has him contradicting himself — claiming Socrates alone corrupts the young, and that Socrates is at once an atheist and a believer in new divine beings. Then he refuses the bargain the jury wants: stop philosophizing and we let you go. He cannot. The god has stationed him in Athens the way a general stations a soldier, and a soldier does not desert his post out of fear of death. To fear death is to pretend to know what no one knows. He calls himself a gadfly the god has attached to the great noble horse of the city, to sting it awake. Kill him, and the city will sleep peacefully ever after — unless the god bothers to send another.