The penalty — free meals at public expense

The vote comes back narrow — convicted by about thirty votes either way, closer than Socrates expected. He says so. He had thought Meletus would not even clear the legal threshold without Anytus and Lycon. Now Athenian law requires him to propose a counter-penalty against Meletus's call for execution. This is the moment a defendant traditionally weeps, parades his children, offers a humble fine. Socrates does none of these.

He asks instead what a man deserves who has spent his life ignoring wealth, office, and political faction in order to attend privately to each citizen, urging them to care for the soul before the body. Such a man, he says, is a benefactor of the city, and Athens should keep him at his work. He needs leisure to instruct it; he is poor and cannot pay for it himself. The fitting reward is what Athens gives its Olympic champions: free meals at the Prytaneum, the public dining hall, for life. The chariot winner gives the city the appearance of happiness; Socrates has been giving it the real thing. He says this knowing how it will land.

He works through the alternatives and refuses each. Imprisonment: why live as the slave of whichever magistrate happens to hold office? A fine he cannot pay, with prison until he can: the same trap under another name. Exile: he is old, and if Athens cannot bear his conversation no other city will either. Silence — the only offer that might save him — is the hardest to refuse, and he refuses it most clearly. To remain quiet would be disobedience to the god who stationed him in Athens; besides, examining life every day is the greatest good a human being can do, and the unexamined life is not worth living. At his friends' urging — Plato named, with Crito, Critobulus, Apollodorus — he proposes thirty minas, which they will guarantee. The jury votes death by a much larger margin than the conviction.