Apology: Themes, and How to Answer on It

Where it is worked. The one-day rule, which he says he would have overcome if there had been time. The absence of counsel. The prejudice older than the charge. The all-or-nothing choice of penalty, which turned his refusal to beg into a death sentence. And the jurors' oath, which he refuses to ask them to break.

The conclusion available to you. That procedural regularity is not the same as justice, which is exactly the argument the Pickwick chapters make about a Victorian court and the Adam Bede chapters make about an English assize. Making that connection across three texts is the strongest thing a candidate can do with this paper.

Theme five: the fear of death

The proposition. Death should not be feared, because nobody knows what it is, and only unrighteousness should be feared.

Where it is worked. The soldier at his post. "The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death." The silence of the divine sign on the morning of the trial. And the two possibilities: a dreamless sleep or a migration in which he can question the great dead.

Reference to context: the six passages the University sets

Note. Added by the past paper check. This text is set for reference to context more often than any other in Module II, and the examiner returns to the same six places. Two sentences each is what the paper allows.

A. "There can be no reward so fitting as maintenance in the Prytaneum, O men of Athens." Spoken by Socrates after the verdict of guilty, when Athenian procedure required the convicted man to propose his own penalty. The Prytaneum was the public hall in which the city fed its greatest benefactors, Olympic victors among them, at public expense, so he is proposing not a punishment but a public honour, on the ground that a poor man who has spent his life urging his fellow citizens to seek virtue deserves it more than a winner of the chariot race.

B. "There are many reasons why I am not grieved, O men of Athens, at the vote of condemnation." Spoken immediately after the verdict. He says he expected it, and is surprised only that the votes were so nearly equal, since a change of thirty votes would have acquitted him. The line sets the tone of everything he says after conviction, which is that the outcome was foreseen and does not alter the argument.

C. "For if I tell you that to do as you say would be a disobedience to the God, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious." Spoken while he explains why he will not accept exile and silence as a penalty. He adds the sentence for which the whole speech is remembered, that daily discourse about virtue is the greatest good of man and that the unexamined life is not worth living, and he admits that his hearers are still less likely to believe him.

D. "And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am about to die, and in the hour of death men are gifted with prophetic power." Spoken after the sentence of death, addressed to those who voted against him. The prophecy that follows is that his accusers will not be rid of criticism by killing him, because more critics will come and they will be harsher, since the way to escape censure is not to silence others but to improve oneself.

E. "He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own approaching end happened by mere chance." Spoken to the friends who voted for his acquittal, as part of his argument that no evil can happen to a good man in life or after death. He is saying that his conviction is not an accident but the time at which it was better for him to die and be released from trouble, which is why he is not angry with those who condemned him.

F. "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways: I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows." The last sentence of the Apology, spoken to the whole court as he leaves it. It refuses the consolation his friends want from him and returns instead to the position he has held throughout, that nobody knows what death is and that pretending to know is the ignorance he has spent his life exposing.

And a seventh, from the same page as E. Where a paper quotes "there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one is going into a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness", the context is his account of the two possibilities: that death is a dreamless sleep, which he calls an unspeakable gain, or that it is a migration of the soul to another place, where he could question the dead as he questioned the living.

Socrates: a character sketch in the form MU wants

Placing. Socrates is the accused and the speaker of the Apology, an Athenian in his seventies who wrote nothing and spent his life questioning his fellow citizens about what they claimed to know.

He is fearless without being theatrical. He refuses to bring weeping children into court, refuses to beg, and states plainly that he would rather die having spoken in his own manner than live having spoken in theirs.

He is a formidable examiner. The cross-examination of Meletus takes three moves and leaves the indictment contradicting itself, and it is conducted by a man with no legal training and no counsel.

He is obedient in a way that looks like defiance. Every refusal is grounded in obedience: to the god at Delphi, to the post he says he was given, to the oath the jurors swore.

He is poor and says so as evidence. His poverty is the proof he offers that he never taught for money and never sought anything for himself.

He is not humble in the ordinary sense. He proposes to be fed at public expense for life. A sketch that leaves this out has flattered him.

What he is for. He is the first figure in Western writing to state that a person may be right against everybody, and to accept the price of it in public.

The essay questions this text attracts, and how to open each

"The Apology is a defence of free speech." Discuss. Open by agreeing with a qualification: it defends the freedom to question rather than the freedom to say anything, and it grounds that freedom in a duty rather than a right, because Socrates claims to be obeying a god and not exercising a liberty.

"Was Socrates justly tried?" Open with the distinction between the regular and the just: every Athenian rule was observed, and the outcome is still remembered as a judicial murder. Then take the four features from theme four in order.

"Discuss Socrates as a character." Use the sketch above, and make sure the Prytaneum proposal is in it.

"What is the relevance of the Apology to a student of law today?" Three heads: the origin of the speech of defence; conscience against the State, which runs forward to Gandhi and to constitutional protections of belief; and the demonstration that a trial can be procedurally perfect and substantially wrong.

A worked answer

Question. "Discuss the conflict between individual conscience and State authority in the Apology."

Paragraph one, the position. Socrates presents the conflict at its sharpest and then resolves it in a way that most people who quote him do not notice: he disobeys the command and accepts the punishment, and it is the second half that makes the first half something other than lawlessness.

Paragraph two, the disobedience. He tells the court that if they offered acquittal on condition that he gave up philosophy, he would answer that he would obey God rather than them, and would continue exactly as before while he had life and strength. He compares himself to a soldier who has been given a post and may not desert it for fear of death.

Paragraph three, the submission. He does not deny the court's jurisdiction, does not flee, does not ask that the jurors be moved by pity, and expressly refuses to invite them to break the oath by which they have sworn to judge according to the laws. When sentence is passed he says he must abide by his award and lets his accusers abide by theirs.

Paragraph four, why the combination matters. Disobedience alone is defiance; submission alone is obedience; the two together assert that the individual may be right against the State while leaving the State's authority intact. That is the shape Gandhi later gave a method, and this syllabus sets Gandhi two topics after this one.

Paragraph five, the cost, and the conclusion. The position was fatal, and Socrates knew it: he says he was condemned not for want of arguments but for want of willingness to say what the court wished to hear. The Apology therefore does not argue that conscience will prevail. It argues that it should be maintained even when it will not, which is a harder claim and the reason the speech has lasted.

Quick revision

Five themes: conscience against the State; wisdom as knowing that you do not know; the critic as a service; the difference between a regular trial and a just one; and the fear of death.

The civil disobedience formula: disobey the command, accept the penalty, do not deny the court's authority.

The oracle produces the theory of wisdom; the gadfly produces the theory of criticism.

For the trial: one day, no counsel, prejudice older than the charge, an all-or-nothing penalty, and jurors under oath he will not ask to break.

For a character sketch: fearless, a formidable examiner, obedient in a way that looks like defiance, poor and using it as evidence, and not humble, since he proposes a public dinner as his sentence.

Test yourself

1. What exactly does Socrates do that makes his position civil disobedience rather than defiance? He refuses to obey a command that would silence him, and at the same time submits to the court's authority: he does not deny its jurisdiction, does not escape, does not ask the jurors to break their oath, and accepts the sentence.

2. State the theory of wisdom the oracle story produces. That human wisdom is worth little, and that the wisest person is the one who knows they do not know. Socrates concludes that he is better off than those he examined only in this, that they knew nothing and thought they knew, while he neither knew nor thought he knew.

3. Was the trial regular, and was it just? It was regular: a private prosecutor, a citizen jury, a defence delivered in person, a vote, and a choice between two proposed penalties, all as Athenian law required. It is nevertheless remembered as an injustice, because the prejudice that decided it was older than the indictment, because a capital case was decided in a day, and because the procedure turned a refusal to beg into a sentence of death.

4. How does this text connect to the others on your paper? Through the question a court cannot answer for itself: whether following its own rules is enough. Bardell against Pickwick is regular and worthless, Hetty Sorrel's trial is regular and merciless, and the Apology is the earliest and clearest statement of the problem.

5. What is the single detail most often left out of a character sketch of Socrates? That he proposed maintenance in the Prytaneum, a public honour, as his own penalty. A sketch that presents him only as humble and long-suffering has not accounted for it.