Plato · c. 399-360s BCE · translated by Benjamin Jowett
Read The Trial and Death of Socrates with context
You can follow Socrates from the porch of the King Archon to the law-court, the prison, and the final conversation before the hemlock. These dialogues make Socrates comic, irritating, searching, law-abiding, and solemnly committed to care of the soul.
Key Reading Paths
- What is piety?: Euthyphro's confident definitions keep collapsing under Socrates' questions, just as Socrates prepares to face an impiety charge.
- The old accusers: Socrates says the trial has roots in long-standing rumors about sophistry, atheism, and corrupting influence.
- The oracle and ignorance: The Delphic oracle turns Socrates' lack of knowledge into a public mission of exposing false wisdom.
- Care of the soul: Socrates repeatedly asks Athens to value wisdom, truth, and virtue above wealth, reputation, and safety.
- Cross-examining Meletus: Socrates turns the accuser's certainty into contradiction, making the courtroom resemble the conversations that got him in trouble.
- Law and escape: Crito presses survival, friendship, and family; Socrates answers with justice, law, and refusal to repay wrong with wrong.
- Death and the soul: Phaedo transforms the execution into a final inquiry into body, soul, immortality, virtue, and philosophical preparation for death.
- The examined life: Socrates' best-known claim frames philosophy as a life-practice rather than a set of doctrines.