Analysis: The Apology Of Socrates

There was some issues brought against Socrates at his trial some of them included: not recognizing the gods of Athens, introducing new gods, and corrupting the youth. In the actual trial of Socrates he was found guilty but if I was an Athenian jury back then I would have voted not guilty for three reasons: the gods that he was speaking to the youth about were the children of Athens gods, the youth in Athens weren’t being forced to listen to Socrates, and he wasn’t being paid to teach people about these gods so nobody was being forced to listen to him. Socrates parents were members of the class of skilled artisans, who, in the period of just ten years after the Persian Wars, were beginning to achieve prominence. It was the class that created …show more content…
Anaxagoras was a Presocratic philosopher and Socrates was his student. Anaxagoras was an atheist, which led him to be exiled from Athens around 450 B.C. So the fact that Meletus likened Socrates against Anaxagoras was a serious charge in Athens. But in The Apology of Socrates, Socrates defends himself against these charges: “Therefore if I do believe in daimons, as you say, and if, on the one hand, daimons are gods of some sort, then this would be what I say you are riddling and jesting about, when you say that I do not believe in gods, and again that I believe in gods, since in fact I do believe in daimons. On the other hand, if daimons were certain bastard children of gods, whether from nymphs or from certain others of who it is also said they are born, then what human being would believe that there are children of gods, but not gods? It would be as strange as if someone believed in children of horses or asses, mules, but did not believe that there are horses and asses… There is no device by which you could persuade any human being who is even slightly intelligent, that it is not the part of the same man to believe in both daimonia and divine things, and further that this same man believes in neither daimons nor gods nor heroes (West, Apology, …show more content…
“That I happen to be someone of this sort, given to the city by the god, you might apprehend from this: it does not seem human, on the one hand, that I have been careless of all my own things and that for so many years now I have endured that the things of my family be uncared for; and on the other hand, that I always do your business, going to each of you privately, as a father or an older brother might do, persuading you to care for virtue. If I was getting something out of this, and if I was receiving pay while I exhorted you to these things, it would be somewhat reasonable. But as it is, even you yourselves see that the accusers, who accused me so shamelessly in everything else, in this have not been able to become so utterly shameless as to offer a witness to assert that I ever took any pay or asked for it. For, I suppose, I offer a sufficient witness that I speak the truth: my poverty (West, Apology,