In His Own Defense

Socrates (Σωκράτης), born in Athens around 470 BC, was a Greek philosopher who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, he authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre.

In 399 BC Socrates was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth. After a trial that lasted a day, he was sentenced to death. He spent his last day in prison, refusing offers to help him escape.

The Socrates’ oration In His Own Defense was included by Plato in The Apology of Socrates (Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους), a Socratic dialogue of the speech of legal self-defence which Socrates spoke at his trial for impiety and corruption in 399 BC. We present it to our readers today in the English translation by Henry Cary (1906).