Summary
Socrates remarks that Meletus, Anytus, and
Lycon, who have brought the present charges before
the court, are only the most recent of a number of
people who have spoken out against him. He has
more reason to fear his older accusers than these
recent ones, because the former have been speaking
out against him for some time, prejudicing many of
the jurymen against him from the time of their
youth. These older accusers levy two principal
accusations against Socrates: first, that he does
not believe in the gods, but rather teaches purely
physical explanations for heavenly and earthly
phenomena; and second, that he teaches how to make
a weaker argument overcome a stronger argument by
means of clever rhetoric. Socrates complains that
he is not even certain who these older accusers
are, though he makes a passing allusion to
Aristophanes (the comic playwright who parodied
Socrates in The Clouds). As a result, he
cannot cross-examine these accusers, and he must
acknowledge that the prejudices they have lodged
against him go very deep. All he can do is answer
their accusations as best as he can.
Socrates first addresses himself to the accusation
that he "inquires into things below the earth and
in the sky" (19b)--that is, that he tries to
provide physical explanations for matters that are
normally considered to be the workings of the gods.
He refers here to Aristophanes' play, where
Socrates is portrayed as floating about in the air
and uttering all sorts of nonsense about divine
matters. Socrates responds that he does not
pretend to have any knowledge of these things, nor
is he interested in them. He has no complaints
against people who do claim to be experts in these
affairs, but he is not one of them. He asks the
jury to consider whether any of them has ever heard
him speak about any of these subjects.
Socrates then distances himself from the sophists
(the men who are typically disdained for teaching
their students how to make weaker arguments
overcome stronger arguments). These men generally
charge a fee for their services, and Socrates
denies ever having charged anyone for engaging in
conversation with him. He ridicules such behavior,
saying that a sophist will persuade young men "to
leave the company of their fellow citizens, with
any of whom they can associate for nothing, attach
themselves to him, pay money for the privilege, and
be grateful into the bargain" (19e-20a). These
sophists claim to teach their students about virtue
and how to become better citizens, and Socrates
concedes that such teaching may well be worth a
great fee, but that he himself lacks any skill in
teaching these matters.
Commentary
The main thrust of this section is to distance
Socrates from the Presocratic philosophers and from
the sophists, distinguishing him as unique among
the Athenian intellectuals. The claim that
Socrates provides physical explanations for divine
phenomena is true of the Presocratics, and the
claim that Socrates charges a fee for teaching
rhetoric is true of the sophists, but neither claim
is true of Socrates himself. He consistently
professes to have no expertise in any field
whatsoever; that he has never claimed such
expertise; and that he has certainly never charged
a fee for passing on such knowledge.
"Presocratic" philosophy refers to Greek philosophy
untouched by Socrates' influence. The Presocratics
date back to the sixth century B.C., when thinkers
began to question the existing mythological
explanations for the existence of the world, the
universe, and matter, and began looking for
physical explanations instead. Among the famous
Presocratics are Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus,
and Parmenides. The state sanctioned devout
worship of the Olympian gods, so the Presocratics'
teaching was considered illegal and dangerous. In
the Phaedo (96a-98b), Socrates claims that
in his youth, he was attracted to the teachings of
Anaxagoras, one of the great Presocratics, but
that he later abandoned that line of thinking.
However, Socrates himself never taught such
matters, and his defense at 19d is not that he was
never interested in Presocratic philosophy, but
that he never claimed expertise or taught it
himself. Indeed, Socrates' teachings remained
exclusively in the human realm, dealing with
questions of ethics and virtue. One of his great
contributions to philosophy is the introduction of
ethical questions, and his dismissal of the
Presocratic interest in cosmology.
The sophists were discussed in the previous section
as men who trained Athenian youths for a career in
politics by teaching them how to make convincing
arguments and flowery speeches. Plato is
determined to set Socrates apart from such men, and
many of his dialogues have Socrates showing up the
emptiness of their teachings. One of the great
differences between Socrates and the sophists is
that the sophists charged a fee for their services,
and Socrates' poverty speaks to the fact that he
has clearly not profited greatly from teaching.
