Apology

Plato’s Apology records the speech Socrates gave in his own defense at his trial in Athens, where he stood accused of impiety and corrupting the young. Rather than beg for mercy, Socrates calmly defends the examined life, insists that he knows only that he knows nothing, and declares that a good man cannot be harmed by death. Condemned to die, he faces the sentence with serene conviction. One of the foundational texts of Western philosophy, it is both a stirring portrait of intellectual courage and the origin of ideas about conscience, truth, and the duty to question authority that still shape how we think today.