Apology

In 399 BC, Socrates, seventy years old, stands before a jury of five hundred Athenians, charged with not believing in the city's gods and with corrupting the young. Instead of pleading for mercy, he explains his life: the oracle at Delphi declared that no one was wiser than he, and to understand it he questioned politicians, poets and craftsmen, and found that they believed they knew what they did not. He will not stop questioning, he says, even to save his life, because 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. Found guilty, he proposes, as his penalty, free meals at public expense.

Plato, who was present at the trial, wrote the speech some years later. It is the best place to begin with Plato, and it ends with one of the most famous farewells in literature: 'The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.' The translation is Benjamin Jowett's. The story continues in prison in the Crito and ends with Socrates' death in the Phaedo.

Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was born into an aristocratic family in Athens and became the devoted student of Socrates. After his teacher's trial and execution in 399 BC, he travelled, returned to Athens and founded the Academy, a school that lasted for centuries and counted Aristotle among its students.

Almost all his writings are dialogues in which Socrates questions his fellow citizens about justice, love, knowledge and the soul, from the Apology to the Symposium and the Republic. Known to Arab philosophers as Aflatun, he was read closely by al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd, and Western philosophy has been called a series of footnotes to him.