Download Plato’s apology of Socrates and more Study notes Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity!
Notes on Plato’s Apology of Socrates
- Background a. The Setting: Ancient Athens i. ὅτι μὲν ὑμεῖς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, πεπόνθατε ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν κατηγόρων, οὐκ οἶδα: ἐγὼ δ᾽ οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν ὀλίγου ἐμαυτοῦ ἐ πελαθόμην, οὕτω πιθανῶς ἔλεγον. ii. Those are the opening words of Plato’s Apology of Socrates , at least in the version of it we have now. For most of us, I’d presume, these words don’t sound terribly familiar. Our ears are not attuned to the Attic dialect spoken by most ancient Athenians. But how ancient was this Athens of Socrates? How far away from us was it, chronologically speaking? And how does that chronological distance relate to the conceptual distance between us and Socrates? In other words: does the length of time between us make it harder for us to get a grip on what these ancient Greek figures were arguing about? iii. Perhaps a brief timeline can help us begin to fathom the number of years we’re talking about here. We’ll work backwards.
- 2015 CE—Today
- 1997 CE—Average Freshman’s Birth Year
- 1969 CE—First Internet Prototype (ARPANet) Goes Online
- 1939 CE—World War II Breaks Out
- 1914 CE—World War I Breaks Out
- 1865 CE—End of the American Civil War
- 1776 CE—America’s Declaration of Independence
- 1492 CE—Columbus Crosses the Atlantic
- 1440 CE—Invention of Printing Press
- 1000 CE—Leif Erikson Crosses the Atlantic
- 632 CE—Death of Muhammad
- 476 CE—Fall of Western Roman Empire
- 0 CE—Birth of Jesus of Nazareth (maybe!)
- 44 BCE—Assassination of Julius Caesar
- 323 BCE—Death of Alexander the Great
- 399 BCE—Death of Socrates (after the events depicted in the Apology ) iv. 2414 years—that’s a long time. Think of all of the events that have taken place since then. Aside from the innumerable, almost unnoticeable shifts in our everyday lives, we can make note of these seemingly huge changes in the history of the world. At the time of Socrates’ death, there was obviously no internet. There weren’t any printed books. There was no Christianity, no Islam. The Roman Empire didn’t even exist yet. The life and times of Socrates took place in a world without any of those familiar touchstones. It was a world that can and should strike us as a bit strange, a bit foreign. v. And yet the world of Socrates might not seem entirely foreign to us. We can still make sense of it, if only in an imperfect, imaginative way. Socrates lived in Athens, a port city on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. (Look it up on Google Maps!) By the time he was born—about 470 BCE—Athens was already an influential city in the region, trading with other cities across the water and building up its economic power. vi. With economic power came military power. By the time Socrates was born, an uneasy alliance of Greek cities had already repelled the powerful Persian Empire and established some measure of independence. (In other words: the events of 300 —taking place in 480-479 BCE—had already taken place.) According to the usual story, that victory kicked off a ‘Golden Age’ for Athens. During that age, leaders like Pericles led Athens to imperial supremacy over most of the other Greek cities. vii. Pericles’ Athens (ca. 461-429 BCE) was not a completely tyrannical empire, however. He also encouraged the growth of Athenian democracy. Under this democratic regime, citizens could take a more direct role in governing the city, influencing policies, and—most important for our purposes—conducting trials. Even though we call this form of government ‘democracy,’ we shouldn’t confuse it with America’s current form of democracy. In Athens, only free men—usually free men of a certain status—could vote or govern or serve on a jury. Women, slaves, foreigners, and other undesirables were kept out of the functioning of this democracy. viii. This so-called ‘Golden Age’ didn’t last forever, of course. It didn’t even last for all of Socrates’ life. He lived through tumultuous times. In 431 BCE, war broke out between Athens and its
pretty clear that he’s no Sophist. He’s not like those other guys. For one thing, he never takes any money! ii. How do we know who he was?
- But the question remains: how do we know that the Socrates of Plato’s Apology is ‘the real’ Socrates? The text of the Apology doesn’t seem to have been written by Socrates himself. In fact, we have no writings by Socrates himself whatsoever. Instead, what we have are reports of what he (might have) said.
- This might seem like a bit of a pointless question, if the only evidence we had of Socrates was found in Plato’s writings and dialogues. But that’s not actually the case. We do have other documents that attest to the historical figure of Socrates. But the strange thing is that Socrates doesn’t always seem like the same character, depending on which source we’re looking at. iii. Plato’s Socrates vs. Other Socrateses
- Aside from Plato’s Socrates, we have two main competing views of what Socrates was really like. The first comes courtesy of an author named Xenophon. The second comes from the comedic plays of a playwright named Aristophanes.
- Xenophon, like Plato, wrote admiringly of Socrates as an accomplished philosopher. Both authors even wrote dialogues of the same name—Symposium—depicting Socrates engaged with friends in a philosophical conversation that was also a bout of drinking. Xenophon’s portrayal Socrates, while still interesting in its own way, has not been as popular as Plato’s over the centuries. In some ways, this may be because Xenophon’s Socrates dispenses some pretty straightforward advice about knowledge and virtue. He’s not a Sophist—he doesn’t take money!—but the kind of advice he gives doesn’t really seem all that different from what a Sophist would say.
- Aristophanes, on the other hand, gives us a version of Socrates that is radically different from that of Plato. In his comedic play The Clouds , Aristophanes depicts Socrates as a pie-in-the-sky intellectual who makes wild claims and demands payment from the gullible young students in Athens. With his head in the clouds, Socrates tends to go around claiming to have secret knowledge about the natural
world—what lies above the sky and below the earth, as the Greeks would say. (Aristophanes made this painfully evident by having the actor portraying Socrates enter the scene while suspending from a crane from above, as if he were descending from the heavens.) What’s worse, he also teaches young Greeks how to make the weaker of two arguments sound like the stronger one, and vice versa. This makes rhetoric—the art of persuading people—more powerful than simply honesty and truth-telling. The result is that Socrates is not only an absurd fool, but perhaps also a dangerous influence.
- Plato seems to have had a strong negative reaction to Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates. As a student of Socrates, Plato wanted to defend his former teacher not only against the charge of being a fool, but even more so against the charge of being a bad influence on the people of Athens. It is this charge of ‘corrupting the youth,’ after all, that seems to have led to Socrates’ political and legal troubles.
- But who was this Plato guy? Why should we take his word over that of Xenophon or Aristophanes? Well, to answer the first question: it’s tough for us to know who Plato truly was. We know he was a student of Socrates. We know he wrote a good number of philosophical texts, many of which were dialogues between Socrates and other notable characters from the Athens of that time (including Plato’s own brothers!). And we also think that, despite his admiration for Socrates, he probably brought in a number of other philosophical influences when it came time to think up his own questions and arguments.
- And that leads us to the second question: why trust Plato? Well, perhaps it’s not really a question of trust here. We read Plato’s version of Socrates not because we absolutely know that he was telling us how Socrates really was, but because Plato’s dialogues have stood the test of time as philosophically interesting texts. That is: Plato’s Socrates can challenge us to rethink our presumptions and ask new kinds of questions, questions that never occurred to us before. In short, Plato’s Socrates can help teach us how to think.
trial. Over the course of his oration, he addresses not only the members of the jury (men of Athens—the body of democratic citizens), but also his own accusers: Meletus, Anytus, Lycon. If we understand this, we can start to picture a more vivid ‘courtroom-like’ setting for the words on the page.
- Once again, though, the question arises: is this was Socrates really said? Does Plato’s account of Socrates’ apologia accurately represent what was really said on that fateful day in 399 BCE? We cannot know if it does or doesn’t. And yet, we do not know that the questions and arguments posed by Plato’s Socrates in this text continue to give us pause and make us think today. And so our attention should be placed on what Socrates is saying in this text, rather than what he might have said in real life. d. The Prelude: Euthyphro i. Euthyphro as stage-setting within the larger ‘plot’
- Finally, to help us get an even better handle on the scene taking place in Plato’s Apology of Socrates , we can look to another Platonic dialogue: the Euthyphro. Even though we don’t entirely know when each dialogue was written, we do know that the Euthyphro comes earlier in the ‘story’ of Socrates’ last days than does the Apology. This is because, in the Euthyphro , Socrates runs into the title character while going to the law courts for his own trial. Euthyphro is surprised to bump into Socrates there, since he considers him to be an intellectual man with little interest in the day- to-day business of legal cases.
- In addition to the Euthyphro and the Apology , two other dialogues complete our picture of the last days of Socrates. The Crito takes place following the Apology , with the Phaedo coming along after that. Since (spoiler alert!) Socrates is found guilty and sentenced to death at the end of the Apology , the Crito then consists mostly of his friends trying to convince him to escape before his execution. This leads to a discussion about whether it is ever just or lawful to break the laws, even when they seem unjust.
- Finally, there comes the Phaedo. In this dialogue, which we’ll read later on in the semester, Socrates’ companions talk with him about death. The trial is over. The sentence has been passed. And Socrates has refused escape by any
means. So he must die, and he seems quite willing to accept that fact. This confuses and concerns his friends, which leads to a lengthy discussion about death, life, and the immortality of the soul. ii. Euthyphro as indicative of the aporetic Socrates
- But setting aside all of these details of Socrates’ last days, we can take one last look at the Euthyphro. In this brief dialogue, we can get a taste for how Plato’s Socrates operated.
- At the beginning of the dialogue, as we said, Socrates runs into the character of Euthyphro outside the law courts. While Socrates is there to defend himself at his own trial, Euthyphro is there to prosecute his own father. But why would he do that? Well, it turns out Euthyphro’s father had killed one of their servant workers who had already killed someone else.
- Euthyphro’s family is horrified that he would help prosecute his own father. They call that act ‘impious’ ( anosion ): perhaps somewhere between irreligious and unjust. Euthyphro, however, considers himself rather educated and claims that his family is mistaken about what is pious and what is impious. He, however, has the correct idea about what it means to be pious. And so he’s quite confident that his prosecution of his own father is the pious thing to do.
- Socrates isn’t so sure. It’s not that he necessarily has a better idea of what’s pious or not. Rather, he’s suspicious about how confident Euthyphro is in his own assessment of piety. Still, the two do agree about some things, such as that the gods love pious acts. But then Socrates asks the younger man: do the gods love pious acts because those acts are pious? Or are those acts pious simply because the gods love them?
- Long story short: these questions posed by Socrates don’t lead to a final agreement between him and Euthyphro about what piety is. They do not seem to be meant to lead to such a conclusion. Rather, they lead to an impasse, what the Greeks called an aporia. That might seem anticlimactic. Perhaps it is. But it also teaches us a lesson about being overly presumptuous when it comes to deciding what is pious and what is not, what gods love and what they don’t,
to speak off the cuff, not in the language of the law courts or even of the assembly, but rather in the marketplace chatter of the agora. iv. Yet Socrates’ claims here raise another question, the question of sincerity. How sincere is Socrates being here? Is he really going to be speaking at random? Or is he merely using the idea of spontaneity to conceal a deeper plan, a deeper chain of reasoning? Even if he didn’t literally write down his speech beforehand, how do we know that his seemingly off-the-cuff delivery isn’t just another kind of rhetorical ploy? How do we tell the difference between truly spontaneous speech and the stylistic imitation of spontaneity? (Here we’re playing devil’s advocate on behalf of Socrates’ accusers.) v. We shouldn’t neglect to mention that this distinction between persuasion and truth maps nicely onto the broader distinction between the so-called Sophists and the anti-Sophist Socrates. This takes us a bit beyond the text, for now, but it can nevertheless be instructive. It was the Sophists who, according to Plato’s negative account, traveled the cities of Greece dispensing advice about how to convince listeners and thereby gain influence. Truth was a side-issue. The point was not necessarily to speak most truthfully, but to speak most convincingly. Power came through persuasion, not necessarily through honesty. Here, Socrates is positioning himself against that kind of pedagogy. This might then be a shrewd opening move, given that many of his enemies—e.g., Aristophanes—would say that it’s Socrates’ sophistry that makes him so dangerous to the polis of Athens. vi. Socrates ends his opening section on truth and persuasion by reminding the jury what their duty is. Or it might be more accurate to say: he reminds them what their “excellence” is. The word translated as “excellence” here is aretē , which is often translated elsewhere as “virtue.” “Excellence” is a helpful translation, though, since it clears our head of any overly moralizing notions of virtue. The Greek aretē can certainly include moral virtue, but it goes well beyond that. The aretē of a pack- horse, for example, is that it carries a heavy burden without fail. vii. The aretē of a jury or a judge, then, has to do with their excellence in judging. As Socrates puts it: “concentrate your attention on whether what I say is just or not, for the excellence of a judge lies in this, as that of a speaker lies in telling the truth.” (18a) Socrates’ chosen form of speaking is then not just more honest than the persuasive words of his opponents, but also more excellent or
virtuous—precisely because the excellence or virtue of speech is telling the truth. (At least, this is what Socrates argues…) c. Two Generations of Accusers i. Socrates’ opening remarks conclude with a preview of the accusations he is about to respond against. As he tells us right away, these accusations derive from two main sources, two generations of accusers. First there was a group of older men who had always found Socrates to be a thorn in their side. They laid the groundwork for his bad reputation, most effectively by telling their children that Socrates was a terrible influence. Then came the younger, more recent accusers, whose accusations have led to Socrates’ legal troubles and the current trial. ii. Socrates next tells us that he will address each of these generations of accusers in turn. Because they came first and laid the groundwork, the older generation of men will be his first target. After that, he’ll move on to the younger prosecutors. Here he mentions only Anytus, (18b) although later we’ll also hear about Meletus and Lycon. iii. According to Socrates, the content of the first batch of accusations was contained in what they told their children: “they got hold of most of you from childhood, persuaded you and accused me quite falsely, saying that there is a man called Socrates, a wise man, a student of all things of the sky and below the earth, who makes the worse argument the stronger. Those who spread that rumor, gentlemen, are my dangerous accusers, for their hearers believe that those who study these things do not even believe in the gods.” (18b-c) iv. We can perhaps divide this initial accusation into a series of three:
- Socrates (illegitimately) investigates natural, supernatural, and sub-natural topics a. “things of the sky and below the earth”
- Socrates inverts the logical force of arguments a. “the worse argument the stronger”
- Implicitly, Socrates does not believe in the traditional gods v. The first attack seems to insinuate that Socrates is not using his intelligence for practical, civically minded activities. Instead, he’s coming up with wild theories about nature and even trying to peer behind the curtain into whatever lies beyond the visible world. vi. The second attack has to do with Socrates’ use of language. He appears to twist words in order to confuse the people he’s talking to and throw them into confusion. They no longer understand
iii. Socrates’ defense here is to point to the jury’s own experience encountering him in person: “I do not speak in contempt of such knowledge—lest Meletus bring more cases against me—but, gentlemen, I have no part in it, and on this point I call upon the majority of you as witnesses. I think it right that all those of you who have heard me conversing, and many of you have, should tell each other if any one of you has ever heard me discussing such subjects to any extent at all.” (19c-d) iv. Socrates’ rejoinder here is surprisingly empirical. He has no high- minded argument to make concerning such high-minded knowledge. Instead, he asks his fellow citizens to think back on their own interactions with him. He’s asking them to put some distance between his reputation—ruined by Aristophanes and Meletus and other accusers—and his actual conduct in their presence. v. In addition to that, Socrates seems to swallow the second accusation—making the weaker argument into the stronger (19b)—into the first accusation. It’s as if this accusation of inverting arguments is tied directly to the accusation concerning natural and supernatural knowledge. Because of that, his plea to the jury to think back on their personal encounters is also aimed at countering the second accusation. b. $ophistry i. Of course, making the weaker argument sound stronger is what the Sophists were known for—and Socrates doesn’t want the jury to think of him as a Sophist! He makes that very clear in his next set of comments. ii. Somewhat surprisingly, however, his main complaint now is the idea that people think he takes money for teaching students: “And if you have heard from anyone that I undertake to teach people and charge a fee for it, that is not true either.” (19d) This is not something that’s listed in the original slate of accusations. (Doth he protest too much?) Yet, for Socrates, the issue of payment seems to be indelibly linked to that of sophistry and, therefore, of guilt. iii. His next move is to throw a number of ‘real’ Sophists under the bus—Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias. These are the bad eggs. These are the false teachers coming into Athens—often from abroad, these foreign outsiders—and bilking young men out of their money. (19e) Here it almost seems like Socrates doesn’t necessarily disagree with his accusers when it comes to the
possibility that sophistic teaching corrupts the youth and undermines the city. It’s just that he himself is not one of those guilty corruptors! iv. One of the most egregious cases of sophistry, Socrates tell us, has to do with Evenus of Paros, whose teaching services were paid for at great cost by the Athenian Callias, on behalf of his own sons. Callias paid Evenus five minas, which was equivalent to 500 drachmas. Given that the average laborer made about one drachma per day, this was a decent wage. v. So what was it that Evenus professed to teach Callias? It was, in Socrates’ words, the content of human excellence—again, aretē. More specifically, this was a kind of social or political excellence— aretē politikē. (20b) In Socrates’ eyes, access to this kind of human-political virtue would indeed be worth a tidy sum. His sarcasm, however, indicates that he doesn’t think Evenus actually capable of teaching others to be virtuous or excellent in this way. Less sarcastically, he makes it clear that he himself is incapable of doing so as well (and he’s never claiming to be able to!): “Certainly I would pride and preen myself if I had this knowledge, but I do not have it, gentlemen.” (20c) c. The Source of Rumors i. Having defended himself from charges of (super-)natural knowledge, perversion of arguments, and plain old sophistry, Socrates next anticipates a possible counterpoint. If Socrates doesn’t have special knowledge about the world, if he doesn’t use language to destabilize arguments, if he doesn’t take money for his services, then—why is he at trial? Where do all of these accusations come from? Out of thin air? ii. Socrates admits that there might be some reasons that these accusations have arisen. That’s not to say that they’re well- grounded. Rather, certain events may have taken place which, if misunderstood, could have led certain enemies to form negative notions about Socrates’ lifestyle and occupation. iii. In order to repair his reputation against such slander, Socrates begins to tell his own story: “Perhaps some of you will think I am jesting, but be sure that all that I shall say is true. What has caused my reputation is none other than a certain kind of wisdom. What kind of wisdom? Human wisdom, perhaps. It may be that I really possess this, while those whom I mentioned just now are wise with a wisdom more than human; else I cannot explain it, for I
am not wise at all; what then does he mean by saying that I am the wisest? For surely he does not lie; it is not legitimate for him to do so.” (21b) e. Devising a Test i. Not one to stay still or satisfied in confusion, Socrates next devised a plan. He would go around Athens testing out different men who were said to be wise. By talking to them and asking them questions, he would be able to figure out if he was indeed wiser than them (which would indeed be surprising). ii. First, he went to a politician. Everyone though this great statesman possessed exceptional wisdom. But when Socrates interrogated him, he was left with the following impression: “I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not.” (21c-d) iii. Here Socrates is opening up a gap between appearance and being, between what seems to be the case and what actually is. Wisdom, in his estimation, only counts if someone actually has it, not if they merely appear to have it. The politician lets Socrates down precisely because he only has a veneer of wisdom. Deep down, he’s not much different from anyone else. iv. Even after testing out just this one man, Socrates begins to acquire a new perspective on the oracle’s proclamation. He thought to himself, “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” (21d) v. Now we can begin to catch a glimpse of Socrates’ more nuanced interpretation of Apollo’s prophecy. The point is not that he, Socrates, possesses huge amounts of special wisdom. Rather, his ‘wisdom’ mostly consists in not assuming that he knows a bunch of things that he doesn’t in fact know. His wisdom lies in his caution, his reflection, his questioning, not in rushing to claim all knowledge for himself. f. Testing the Rest i. After quizzing the politician, Socrates turns to other members of society who might be said to have wisdom. He frames this testing as a kind of divine mission—an “investigation in the service of the god.” (22a) What he begins to find is that those who have the biggest reputation for wisdom tend to have the least, while those
with less of a reputation tend to have a surprising amount of human wisdom. ii. After the politicians, then, he turns to the poets. Almost immediately, he determines that poets don’t know what they’re talking about, for the most part. Even though they can create great works of art that move us so deeply, they can barely explain what they’re doing or what it means. In that way, they’re more like “seers and prophets,” moved by inspiration rather than knowledge. (22b-c) iii. After the poets come the craftsmen. To a certain extent, the craftsmen do possess an impressive array of knowledge. But their knowledge is technical—that is, it has to do with their specific crafts. A great carpenter has an amazing amount of knowledge about carpentry—but that doesn’t necessarily mean they know more in general. Socrates is concerned about the human propensity to take skill ( technē ) in one field as indicative of wisdom more broadly. He calls this a plain “error.” (22c-d) g. Socrates’ Findings i. After quizzing the politicians, the poets, the craftsmen, and many other men of Athens, Socrates begins to refine his interpretation of Apollo’s prophecy. Whereas everyone else thought he was just trying to make himself look smart by making others look dumb, he was actually discovering a deeper truth about the chasm between divine and human wisdom. ii. As Socrates puts it: “in each case the bystanders thought that I myself possessed the wisdom that I proved that my interlocutor did not have. What is probable, gentlemen, is that in fact the god is wise and that his oracular response meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that when he says this man, Socrates, he is using my name as an example, as if he said, ‘This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.’” (23a-b) iii. For a human, then, to be ‘wise’ may just be to recognize the limits and shortcomings of one’s own wisdom. In its beginnings, at least, Socrates’ wisdom is more negative than it is positive. That is: he is wiser because he knows that he does not know everything. h. Transitioning to the Current Case i. After defending his modified claim to human wisdom, Socrates then returns to this idea that his accusers fall into two generational categories. He has so far been responding to the first generation, who had a problem with him specifically. This is most likely
- Socrates believes in strange new spiritual realities iv. Here we should pause to note two quick connections:
- Almost immediately, the question of Socrates’ philosophical claims turns into a political issue. The Greek word for city is polis , which is where we get our own vocabulary for talking about civic matters: politics, political, politician, and so on. Socrates’ teaching (or corrupting) of young men is almost immediately linked to its “political” consequences for the city.
- In addition to that, the philosophical and political aspects of these accusations are immediately linked to a religious problem. Socrates is somehow undermining the traditional gods—Zeus, Apollo, etc.—in favor of some unnamed new “spiritual things.” (The Greek here is daimonia , related to our word ‘demon’—although there is not necessarily a negative or devilish connotation here. Daimon denotes a spiritual being—usually a child of a god—without reference to its goodness or badness.)
- And to tie these two connections together: Socrates’ impiety is supposedly directed at the god ‘of the city.’ That is: the religious accusation against him is also a part of the political accusation against him. Like philosophy, religion is not a matter separated out from politics. All three— philosophy, religion, politics—are intimately intertwined. b. Who Improves the Youth? i. After naming the accusations against him, Socrates immediately launches into a counter-attack. He aims to reveal to the jury just how frivolous these charges are. And he will do so first by posing a series of question to one of his accusers, Meletus. Here Socrates is turning the tables somewhat, forcing Meletus to explain himself before his peers—just as Socrates has to do in his own defense. ii. Socrates’ aim in questioning Meletus is to show that his accuser doesn’t actually care about the virtue of young Athenians or matters of philosophy more broadly. Meletus may couch his own position in high-minded terms, but Socrates wants to say that that’s all for show. A bit of interrogation should suffice to show that, deep down, Meletus hasn’t thought much at all about the matters at hand. iii. At this point, the voice of Meletus begins to appear in the text. Although something of a dialogue begins here, our version of the
text doesn’t adopt a script-like format. It merely represents Meletus’ response after a dash, following Socrates’ question. iv. The first question Socrates asks is a loaded one: “Surely you consider it of the greatest importance that our young men be as good as possible?” (24d) “Indeed I do!” replies Meletus. The problem, of course, is that Meletus thinks Socrates, far from improving the youth, actually corrupts the youth whom he’s supposedly helping. v. But, asks Socrates, if I corrupt the youth, then who improves them? What standard am I being held up against? When pressed to reveal ‘who’ is actually capable of improving youth Athenians, Meletus responds: “the laws.” (24d-e) vi. Socrates is not satisfied with that answer. He wants to know “who” improves the youth, not “what.” The laws alone can’t do much without an interpreter, someone to help young people learn what the laws really mean. vii. So who is it that has knowledge of the laws? The jury, perhaps? And probably the audience in the court of law, as well. And then the government, ruling powers like the Assembly and the more rarefied Council—they know the laws fairly well, don’t they? After Meletus has agreed to all this, Socrates gets him to agree also that “all the Athenians” know the laws and can therefore improve young men by training them in the laws. (25a) Thus it’s only Socrates that corrupts young men, while basically everyone else in Athens is capable of improving them. How unlucky for Socrates! viii. The point Socrates is getting at here seems to be this: it doesn’t seem likely that the vast majority of people in a city would be capable of improving the youth of that city. Rather, it seems much more likely that there would be a smaller group of people—e.g., teachers—who would be tasked with improving the youth and preparing them for public service. But Meletus seems to have it backward: almost anyone could improve the youth by interpreting the laws for them—except Socrates! ix. To drive the point home—almost to the point of absurdity— Socrates turns to one of his favorite animal analogies: that of horses. With horses, he suggests, it’s not at all the case that just anyone is capable of improving them—i.e., of making them better horses, better at racing or better at hauling carts. Rather, we have special people whose job it is to improve horses, to raise them and train them. Horse breeders, we call them.
