The Important Role Of Socrates In The Apology

Every person aspires to have a good and comfortable life. A good education, a good job, a house, a car and a great family are what most people use to define happiness. Having a degree of respect or praise in a person’s social circles, great achievements and successes are very important to some people. Some would go to unimaginable levels to acquire wealth such as corruption, murder, drugs, prostitution and weapons; all for the sake of getting rich. To most people, having wealth is equated to being happy. It does not matter that moral decadence is as a result of people trying to get rich and live better lives. Very few people concern themselves with matters of good or evil, right or wrong and of preserving morality in our societies. All

Socrates in the Apology spends most of his time examining and testing the people he and most other people considered wise as a service to the gods, in order to determine their worth. He considered himself unwise, and by accepting that he realized that in fact he was wise in that respect, for he never dared to take credit for what he was not. "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 than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know." (Plato 3). Through these examinations, he realized that the people considered wise by the public were mostly unwise and were living a lie. These included the politicians who thought themselves wise because they were popular, poets who did not understand their compositions more than their audiences and the craftsmen who believed that their knowledge made them wiser in other more important respects. Socrates took it upon himself to point the fault in the people he examined which earned him a lot of enemies. “I found that those who had the highest reputation were nearly the most deficient, while those who were thought to be inferior were more knowledgeable.”(Plato

He says that he is over 70 years old and his time on earth is almost coming to an end, most importantly, he appears in court to defend himself and have his life examined. He is not afraid for he has lived a life of honesty and truth. He presents himself as an example of a person whose life was worth living for before being examined by others he examined himself and corrected his errors to portray to the public an image that befits him, his actions and beliefs. He reminds the people present at his trial that his death will harm them more than him and that more like him will come and they will be difficult to deal with since they will have the advantage of youth. “You too must be of good hope as regards death, gentlemen of the jury, and keep this one truth in mind, that a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by the gods.” (Plato 14). Socrates embraces death in a manner that surprises even the people present at the trial. He sees it as an opportunity to continue with his life questioning the great men who died before him; if at all what is said about the dead is