If you could only recommend one book to everyone, what would it be?
Ask Donald Robertson, who has spent his career writing about Stoicism and Socrates, and he doesn't hesitate: Plato's Apology. When I put the question to him, he told me he is normally reluctant to recommend books at all. A good recommendation depends on knowing the person. The Apology is his one exception, the single text he thinks every human being should read, and his video on it has been watched over 130,000 times.
This page is the companion to our conversation: a Plato's Apology summary, what the Apology of Socrates actually is, and why a courtroom speech from 399 BCE still gets under people's skin.
Reading about Stoicism is the easy part.
The free 7-Day Stoic Challenge gives you one short audio lesson and one exercise a day for a week. By day seven you'll have trained more than most people who have only read about it.
Start the challengeWhy Donald Robertson recommends Plato's Apology
His case for it is simple. The Apology is short, a few hours at most, and you don't need a philosophy degree to read it (there's a free version at MIT Classics). And it reads at the pace of a courtroom drama rather than a treatise, because that is literally what it is: a man on trial for his life, defending it in real time.
And it does something most philosophy books don't. Rather than handing you conclusions, it leaves you with questions that keep working on you afterwards. Robertson's phrase for it: the text "creates images in your mind" that linger. He reckons weeks, months, even decades later you are still chewing on what Socrates said. I believe him. The Apology shaped Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius; if you want to understand Stoicism or Western philosophy generally, this is where the thread starts.
The line everyone half-remembers from it is usually given as:
"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing."
Worth being honest here: that exact wording appears nowhere in the text. It is a popular paraphrase of Apology 21d, where Socrates concludes he is wiser than others only in that he does not imagine he knows what he doesn't. The paraphrase is catchier. The original is more unsettling.
What is Plato's Apology about? A summary of Socrates' defence
Written by Plato, Socrates' student, shortly after the trial of 399 BCE, the Apology is not an apology in our sense. Nobody says sorry. The Greek apologia means a defence speech, and that is what this is: Plato's record of what Socrates said to the jury of Athenian citizens who would vote on his life.
The charges were corrupting the youth and impiety, introducing new gods. Socrates, facing a death sentence, does not beg. He cross-examines his accusers, exposes the contradictions in the charges, and defends the way he has spent his life: questioning people who claimed to know things, and showing them they didn't. The jury convicts him anyway. He is sentenced to die by drinking hemlock, and his refusal to grovel on the way down is what turned a local trial into the founding scene of Western philosophy. For the historical backdrop, the World History Encyclopedia entry on Athens is a good orientation.
The opening lines set the tone, polite and lethal at once:
"I do not know what effect my accusers have had upon you, gentlemen, but for my own part I was almost carried away by them; their arguments were so convincing. And yet hardly a word of what they said was true." (Plato, Apology, 17a, trans. Benjamin Jowett)
Socrates on death
The most quoted stretch of the Apology is Socrates on mortality. He was around seventy at the trial. He had lived through war, plague, and the deaths of most of his friends, and what he says about death is not bravado. It is a position he had clearly worked out long before anyone threatened him with it.
His argument: we do not fear death. We fear our beliefs about death, which is a different thing, because nobody actually knows what death is. If it is a dreamless sleep, there is nothing in it to dread. If it is a journey somewhere else, that might be the more interesting option. Either way, treating it as the worst thing that can happen is a claim to knowledge nobody possesses:
"To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know." (Plato, Apology, 29a, trans. Benjamin Jowett)
Robertson points out that this is the seed of the most famous sentence in Stoicism, Epictetus's line that people are not upset by events but by their opinions about them. The whole Stoic project on death is in many ways a footnote to Apology 29a.
A defence of philosophy itself
The deeper argument of the Apology is not about Socrates' innocence. It is about what a life is for. Socrates tells the jury, in effect, that staying alive is not the most important thing a person can do; living well is, and he would rather die than stop doing the work:
"For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth, but first and foremost for the excellence of your soul." (Plato, Apology, 30a-b, trans. Benjamin Jowett)
And here is the detail Robertson relishes: Socrates conducts his defence by doing the very thing he is on trial for. He questions, he debates, he digs for truth, in front of the men about to vote on whether that activity deserves death. "He's standing there, doing what they accused him of, right in front of them." It is the most complete refusal to be intimidated in the historical record, and he was an old man with everything to lose.
What the Apology leaves you with
Five things the text plants, whether you agree with Socrates or not:
- Question everything, including the things your whole society treats as settled. Especially those.
- Fear is mostly belief. Examine the belief and the fear often shrinks with it.
- Character outranks survival. Socrates chose integrity over a longer life, deliberately, with his eyes open.
- Wisdom and popularity pull in opposite directions more often than we'd like.
- Knowing that you don't know is rarer and more valuable than any amount of confident knowledge.
I won't pretend I live up to the second one, let alone the third. That is rather the point of reading it more than once.
Watch the full discussion
Robertson and I go deeper on all of this, why the Apology endures, how it feeds into Stoicism, and what Socrates was actually like, in the clip below.
Further resources
- Donald Robertson's writing on Stoicism and Socrates lives at his website.
- The Socrates Cheatsheet: more from Donald on Socrates, distilled.
- Free Plato's Apology PDF and web versions are at MIT Classics.
- If you need to cite Plato's Apology in an essay: credit Plato as author, name the translator, and use the Stephanus numbers (17a, 21d, 29a) rather than page numbers. Purdue OWL has the MLA formatting details.
- For Socrates' life and legacy, the BBC documentary is a solid overview, and the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Plato covers where the Apology sits in his work.