either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.

O my judges—tfor you I may truly call judges

Me you have killed be- cause you wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an account of your lives.

weeping and wailing and lamenting,

a muna,

When I do not know whether death is a good or an evil, why should I propose a penalty which would certainly be an evil?

But that is not the case.

And so he proposes death as the penalty.

nd I say that these things ought not to be done by those of us who are of reputation; and if they are done, you ought not to permit them; you ought rather to show that you are more inclined to condemn, not the man who is quiet, but the man who gets up a doleful scene, and makes the city ridiculous.

Perhaps there may be some one who is offended at me, when he calls to mind how he himself on a simular, or even a less serious occasion, had recourse to prayers and supplications with many tears, and how he produced his children in court, which was a moving spectacle, together with a posse of his re- jations and friends:

For if I am really corrupting the youth, and have cor- rupted some of them already, those of them who have grown up and have become sensible that I gave them bad advice in the days of their youth should come forward as accusers and take their revenge; and if they do not like to come themselves, some of their relatives fathers brothers, or other kinsmen, should say what evil their families suffered at my hand

they like to hear the cross-examination of the pretenders to wisdom, there is amusement in this

For the strong arm of that oppressive power did not frighten me into doing wrong;

which was legal, as you all thought af terwards;

The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything,

here was an agree- ment between us that you should hear me out.

es, but I do care; I do not depart or let him go at once; I interrogate and examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue, but only says that he has, I re- proach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the less.

O my friend, why do you, who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never re- gard or heed at all?

death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown;

But no one who has a particle of understanding will ever be convinced by you that the same men can believe in divine and superhuman things, and yet not believe that there are gods and demigods and heroes.

He can not.

Did ever any man believe in horsemanship, and not in horses? or in flute-playing, and not in flute-players?

I swear by Zeus that you believe absolutely in none at all.

mean the latter—that you are a complete atheist. That

But you have just admitted that the good do their neighbors good, and the evil do them evil.

eletus, have sufficiently shown that you never had a thought about the young: your careless- ness is seen in your not ca

But that, my good sir, is not my meaning. ] want to know who the person is, who, in the first place, knows the laws.

He says that I am a doer of evil, who corrupt the youth;

have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud a

by reason of my devotion to the god.

But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets

wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of ge- nius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.

1 found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that some inferior men were really wiser and better.

evil name.

for there must have been something strange which you have been doing?

that I have nothing to do with these studies.

Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear

therefore I would have you re- gard me as if J were really a stranger, whom you would excuse if he spoke in his native tongue, and after the fashion of his country;—that I think is not an unfair reques

For I am more than seventy years of age, and this is the first tume that I have ever appeared in a court of law, and I am quite a stranger to the ways of the place;