Athens, early summer, 399 BCE. A courtroom packed with more than five hundred jurors. A seventy-year-old man stands before them — barefoot, wrapped in a threadbare cloak, with neither counsel nor prepared speech. The indictment reads: "Socrates is guilty of not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledges, of introducing new spiritual beings, and of corrupting the youth" (24b–c). The penalty demanded is death. Three accusers: Meletus, Anytus, Lycon. The defendant: a man who never wrote a single word.
Plato's Apology of Socrates is the record of this trial — or, more precisely, a philosophical manifesto disguised as a record. The title, apologia, does not mean "apology" in the modern sense. It is a Greek legal term for a speech of defense. But read even a few pages and the pretense falls away. Socrates is not defending himself. He is attacking. His posture says, in so many words, that it is not he who is on trial but Athens itself.
Why read this text now? For anyone living under the pressure to "read the room" and keep quiet, the Apology is a foreign body. Here was a man who knew that speaking his mind would get him killed — and spoke anyway. And what he said began with an admission: "I know nothing." Why would confessing one's ignorance be worth dying for?
Picture the scene. Five hundred pairs of eyes. Cicadas and dust. The prosecution has finished its speeches, and at last the defendant rises to speak. Socrates opens by rejecting the very conventions of forensic oratory. My accusers spoke eloquently, he says, but what you will hear from me is the plain truth, "in the words I am accustomed to use in the marketplace and at the money-changers' tables" (17a–c). With that declaration, the most famous trial in the history of Western philosophy begins. Let us follow this courtroom drama as it unfolds in the original text.
Key Takeaways
- The "defense" is no defense at all: Socrates is not trying to win an acquittal. He uses the courtroom as a stage to demonstrate, in public, that "the examined life" (bios exetastikos) is the only life worthy of a human being. The Apology is philosophy performed in the form of a legal speech.
- "The unexamined life is not worth living" (38a): The most quoted sentence in all of Western philosophy. To question one's own beliefs, to engage others in dialogue, to strip away unfounded assumptions — Socrates declared he would rather die than abandon this practice.
- Fear of death as a species of ignorance: To fear death, Socrates argues, is "to think you know what you do not know" (29a–b). No one knows whether death is good or evil. To let fear of the unknown dictate one's actions is to capitulate to ignorance — the very thing his life's work was meant to combat.
About the Text
Structural Overview
The Apology has no chapter divisions. It is a single, continuous speech by a man standing in a courtroom. Scholars conventionally divide it into three speeches.
- First Speech (17a–35d): Rebuttal of the charges and defense of the philosophical mission
- Exordium (17a–18a): The refusal of rhetoric
- Reply to the old accusers (18a–24b): Combating prejudice; the oracle at Delphi
- Cross-examination of Meletus (24b–28a): Dismantling the indictment by logic
- The philosophical mission (28a–34b): The soldier analogy; the gadfly metaphor
- Peroration (34b–35d): The refusal to beg for mercy
- Second Speech (35e–38b): Counter-proposal on sentencing after the guilty verdict
- Third Speech (38c–42a): Final address after the death sentence
Commentary Following the Original Text
1. Exordium: The Refusal of Rhetoric (17a–18a)
Socrates begins with a provocation. "My accusers spoke eloquently," he says, "but hardly a word of truth was in it" (17a). This is not mere throat-clearing. It is a declaration of war on the forensic culture that governs the courtroom. In Athenian trials, defendants routinely deployed tears, theatrics, and polished rhetoric to sway the jury. Socrates renounces all of it from the start.
"You will not hear from me the kind of ornate speech you are accustomed to. I shall speak in the same way I am used to speaking in the marketplace and at the money-changers' tables" (17c–d). Note the detail — the money-changers' tables. The Socrates of the Agora, the man who buttonholes passersby and interrogates them, has walked straight into the courtroom without changing his register. He refuses to tailor his language to the occasion.
Was there a strategic calculation behind this plainness? The suspicion is as old as antiquity: is the profession of artlessness itself a rhetorical device? Perhaps. But the text leaves little doubt that Socrates means what he says. What he is bringing into the courtroom is not persuasion but truth — and in his mind the two are sharply distinct. He then announces that he must contend with two kinds of accusers.
2. The Old Accusers (18a–24b)
There are enemies more dangerous than the men who filed the indictment, Socrates says: "the old accusers" (18a–b). Nameless, faceless people who have spent years feeding prejudice into Athenian ears. "Socrates is a man who investigates things in the heavens and below the earth and makes the weaker argument the stronger." Aristophanes' comedy Clouds (first performed in 423 BCE) is the prime exhibit: its stage-Socrates hangs in a basket above the ground and teaches people how to cheat their creditors with sophistry (19c). A comedy from a quarter-century earlier was still lodged in the jurors' minds.
Socrates denies every charge. He has never studied natural science. He has never taken money for teaching (19d–e). Then why the reputation? This is where he introduces the story of the Delphic oracle. His friend Chaerephon went to Delphi and asked the priestess Pythia whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The oracle's answer: no one (21a).
Socrates was baffled. He did not think himself wise. But the god does not lie. So what did the oracle mean? This question shaped the rest of his life. To "refute" the oracle, he sought out people reputed to be wise and questioned them one after another — politicians, poets, craftsmen. The results were revealingly different. The politicians possessed none of the wisdom their reputations promised (21c–d). The poets produced admirable work but could not explain what they had written; they composed by inspiration (enthousiasmos), not by knowledge (22a–c). The craftsmen alone possessed genuine expertise — but because they excelled in their own trade, they assumed they were equally wise about everything else (22d–e). The common thread was this: all of them believed they knew things they did not know. Only Socrates was aware of his own ignorance (21d). In that one respect he was marginally wiser. That, he concluded, was the oracle's meaning.
Here is the first crux of the text. "The knowledge of ignorance" (the traditional label, though the phrase never appears in the text itself) is not intellectual humility. It is a weapon. A person who knows what he does not know holds an overwhelming advantage over someone who merely thinks he knows. And that advantage breeds resentment. The reason Socrates was hated is simple: the men he humiliated in argument were legion. Behind the trial lay not a legal problem but an accumulation of grudges.
Worse still, young men began imitating him (23c–d). The idle sons of wealthy families followed Socrates around the Agora, interrogating adults for sport. The adults who were shown up refused to blame themselves. Instead they said, "Socrates is corrupting the youth" (23d). The real cause of the indictment, Socrates insists, is not the charges on the written complaint but this resentment.
3. The Cross-Examination of Meletus (24b–28a)
Having disposed of the old prejudice, Socrates turns to the formal accuser, Meletus. This passage is the only stretch of dialogue in the Apology. Socrates does in the courtroom what he does every day in the Agora: he cross-examines.
"Who makes the youth better?" Socrates asks, in response to the charge that he corrupts them. Meletus answers: "The laws" (24d–e). Socrates presses: specifically who? The jurors? The members of the assembly? The audience? Meletus says, "All of them" (25a). So every Athenian citizen improves the young, and Socrates alone corrupts them? Socrates draws an analogy to horse-training: only a specialist trainer can improve a horse, while most people ruin one. Why should human beings be any different? (25a–b).
Then Socrates tightens the screw. Suppose I am harming the young. Is it deliberate or involuntary? If deliberate, it is self-defeating: a person made worse will harm those around him, including me. If involuntary, then the proper remedy is instruction, not prosecution (25d–26a). Either way, the charge collapses. Socrates does not assert his own position; he makes his opponent's position destroy itself. This is elenchos — refutation from within.
On the charge of impiety, the dissection is even sharper. "Are you saying I believe in no gods at all, or that I believe in different gods?" (26b–c). The indictment mentions "introducing new spiritual beings" (daimonia). If Socrates believes in spiritual beings, he believes in spirits (daimones). Spirits are the offspring of gods. To believe in the offspring of gods while denying the existence of gods is as absurd as believing in the offspring of horses while denying the existence of horses (27d–e). The logical net closes. Meletus has no answer.
And yet, for all the logical brilliance, the cross-examination changed nothing. Five hundred jurors watched Meletus' argument crumble, and still they voted to convict. Logic won the argument and lost the trial. Plato, speaking through the mouth of his teacher, recorded the moment when philosophy was rendered powerless before politics.
4. The Philosophical Mission (28a–34b)
Here the Apology reaches its heart. Having finished his legal rebuttal, Socrates turns to a direct defense of the way he has lived his life.
He begins by invoking Achilles. When the hero's mother Thetis warned him that killing Hector would cost him his own life, Achilles counted death a lesser evil than living as a coward who had failed to avenge his friend (28c–d). Every juror in the room would have known the story. Socrates makes the hero his precedent. A soldier who abandons his post out of fear of death is a coward. Socrates held his post through three campaigns — Potidaea, Amphipolis, Delium. He did not desert when his commanders ordered him to stand. Why, then, should he desert the post to which God has assigned him — the life of examination — simply because death threatens? (28d–29a).
Most of the jurors were themselves military veterans. Socrates knows this. He is mapping the language of military honor onto the philosophical mission. But then, in the very next breath, he provokes them. "Even if you were to acquit me on condition that I stop philosophizing, I would obey God rather than you" (29d). You may offer me my life — but if the price is silence, I choose death.
And what, precisely, does he do if he goes on living? Socrates describes his daily routine. He accosts citizens on the street and asks: "Are you not ashamed to care so much for money, reputation, and honor, while giving no thought to wisdom, truth, and the improvement of your soul?" (29d–e). If the man claims to possess virtue, Socrates tests the claim. If the claim proves hollow, he rebukes him for "valuing the most worthless things and neglecting what matters most" (30a). Old and young alike, foreigners and citizens — he treats them all the same (30a–b). This is what he calls his "service to God." Philosophy was not a desk job. It was performed on the street.
Is this arrogance? A mockery of the court? Perhaps. But Socrates has an argument. To fear death is the most typical instance of "thinking you know what you do not know" (29a–b). No one knows whether death is good or bad. To change one's behavior out of fear of the unknown is to exhibit the very "sham knowledge" Socrates has spent his life opposing. His willingness to accept death is not an act of bravery. It is an act of consistency.
Then comes the famous image of the gadfly (myōps). Athens, Socrates says, is "a great and noble horse, grown sluggish because of its size." He is the gadfly that settles on it and stings it awake all day long (30e–31a). Kill me, and you will spend the rest of your lives asleep. This is not a threat. It is a diagnosis.
As proof, Socrates recalls two episodes from his own past. Under the democracy, when the Assembly moved to try the generals from the battle of Arginusae in a single, illegal proceeding, Socrates alone voted against the motion (32a–c). The crowd grew violent and threatened him with arrest. He did not budge. Under the oligarchy of the Thirty, he was ordered to help arrest Leon of Salamis for an unjust execution. The other four men who received the order obeyed. Socrates went home (32c–d). Had the Thirty not fallen, he says matter-of-factly, he would have been killed. What matters is that under both democracy and oligarchy he refused to carry out an unjust order. His standard was not the regime but the distinction between right and wrong.
He also speaks of the daimonion — a divine sign that has visited him since childhood (31c–d). It is a voice that only restrains: it tells him not to do things, never tells him what to do. A strange inhibitory mechanism. Socrates says it is the reason he never entered politics. Had he done so, he would have been killed long ago for insisting on justice.
5. Peroration: The Refusal to Beg (34b–35d)
At the close of his speech Socrates breaks another convention. In Athenian courts it was standard practice for the defendant to parade his weeping children before the jury and beg for mercy. Socrates had three sons. He brought none of them (34c–d). Begging asks the jury for a favor, he says, and the jury's job is not to dispense favors but to judge according to the law (35b–c). A juror who yields to a plea for mercy is judging by emotion, not by law. That is a violation of the juror's oath.
A man on trial for his life is lecturing the jury on professional ethics. He does not ask to be saved. He demands that they be just. The last words of the first speech are spoken not for himself but for them.
This refusal is not a point of aesthetics. It is a point of logic. An acquittal obtained through begging would rest on sympathy, not on law. Socrates' lifelong claim has been that "doing injustice is worse than suffering it" (29b). To induce jurors to violate their oath — to make them judge by emotion — is to make them commit an injustice. To save his own skin at the cost of another's wrong is worse, in his eyes, than death.
6. The Second Speech: Counter-Proposal on Sentencing (35e–38b)
The verdict is guilty — 280 to 220, by scholarly reconstruction from the text (36a). A narrow margin. Under Athenian procedure, after a guilty verdict both prosecution and defense propose a penalty, and the jury chooses between them. The prosecution proposes death. What will Socrates propose?
Ordinarily a defendant would suggest exile or a heavy fine and escape with his life. Socrates asks what he truly "deserves." A man who has served the city ought to receive the honor reserved for public benefactors: free meals at the Prytaneum. The honor given to Olympic victors should be his, he says, because "they make you seem happy, whereas I make you actually happy" (36d–e).
One can imagine the uproar. A man facing the death penalty is demanding a state banquet. Provocation? Insanity? In the end, Socrates proposes a fine of thirty minas, guaranteed by Plato and other friends (38b). The jury rejects it and votes for death — and this time the majority against him is larger (36a). The Prytaneum gambit backfired.
Why not propose exile? Socrates considers the option and dismisses it. He could go to another city and live quietly — but living quietly means giving up philosophical conversation, and for him that would mean not living at all. If instead he carried on his questioning elsewhere, he would only be expelled again. "The young men will follow me" (37d–e). Exile merely postpones the problem. And it is in this context that the most famous sentence in Western philosophy appears: "The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being" (38a).
7. The Third Speech: Final Address (38c–42a)
The death sentence is confirmed. Socrates addresses two audiences in turn.
To those who voted to convict: you imagine my death will free you from criticism, but the opposite will happen. By killing me you will call forth critics who are younger, more numerous, and more relentless (39c–d). You cannot silence inquiry by killing the inquirer. The only way to stop criticism is to become better yourselves. The tone is prophetic.
To those who voted to acquit, Socrates' voice softens. He offers a piece of evidence. Throughout the entire trial, his daimonion — the divine sign that has restrained him at every critical moment since childhood — did not intervene once (40a–b). Not when he left home that morning, not when he entered the courtroom, not during the speech itself. The voice that usually stops him over the most trivial matters was silent. The inference: what has happened today — the conviction, the death sentence — may in fact be a good thing. This is less a logical argument than a confession of intuition. But for Socrates, the silence of the daimonion carried the weight of proof.
Then he turns to death itself. Death is one of two things: either total annihilation, a dreamless sleep; or a journey of the soul to another place (40c–41a). Neither is bad. If it is nothingness, it is the most restful night a person has ever had — a night so peaceful that even the Great King of Persia could scarcely match it (40d–e). If it is a journey, then Socrates will meet Homer and Hesiod, Palamedes and Ajax — men unjustly condemned in their own time — and Odysseus, hero of Troy. And there, too, he will examine them. "Those in the other world do not put you to death for asking questions" (41b–c). Whether this is a joke or a statement of faith is impossible to tell. That is part of its power.
The two-alternatives argument is not, strictly speaking, a proof. It does not rule out a third possibility: a painful afterlife. But Socrates' point lies elsewhere. We do not know what death is. To hold a definite fear about something one does not know is irrational. This epistemological restraint is his consistent stance toward death throughout the text.
And then the final sentence. "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways — I to die, and you to live. Which of these is the better lot, no one knows except the god" (42a). The text ends. No conclusion. No resolution. Only the question remains.
Core Concepts and the Architecture of the Argument
The Apology reads like an improvised courtroom monologue, but beneath the surface lies a skeleton. Do not be deceived by the apparent spontaneity. Four interlocking concepts drive the whole.
1. Human wisdom (anthrōpinē sophia). Only God possesses genuine wisdom; human wisdom is "worth little or nothing" (23a). If Socrates is wiser than other people, it is in one respect only: he knows what he does not know.
2. The examined life (exetazomenos bios). The practice of testing one's own beliefs and those of others through dialogue. The moment this practice is abandoned, human life becomes "not worth living" (ou biōton, 38a).
3. Care of the soul (epimeleia tēs psychēs). Socrates insists, again and again, that the soul matters more than the body or material possessions (29d–e, 30a–b). To make the soul "as good as possible" is the highest human task, and philosophical conversation is the instrument.
4. The prohibition against doing injustice. Socrates repeatedly claims that doing injustice is worse than suffering it (29b, 37b). This principle — explored at greater length in the Gorgias (469b–c, 509c) — is already fundamental in the Apology. He continues to philosophize because it is right. To stop philosophizing in order to avoid death would be to commit an injustice. Therefore death is preferable. This moral axiom is the hidden pillar of the entire speech.
The chain of reasoning: (a) The oracle declares that no one is wiser than Socrates → (b) Investigation reveals that others lack awareness of their own ignorance → (c) Therefore the examined life is a divinely mandated mission → (d) Abandoning the mission is equivalent to deserting one's post → (e) Fearing death enough to desert one's post is a textbook case of "thinking you know what you do not know" → (f) Therefore he accepts death.
The chain is not without gaps. The move from (a) to (c) — interpreting the oracle as a divine command to conduct philosophical inquiry — involves a logical leap. That "you are the wisest" and "you must go on examining others" are two different propositions. Socrates bridges the gap with something closer to faith than to argument.
Major Interpretive Controversies
1. The historical Socrates versus Plato's Socrates. This is the central question. How faithfully did Plato reproduce his teacher's words? Xenophon's Apology of Socrates recounts the same trial in an entirely different register. Gregory Vlastos (1991) argued that the Socrates of the early dialogues retains a substantial historical core; Charles Kahn (1996) countered that even the early dialogues should be read as Platonic literary creations. What is certain is that the Apology is no court transcript. Plato was a writer and a philosopher.
2. Was Socrates truly impious? In the text, Socrates repeatedly professes belief in God. But was his God the same as the traditional Olympian deities? Does the daimonion fit within the framework of conventional religion? M. F. Burnyeat (1997) argued that Socrates' religious outlook diverged subtly from tradition, and that the charge of impiety was not entirely a fabrication. Socrates did believe. But his belief was not the kind the polis demanded.
3. Why did Socrates not escape? In the Crito, he is offered a chance to flee prison and refuses. Is this consistent with the Apology? In the Apology he says, "I obey God rather than you"; in the Crito, he says, "I obey the laws." Is this a contradiction? Richard Kraut (1984) analyzed the tension in detail and concluded that Socrates did not regard obedience to law as absolute; the overriding principle was the prohibition against doing injustice.
4. Is "knowing that you do not know" a form of knowledge? Knowing that you are ignorant — is that not self-contradictory? Vlastos (1985) proposed that the "knowledge" Socrates disclaims and the "knowledge" he actually possesses are of different kinds. He does not possess epistēmē — certain, expert knowledge — but he does hold convictions that have survived rigorous examination. Whether one accepts this distinction largely determines how one reads Socrates.
The Legacy of This Text
Antiquity and the Hellenistic age. The trial and death of Socrates set the course for all subsequent ancient Greek philosophy. Plato founded the Academy as a response to his teacher's execution. The vision of the Republic — "either philosophers must become kings or kings must become philosophers" (473c–d) — would never have been conceived without the rage born of watching a democracy put Socrates to death. The Cynics pushed the Apology's embrace of poverty to its radical extreme; the Stoics systematized its central claim that "virtue alone is good."
Rome and Christendom. Cicero called Socrates "the man who brought philosophy down from the heavens to the earth" (Tusculan Disputations V.4.10). The early Christian apologist Justin Martyr (second century) hailed Socrates as one who "lived according to the Logos" before Christ (First Apology 46.3). A just man killed by an unjust verdict: the pattern mapped onto the Passion of Jesus, and Socrates was received into Christendom as a "pagan martyr."
The modern period. For Enlightenment thinkers, the trial of Socrates became the archetype of the conflict between free thought and political repression. J. S. Mill cited it in On Liberty (1859) as proof that a majority can kill truth itself. Kierkegaard analyzed the Socratic stance in the Apology as "absolute irony" in The Concept of Irony (1841).
The twentieth century and beyond. Hannah Arendt described the trial as "the original conflict between philosophy and politics" (her 1954 lectures on Socrates). Thinking versus acting, individual conscience versus communal order — the tension remains unresolved. In the analytic tradition, Vlastos (1991) reconstructed the Socrates of the Apology as a "moral philosopher," while Brickhouse and Smith (1989) reread the Apology's logical structure through a meticulous reconstruction of its legal and historical context. The Apology has been read in every age, but never in the same way twice. Every reader brings a wound of his own.
Connection to the Present
Social conformity and parrēsia. Can you tell your department head, "I think you are wrong"? Can you post an unpopular opinion on social media under your real name? The moment you keep silent for fear of backlash, you stand on the same side as the jurors who voted Socrates to death — or with the spectators in the courtroom who said nothing. "The unexamined life is not worth living." The sentence cuts deepest for those whose mouths are already shut.
Whistleblowing and institutional loyalty. Imagine a single employee who discovers that the entire company has been falsifying data. Blow the whistle and you lose your job, your colleagues, your family's security. Keep quiet and the paycheck keeps coming. In the Apology, Socrates recounts how he defied the order of the Thirty Tyrants (32c–d). He refused to carry out an unjust command and walked home, knowing it might cost him his life. His criterion was a single question: am I complicit in injustice, or am I not?
What it means to face death. Picture a hospital room and a decision about end-of-life care. Do you prolong treatment out of fear of death, or do you spend whatever time remains living an examined life? Socrates' stance was to accept death as something "unknown" and to refuse, on that basis, to change the way he lived. In a culture that avoids the subject of death — that treats it as taboo, as something "too morbid to mention" — Socrates broke the seal. To admit that you do not know: that was his starting point, and it remained his final position.
Questions for the Reader
- You have a conviction you consider non-negotiable. If someone subjected it to relentless questioning, could you defend it? And if you could not — would you abandon the belief, or would you silence the questioner?
- When you see something at work or at school that you believe is wrong, do you say so? If not, what exactly is keeping you silent?
- Socrates declared that he did not know what death is. What do you think you "know" about death? Is it genuine knowledge, or a story your fear has written for you?
Key Quotations
"The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being." Source: Plato, Apology of Socrates 38a / Greek: "ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ" (ho de anexetastos bios ou biōtos anthrōpōi)
Spoken during the sentencing debate. Socrates could save his life by proposing exile, but in any other city he would either have to stop philosophizing — in which case life would lose its meaning — or continue and be driven out again.
"To fear death is nothing other than to think you are wise when you are not — for it is to think you know what you do not know." Source: Plato, Apology of Socrates 29a–b / Greek: "τὸ γὰρ τοι θάνατον δεδιέναι, ὦ ἄνδρες, οὐδὲν ἄλλο ἐστὶν ἢ δοκεῖν σοφὸν εἶναι μὴ ὄντα" (to gar toi thanaton dediénai, ō andres, ouden allo estin ē dokein sophon einai mē onta)
The fear of death is treated not as a failure of moral courage but as an epistemological error. To assume knowledge of something unknown: the same structure that runs through the entire Apology as its leitmotif.
"I am, as it were, a gadfly given to the city by God. The city is a great and noble horse, grown sluggish because of its size, and in need of being stirred up. If you kill me, you will spend the rest of your lives asleep." Source: Plato, Apology of Socrates 30e–31a / Greek: "οἷον δή τινα ... μύωπα" (hoion dē tina ... myōpa)
To compare yourself to a stinging insect is a mixture of self-deprecation and pride. Irritating — but indispensable.
"The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways — I to die, and you to live. Which of us goes toward the better lot, no one knows except the god." Source: Plato, Apology of Socrates 42a / Greek: "ἀλλὰ γὰρ ἤδη ὥρα ἀπιέναι, ἐμοὶ μὲν ἀποθανουμένῳ, ὑμῖν δὲ βιωσομένοις· ὁπότεροι δὲ ἡμῶν ἔρχονται ἐπὶ ἄμεινον πρᾶγμα, ἄδηλον παντὶ πλὴν ἢ τῷ θεῷ." (alla gar ēdē hōra apienai, emoi men apothaneoumenōi, hymin de biōsomenois; hopoteroi de hēmōn erchontai epi ameinon pragma, adēlon panti plēn ē tōi theōi.)
The final line of the Apology. To the very end, Socrates refuses to declare whether death or life is the better lot. The courage not to give an answer.
References
- (Primary text): Burnet, John (ed.), Platonis Opera, Tomus I, Oxford Classical Texts, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900.
- (Translation & commentary): Burnet, John, Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates and Crito, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.
- (Translation): Grube, G. M. A. (rev. John M. Cooper), "Apology" in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
- (Translation): Reeve, C. D. C., The Trials of Socrates: Six Classic Texts, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002.
- (Study): Vlastos, Gregory, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- (Study): Brickhouse, Thomas C. & Smith, Nicholas D., Socrates on Trial, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
- (Study): Kraut, Richard, Socrates and the State, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
- (Article): Vlastos, Gregory, "Socrates' Disavowal of Knowledge", The Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1985), pp. 1–31.
- (Study): Kahn, Charles H., Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- (Article): Burnyeat, M. F., "The Impiety of Socrates", Ancient Philosophy 17 (1997), pp. 1–12.
- (Overview): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Socrates" (first published 2005, substantive revision 2018). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/
