Phaedrus — Plato

and inveterate calumnies. And this is the reason why my three accusers, Meletus and Anytus and Lycon,* have set upon me : Meletus, who has a quarrel with me on behalf of "'• the poets ; Anytus, on behalf of the craftsmen ; Lycon, on \ behalf of the rhetoricians : and as I said at the beginning, I cannot expect to get rid of this mass of calumny all in a moment.

And this, O men of Athens, is the truth and ^;J' the whole truth ; I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing. And yet, I know that this plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth ? — this is the occasion and t^ reason of their slander of me, as you will find out either in this or in any future inquiry.

I have said enough in my defense against the first class of my accusers ; I turn to the second class who are headed by Meletus, that good and patriotic man, as he calls himself. And now I will try to defend myself against them : these new accusers must also have their affidavit read. What do they say ?

Something of this sort : That Socrates is a doer of evil, [ and corrupter of the youth, and he does not believe in the gods of the State, and has other new divinities of his own. That is the sort of charge ; and now let us examine the particular counts.

He says that I am a doer of evil, who corrupt the youth ; but I say, O men of Athens, that Meletus is a doer of evil, and the evil is that he makes a joke of a serious -matter, and is too ready at bringing other men to trial from a pretended zeal and interest about matters in which he really never had the smallest interest.

And the truth of this I will endeavor to prove, [By questioning Meletus, Socrates brings out the fact that Meletus himself is careless about the improvement of the youth. In answer to the charge that he corrupts the youth, Socrates shows how inconceivable it is that a man should intentionally injure citizens among whom he has to live and firom whom he must expect evil in return as Meletus admits.

The declaration of Meletus that Socrates is an atheist is shown to contradict the charge that he is introducing new gods.] ** Lycon (Ij^on) : a rhetorician and orator, said to have been banished for his part in the prosecution of Socrates.

p. 14have said enough in answer to the charge of Meletus : any elaborate defense is unnecessary ; but as I was saying before, g I certainly have many enemies, and this is what will be my destruction if I am destroyed ; of that I am certain ; not Meletus, nor yet Anytus, but the envy and detraction of the world, which has been the death of many good men, and will probably be the death of many more ; there is no danger of my being the last of them.

Some one will say : And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the / chance of living or dying ; he ought only to consider whether • in doing anything he is doing right or wrong— acting the part of a good man or of a bad.

Whereas, according to your view, the heroes who fell at Troy^ were not good for much, and the son of Thetis above all, who altogether despised danger in comparison with disgrace ; and when his goddess mother said to him, in his eagerness to slay Hector, that if he avenged his companion Patroclus, and slew Hector, he would die himself, — ** Fate,** as she said, " waits upon you next after Hector; " he, hearing this, utterly despised danger and death, and instead of fearing them, feared rather to live in dishonor, and not to avenge his friend. **Let me die next,*' he replies, ''and be avenged of my enemy, rather than abide here by the beaked ships, a scorn and a burden of the earth.** Had Achilles any thought of death and danger?

For wherever a man*s place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger ; he should not think of death or of anything, but of disgrace. And this, O men of Athens, is a true saying.

Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I was ordered by the generals whom you chose 2» According to legend, Helen, the beautiful wife of King Menelaus (mSn'- e-la'us) of Sparta, was carried off to Troy during her husband's absence, by Paris, son of King Priam of Troy.

Under the leadership of Agamemnon (ig'a-mem'n6n) brother of Menelaus, the Greeks went to Troy and besieged the city for ten years before it was finally taken and Helen recovered. Tiiis war is the subject of Homer's Iliad. Achilles (a-kUlez), son of the seanymph Thetis (the'tfs), was the bravest of the Greek heroes. His friend Patroclus (p5t-r6'klus) fell by the spear of the Trojan warrior Hector. To avenge this death, Achilles engaged in combat with Hector and slew him.

APOLOGY I S to command me at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium,^^ remained where they placed me, like any other man, facing death, — if, I say, now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfill the philosopher's mission of searching into myself and other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death, or any other fear ; that would indeed be strange, and I might justly be arraigned in court for denying the existence of the gods, if I disobeyed the oracle because I was afraid of death : then I should be fancying that I was wise when I was not wise.

For this fear of deat his indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown ; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance ?

And this is the point in which, as I think, I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men, — that whereas I know but little of the world below,® I do not suppose that I know : but I do know that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonorable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil.

And therefore if you S3 In the hostilities preceding and during the Peloponnesian War (see note 14), Socrates served as foot soldier in battles at Potidaea (p6t'i-de'a) in Macedonia in 432 B.C.; at Delium (de'lf-um) in Boeotia (be-o'shf-d) in 424 B.C.; at Amphipolis (^m-ftp'o-lis) in Macedonia, in 422 b. c. " The Greeks believed that the world of the dead was in the depths of the earth.

In the most ancient usage, Hades meant simply the world of the dead, inhabited by incorpjoreal images having the form of the earthly body and following the occupations of the earthly life, but, except by special favor of the gods, without consciousness.

Later, Hades was made to include a place for the blessed (Elysium, or the Islands of the Blest), and a place for the damned, Tartarus (tar'ta-rfls), the inhabitants of both being of course conscious of their states.

The Hebrew word Sheol (she'ol) made familiar by its use in the revised version of the English Bible, passed through a somewhat similar change of meaning and in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, is usually translated by the Greek word Hades.

When the authorized version of the English Bible was made in 1611, the word hell still sometimes retained the meaning, the place of the dead, although it had also the meaning, the place of the damned. The word hell was therefore, as a rule, properly used to translate Sheol and Hades.

Now that our word hell has lost its general meaning, the place of the dead, it is no longer equivalent to Sheol and Hades ; and since we have now no English word for the place of the dead, the revised version of the English Bible simply transfers Sheol (nearly always) and Hades (always) into English spelling.

This explanation of a word much used by Plato is made necessary l^ause of the popular misconception that Hades is a mild term fcr Uie place of eternal torment.