Trial Of Socrates In Plato's Apology

438 Words2 Pages
An Account of the Trial of Socrates as outlined in Plato’s Apology This essay is an interpretation of the accusations against Socrates during his trial. Socrates was a Greek philosopher born in 470 BCE. He believed that within philosophical thought was the value of human knowledge. He would rather die than live not being allowed to express his ideas of wisdom and improvement of the soul. In 431BCE, democratic Athens was the political and cultural centre of the period, the Spartans saw its development and increase of political influence as suspicious and threatening so decided to start a military conflict against Athens. This conflict was known as the Peloponnesian war. The war ended in 404BCE after the surrender of Athens and the Spartan…show more content…
Socrates would be going against its principles with his contradictory teaching manners and implementation of the virtue of knowledge, giving models of an exemplary life, in which one should be examining themselves and not accepting all “truths” without previous considerations and arguments. He wanted to replace military combat with verbal combat. (Peters W. 2014). In 399BCE, Socrates was sentenced to death after being tried before a judge and a jury under the accusations of corrupting the young and impiety. The accusations According to Plato in the Apology, Socrates had two classes of accusers. The first class of accusers, being the ones whom accused him of practicing philosophy, these were the ones responsible for his unpopularity, whom have been accusing him for a long time. They claimed that he would be seeking physical explanation rather than divine ones for every day phenomena and that he would make the worse argument into a better one, classifying him as a sophist. The Sophists were a group of orators who would use techniques of persuasion to train Athenian youths for a career in politics by teaching them how to make convincing arguments without any reasoning or deep thinking. Unlike Socrates, they charged their
Open Document