Socrates speaks to the jury that will sentence him to death, and tells them the unexamined life is not worth living.
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Plato's version of what Socrates said at his trial in 399 BC, charged with corrupting the young and not believing in the city's gods. Apology here means a speech for the defence; Socrates apologises for nothing. We are pressing it now, from the first line, and it is not readable here yet. Your support is what gets it made.
The jury was about five hundred ordinary Athenians. Plato was in the room, and he names himself among the friends offering to pay a fine, one of the very few times he appears anywhere in his own writing. The vote to convict was close: Socrates says that if thirty votes had gone the other way he would have been acquitted. Asked to propose his own penalty, he suggested free meals at public expense for the rest of his life.
He calls himself a gadfly, sent by the god to sting a large, well-bred and sluggish horse, which is Athens. The famous sentence comes after the verdict, and in Greek it plays on one root: ho de anexetastos bios ou biōtos anthrōpōi, the unexamined bios, life, is not biōtos, livable, for a human being. In English the echo is lost; here the two words sit on the page one under the other.
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