The Four Witnesses

How you have been affected by my accusers, men of Athens, I cannot tell. For my own part, I know that they almost made me forget who I was, so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth. Of their many falsehoods, one amazed me above the rest: the warning that you should be on your guard against being deceived by my eloquence. To say that, when they were certain to be shown up the moment I opened my mouth and proved to be no great speaker at all, seemed to me the height of shamelessness. Unless, of course, by eloquence they mean the force of truth; for if that is their meaning, then I admit I am eloquent, though not after their fashion.

From me you shall hear the whole truth: not delivered in their manner, in a set speech dressed out with fine words and phrases, but in the words that come to me as I speak, for I am confident that my cause is just. At my time of life I ought not to come before you like a boy showing off his rhetoric; let no one expect it of me. And I must ask one favour. If you hear me making my defence in the same language I have always used in the market square, at the money-changers’ tables, and elsewhere, do not be surprised, and do not interrupt me on that account. I am more than seventy years of age, and this is the first time I have ever appeared in a court of law; I am simply a stranger to the speech of the place. So regard me as you would a real stranger, whom you would forgive for speaking in his own dialect and after the fashion of his own country. Never mind the manner, which may be good or may not; attend only to whether what I say is just. Let the speaker speak truly, and the judge decide justly.

Men of Athens, this reputation of mine has come from nothing but a certain kind of wisdom. What kind of wisdom? Such wisdom, perhaps, as a human being can attain; to that extent it may be that I am wise. For a witness to it, I shall call one worth believing: the god at Delphi. You knew Chaerephon. He was a friend of mine from youth, and a friend of the people too, and he was impetuous in everything he did. Once he went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle whether there was anyone wiser than I, and the priestess answered that no man was wiser. Chaerephon is dead, but his brother is here in court and will confirm what I say.

When I heard the answer, I said to myself: what can the god mean? What is his riddle? For I know very well that I have no wisdom, small or great. What can he mean, then, by declaring me the wisest of men? He is a god and cannot lie; that would be against his nature. For a long time I was at a loss, and then I set about testing the saying in this way. I went to a man with a reputation for wisdom, a politician, thinking that there, if anywhere, I would refute the oracle and could say to the god: here is a man wiser than I, but you said that I was wisest. When I talked with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, though he was thought wise by many and thought himself wiser still; and I tried to show him that he supposed himself wise without being so. The result was that he hated me, and so did several of those who were present. I went away saying to myself: well, neither of us seems to know anything really fine and good, but I am better off than he is, for he knows nothing and thinks that he knows, while I neither know nor think that I know. In that one small point, at least, I have the advantage of him. Then I went to another man with even higher pretensions, and the result was exactly the same. I made another enemy there, and many more besides.

After the politicians I went to the poets, tragic, dithyrambic, and the rest, thinking that here I should be caught out at once as more ignorant than they. I took up the passages of their own work that seemed to me most finished, and asked them what they meant, expecting to be taught something. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to say it, but there was hardly a man present who could not have spoken better about their poetry than the poets themselves. So I soon learned that poets do not write by wisdom, but by a kind of genius and inspiration, like seers and prophets who say many fine things without understanding what they mean. And the poets, I noticed, believed on the strength of their verses that they were the wisest of men in every other matter too, in which they were nothing of the kind.

At last I went to the craftsmen, for I was conscious of knowing practically nothing myself, and I was sure I would find that they knew many fine things. There I was not deceived: they knew things I did not know, and in that respect they were wiser than I. But the good craftsmen seemed to me to fall into the very error of the poets. Because each practised his own trade well, he claimed to understand every other great matter as well, and that fault overshadowed the wisdom they had.

This enquiry, men of Athens, has earned me a great deal of hatred, of the harshest and heaviest kind, and out of it has come all the slander against me, and this name of being wise. For the bystanders always suppose that I am wise myself in whatever I show another man not to be. But the truth is that only the god is wise, and by his oracle he meant to show that human wisdom is worth little or nothing. He was not speaking of Socrates at all; he merely used my name as an example, as if to say: the wisest among you, men, is the one who, like Socrates, has recognised that in truth his wisdom is worth nothing. So I go about to this day, in the god’s service, searching and questioning anyone, citizen or stranger, whom I think wise; and when he is not, I show him so, in vindication of the oracle. This occupation has left me no leisure for the city’s affairs or my own, and my service to the god has left me in utter poverty.

Perhaps someone will say: are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a way of life that is likely to bring you now to an early death? To him I can make a fair answer: you are mistaken, my friend. A man worth anything at all does not weigh up his chances of living or dying. He asks only one question about anything he does: whether he is acting justly or unjustly, playing the part of a good man or a bad one. Wherever a man has taken his post, because he judged it best or because his commander placed him there, that is where he ought to stay in the hour of danger, giving no thought to death or to anything else before disgrace.

So I should have behaved strangely indeed, men of Athens, if, having stood my ground like anyone else at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, facing death where the generals you elected had posted me, I were now to desert my post out of fear of death or of anything else, when the god, as I believe and understand it, has ordered me to spend my life in philosophy, examining myself and other men. That would be strange conduct, and then I really might deserve to be brought to court for not believing in the gods: for disobeying the oracle, fearing death, and thinking myself wise when I am not. Because to fear death, gentlemen, is nothing else than to think oneself wise without being so; it is to claim knowledge of what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not in fact be the greatest of all goods that can come to a man; yet men fear it as though they knew it to be the greatest of evils. And is that not the very ignorance we should be most ashamed of, the conceit of knowing what one does not know? Here, if anywhere, I differ from most men, and if I were to claim to be wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that not knowing enough about the world below, I do not suppose that I know. But I do know that to do injustice, and to disobey a better, whether god or man, is evil and shameful. And I will never fear or flee from what may for all I know be a good, in preference to what I know to be an evil.

Suppose you said to me: Socrates, this time we will not listen to Anytus; we will let you go, but on one condition, that you give up spending your time on this search and on philosophy, and if you are caught at it again, you die. If, as I say, those were your terms, I should reply: men of Athens, I honour you and I love you, but I shall obey the god rather than you, and while I have breath and strength I shall never give up philosophy, or stop exhorting whoever I meet and saying, in my old manner: you, my friend, a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, are you not ashamed to care so much for piling up money, and for reputation and honour, while for wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of your soul you take no care or thought at all? And if he protests that he does care, I shall not let him go at once and be on my way; I shall question him and examine him and test him, and if I find that he has no virtue but only says he has, I shall reproach him for setting the lowest value on what matters most, and the higher value on what matters less. This I shall do to everyone I meet, young and old, citizen and stranger, but most of all to you, my fellow citizens, since you are nearest kin to me.

For that, understand, is what the god commands; and I believe no greater good has ever come to this city than my service to the god. I do nothing but go about persuading you all, young and old alike, to care first and most intensely, not for your bodies or your money, but for the greatest improvement of your souls. I tell you that virtue does not come from money; from virtue come money and every other good thing that men have, in private and in public alike. If saying that corrupts the young, then that is my mischief. But if anyone claims I say something else, he is talking nonsense. And so, men of Athens, do as Anytus tells you or not, acquit me or not: whichever you do, know that I shall never change my ways, not even if I must die many times over.

If you put me to death, you will not easily find another like me. For I am, if I may use so absurd a figure, a kind of gadfly, given to the city by the god; and the city is like a great and noble horse, sluggish from its very size, that needs to be stung into life. The god, it seems to me, has fastened me on the city for exactly that; and all day long and everywhere I settle on you, waking you and persuading you and reproaching each one of you. Another like me you will not easily find, and if you take my advice you will spare me. But I dare say you are irritated, like people roused out of a doze, and perhaps you will swat me, as Anytus urges, and kill me without a second thought; and then you would sleep on undisturbed for the rest of your lives, unless the god in his care for you sent you someone else.

And so the man proposes death. Very well: what shall I propose in return, men of Athens? Clearly what I deserve. And what do I deserve to suffer or to pay, for having never in my life kept quiet? I neglected everything most men care about, money-making, family advantage, military commands, public speaking, the offices and plots and parties of the city; I judged myself, in truth, too honest to survive such things. So I did not go where I would have been of no use to you or to myself. I went instead to each of you privately, to do you, as I claim, the greatest of all services, trying to persuade every man among you to care first for himself, for his own goodness and wisdom, before he cares for anything belonging to him. What do I deserve, then, being such a man? Some good thing, men of Athens, if I am truly to be assessed at my worth; and a good thing of a kind that would fit me. And what fits a poor man who is your benefactor, and who needs leisure to spend on exhorting you? Nothing in the world, men of Athens, fits such a man so well as free meals in the Prytaneum. He deserves them far more than any of you who has won a race at Olympia with his horse or his pair or his team. The Olympic victor makes you seem happy; I make you happy in truth. If I must propose what I justly deserve, then, that is my proposal: free maintenance in the Prytaneum.

Perhaps someone will say: but Socrates, can you not hold your tongue once you have left us, and live quietly somewhere else? This is the hardest thing of all to make some of you believe. If I tell you that to keep quiet would be to disobey the god, and that for this reason I cannot do it, you will not believe me; you will think I am being sly. And if I tell you instead that the greatest good a man can have is to talk every day about virtue, and about the other things you have heard me examining myself and others upon, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me even less. Yet it is exactly as I say, gentlemen, however hard it proves to persuade you of it.

The difficulty, my friends, is not to escape death; the real difficulty is to escape wickedness, which runs faster than death. I am old and slow, and the slower runner has caught me; my accusers are clever and quick, and the faster runner, wrongdoing, has caught them. So I leave this place condemned by you to death, and they leave it condemned by the truth to wickedness and injustice. I abide by my penalty; let them abide by theirs. Perhaps these things had to be so, and I think the scales hang well.

Let us look at it another way, and we shall see how much reason there is to hope that death is a good. For death is one of two things. Either it is nothing, an utter absence of consciousness; or, as men say, it is a change, a migration of the soul from this place to another. Now if there is no consciousness, only a sleep untroubled even by dreams, death would be a wonderful gain. For if a man had to pick out the night in which he slept so soundly that not even a dream disturbed him, and set beside it all the other nights and days of his life, and then say how many of them he had spent better and more pleasantly than that one night, I think that not just any private man but the Great King himself would find them easy to count. If death is like that, I call it a gain; the whole of time would then seem no longer than a single night.

But if death is a journey to another place, and it is true, as we are told, that all the dead are there, what greater good could there be, my judges? If the traveller arriving in the world below is rid of those who call themselves judges here, and finds the true judges who are said to sit in judgement there, would the journey be a poor one? Or again: what would any of you not give to talk with Orpheus and Musaeus, with Hesiod and Homer? If that is true, let me die many times over. And for myself, above all, life there would be a wonder: I could go on with my examining, among the dead as among the living, and find out who of them is wise, and who thinks he is wise and is not. What would a man not give, judges, to question the leader of the great expedition against Troy, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or countless others one could name, men and women both? To talk with them, to be in their company, to examine them, would be happiness beyond measure. And there, I imagine, they do not put a man to death for it; for besides being happier than we are, the people of that place are immortal ever after, if what we are told is true.

So you too, my judges, should face death with good hope, and hold this one truth fast: no evil can touch a good man, in life or after death, and the gods do not neglect him or his affairs. What has come to me now has not come by chance. It is clear to me that to die now and be released from all this was better for me; and that is why the sign never once turned me back, and why I bear no anger at all against those who condemned me, or against my accusers.

Still, I have one favour to ask of them. When my sons are grown, gentlemen, punish them; trouble them exactly as I have troubled you, if they seem to you to care for money or anything else more than they care for virtue. And if they pretend to be something when they are nothing, reproach them as I have reproached you, for not caring about what they should, and for thinking themselves something when they are worth nothing. Do that, and my sons and I will have received justice at your hands.

But now it is time to go, I to die and you to live. Which of us goes to the better lot, no one knows but the god.

Socrates: Why have you come at this hour, Crito? It must still be very early.

Crito: Dawn is just breaking.

Socrates: Why did you sit there in silence, then, instead of waking me at once?

Crito: Because, by heaven, Socrates, I would not have wished to be so sleepless and so full of grief myself. I have been marvelling at you all this time, watching how peacefully you sleep; and I deliberately did not wake you, so that the time might pass for you as painlessly as possible. I have thought you happy in your temper all your life; but never so much as in this present trouble, seeing how easily and gently you carry it.

Socrates: Well, Crito, it would be a poor showing for a man of my age to resent it, when the time has come for him to die. But why have you come so early?

Crito: I bring painful news, Socrates. Not painful to you, it seems, but painful and heavy for me and for all your friends. The ship from Delos has been sighted; it will be here today, and tomorrow, Socrates, must be the last day of your life.

Socrates: I should like to know whether we still hold to another proposition, that it is not living that matters most, but living well; and that to live well is the same thing as to live honourably and justly.

Crito: We hold to it.

Socrates: Then from these admissions the question must be examined: whether it is just for me to try to leave this place without the consent of the Athenians, or not just. If it proves just, we make the attempt; if not, we drop it. As for the considerations you raise, about expense and reputation and bringing up children, those, Crito, in truth belong to the many, who would put a man to death and would as cheerfully bring him back to life if they could, and in neither case with a reason. For us the only question is the one I have stated: shall we be acting justly, or shall we in truth be doing wrong? And if it appears that we shall be doing wrong, then it must not be weighed in the balance at all that staying here means death, or any other suffering; only that it means doing no injustice.

Crito: I think that is well said, Socrates; but tell me what we should do.

Socrates: Let us look into it together, my dear friend, and if you can contradict anything I say, contradict it, and I will listen to you; but if not, then stop, good man, telling me over and over that I ought to leave this place against the will of the Athenians. Now consider my starting point. We say that one must never do wrong willingly; or have all our old agreements been poured away in these last few days, and have we, at our age, Crito, been talking earnestly to one another all these years without noticing that we were no better than children? Surely what we used to say holds exactly as it did: whether the many agree or not, and whether we must suffer things heavier still than this or things lighter, doing wrong remains harmful and shameful in every case for the man who does it. Do we say so, or not?

Crito: We do.

Socrates: Then one must never do wrong at all.

Crito: Certainly not.

Socrates: And so one must not even return a wrong for a wrong, as the many think, since one must never do wrong at all; nor harm any man, whatever one has suffered from him. And take care, Crito, that in agreeing to this you are not agreeing against your real opinion; for I know that few men hold it or ever will, and between those who do and those who do not there is no common ground, but each must despise the other’s counsels. So consider carefully whether we may begin from this: that neither doing wrong, nor returning wrong, nor defending oneself against injury by giving injury back, is ever right. Or do you dissent from the starting point? I have held it for a long time and hold it still.

Crito: I stand by it, and I agree with you. Go on.

Suppose that, just as I was about to run off, the Laws and the commonwealth of Athens came and stood before me and asked: tell us, Socrates, what are you proposing to do? Is this act of yours anything less than an attempt to destroy us, the laws, and the whole city, so far as it lies in you? Do you imagine that a city can survive in which the judgements of its courts have no force, but are made void and trampled on by private men? What shall we answer, Crito? Shall we say: yes, but the city wronged us; the sentence was not rightly given? Is that our reply?

Crito: That is our reply, Socrates, certainly.

Socrates: Then what if the Laws should say: and was that the agreement between us, Socrates? Or did you agree to abide by whatever judgements the city pronounced? And if we looked surprised at such words, they might go on: do not stare, Socrates; answer, since you are so fond of question and answer. What complaint have you against us and against the city, that you should try to destroy us? Did we not, to begin with, give you birth? Was it not through us that your father took your mother and begot you? Have you some fault to find with those of us that govern marriage, or with the laws that govern the rearing and teaching of children, under which you yourself were educated in music and gymnastics? None, I should say. Well then. Since you were born and reared and educated under us, can you deny, first, that you are our child and our servant, you and your fathers before you? And if that is so, do you suppose that justice is level between us, so that whatever we do to you, you are entitled to do back to us? There was no such levelness of right between you and your father, entitling you to answer reviling with reviling and blows with blows. Shall it exist, then, between you and your fatherland and its laws, so that if we set about destroying you, believing it just, you in your turn may set about destroying us, and call it acting justly, you, the man whose true care is virtue? Or are you too wise to see that fatherland is a thing more precious than mother or father or all your ancestors together, more venerable, more holy, held in higher honour among gods and among men of understanding; that you must either persuade it or do whatever it commands, and suffer quietly whatever it orders you to suffer; and that if it leads you to war, to be wounded or killed, you go, for justice lies so; and no man may give way or retreat or leave his post, but in war and in court and everywhere else he must do what his city commands, or persuade it where justice really lies? Violence against a mother or a father is unholy; how much more against one’s country. What shall we say to that, Crito? That the Laws speak the truth, or not?

Crito: I think they speak the truth.

Consider, Socrates, the Laws would say, whether we are not right in this too: that what you are now attempting is a wrong against us. We brought you into the world, we reared you, we educated you, we gave you and every other citizen a share of every good thing we could. And even so we proclaim, to any Athenian who wishes, that when he has passed his citizen’s test and seen the business of the city and us its laws, if we do not please him he may take what is his and go wherever he likes. Not one of us laws stands in the way or forbids it: if we and the city fail to please a man, he may leave for a colony or move to any other country, and keep his property. But whoever of you stays, having seen the way we give judgement and manage the city in everything else, that man, we say, has by his staying agreed with us, in fact if not in word, to do whatever we command. And the man who then disobeys does wrong three times over: because we are his parents; because we are the authors of his upbringing; and because, having covenanted to obey us, he neither obeys nor persuades us that we are commanding wrongly.

And you above all Athenians, Socrates, would lie open to those charges. Why me above all, I might ask. Because you above all, they might justly answer, had bound yourself. We have great proofs, Socrates, that we and the city pleased you. You of all Athenians stayed most constantly at home in her; you never left except on campaign, and once to the Isthmus; we and our city sufficed you. So decidedly did you choose us that you begot your children here: the act of a contented man. More: at your trial you could have set your penalty at exile, if you had wished, and done then with the city’s blessing what you are now attempting against her will. Instead you preferred death, you said, to exile. And now you feel no shame at those words, and no respect for us the laws, but attempt to destroy us, running away like the meanest slave, in breach of the compacts by which you covenanted to live as a citizen. You did not make those agreements in a hurry, or under force, or by deception. You had seventy years in which you were free to depart, if we did not please you and the agreements seemed to you unfair. You did not prefer Sparta or Crete, whose good order you are forever praising, or any other city, Greek or foreign. You left Athens less than the lame and the blind and the maimed leave her. And now, will you not stand by what you agreed? You will, if you listen to us, Socrates; and you will not make yourself a laughing-stock by running away.

This, dear Crito, believe me, is the voice I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, the way the mystic worshippers seem to go on hearing the flutes; the sound of these arguments hums inside me and makes it impossible to hear the others. So understand that, as far as my present opinions go, if you speak against them you will speak in vain. Still, if you think you can achieve anything, say on.

Crito: Socrates, I have nothing to say.

Socrates: Then let it be, Crito, and let us act in this way, since this is the way the god is leading.

Crito: And how shall we bury you?

Socrates: However you like, if you can catch me, and I do not slip through your fingers. And he laughed quietly, and looked round at us, and said: I cannot persuade Crito, my friends, that I am this Socrates here, the one now talking and arranging each part of the argument. He thinks I am that other one, the body he will presently see, and so he asks how he is to bury me. All that I have been saying at such length, that when I have drunk the poison I shall not remain with you, but shall go off and away to some happiness of the blessed, seems to have been said in vain so far as he is concerned. So stand surety for me with Crito, will you: not, as he was surety at my trial that I would stay, but the opposite, that when I die I will not stay, but will be off and gone. Then Crito will bear it more lightly, and will not say at the funeral that it is Socrates he is laying out, or carrying to the grave, or burying. For be sure of this, my dear Crito: to use words wrongly is not only a fault in itself; it does harm to the soul. You must have better courage, and say that it is my body you are burying; and bury it however you please, and however you think most customary.

When he had said this he rose and went into another room to bathe, and Crito went with him, telling us to wait. So we waited, talking over the discussion and going through it again, and then dwelling on the greatness of the misfortune that had come to us, for we felt exactly as though we were losing a father and would be orphans for the rest of our lives. After his bath his children were brought to him, and the women of his household came, and he spoke with them in Crito’s presence and gave them his directions; then he sent the women and children away and came back to us.

It was now close to sunset. He came and sat down with us, freshly bathed, and not much was said after that. Then the officer of the Eleven came in and stood by him and said: Socrates, I shall not have to find fault with you as I do with the others, who rage and curse at me when, on the orders of the magistrates, I tell them to drink the poison. In all this time I have found you the noblest and gentlest and best man who has ever come to this place, and I know it is not me you are angry with but them. So now, for you know my errand, farewell; and try to bear as easily as you can what cannot be helped. And with that he burst into tears, and turned and went out.

Socrates looked up at him and said: farewell to you also; we shall do as you say. Then he said to us: what a courteous man. All this month he has come to see me, and talked with me sometimes, and been as kind as he could be; and now how generously he weeps for me. Well, Crito, let us obey him. Let the poison be brought, if it is ready; and if it is not, let the man prepare it.

Crito said: but Socrates, the sun is still on the hills; it has not set yet. Others have drunk the poison late, and dined well first, and drunk deep. Do not hurry; there is still time.

And Socrates said: those who do so, Crito, do it with reason, for they think it is so much gained; and I with reason will do nothing of the kind, for I think I should gain nothing by drinking a little later, except to look ridiculous in my own eyes, clinging to life and hoarding it when there is none left. Come, do as I ask, and nothing else.

Then Crito made a sign to his slave, who went out, and after some delay returned with the man who was to give the poison, carrying it ready pounded in a cup. When Socrates saw him he said: well, my good man, you understand these things; what must I do? Nothing, he said, except drink it and then walk about until your legs feel heavy, and then lie down; and it will act of itself. And with that he held out the cup to Socrates.

He took it quite steadily, Echecrates, without a tremor, without any change of colour or of face; only, looking up at the man from under his brows in that way he had, he asked: what do you say to pouring someone a libation from this cup? Is it allowed, or not? We prepare, Socrates, said the man, only as much as we judge sufficient. I understand, he said. But at least one may pray to the gods, and must, that the change of home from this world to the other be fortunate. That is my prayer; so may it be. And with the words he put the cup to his lips and drank it off, quite easily and calmly.

Up to then most of us had been fairly able to hold back our tears; but when we saw him drinking, and saw the cup empty, we could do it no longer. My own tears came in floods despite myself, so that I covered my face and wept; not for him, but for my own fortune, in losing such a friend. Crito had got up and moved away even before I did, because he could not hold his tears in. And Apollodorus, who had been weeping the whole time, now broke out in such a storm of crying and grieving that he broke down every man there except Socrates himself. And Socrates said: what a way to behave, my strange friends. Why, it was chiefly for this that I sent the women away, so that they should not offend in this manner; for I have heard that a man should die in silence. Be quiet, then, and have courage.

When we heard that, we were ashamed, and checked our tears. He walked about until, as he said, his legs grew heavy, and then he lay down on his back, as the man told him; and the man who had given the poison felt him from time to time, examining his feet and legs; then he pressed his foot hard and asked whether he felt it, and Socrates said no; and after that his shins; and so on upwards, showing us that he was growing cold and stiff. Then he felt him a last time and said that when it reached the heart, he would be gone.

The chill had come nearly as far as the belly when Socrates uncovered his face, for he had covered it, and said, and these were his last words: Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay the debt, and do not neglect it. It shall be done, said Crito; is there anything else? To that question he made no answer; but after a little while he stirred, and the man uncovered him, and his eyes were fixed. And Crito, seeing it, closed his mouth and his eyes.

That was the end, Echecrates, of our friend: a man of whom we may say that of all the men of his time whom we knew, he was the wisest and the most just and the best.

Euthyphro: What strange thing has happened, Socrates, that you have left your usual haunts in the Lyceum and are spending your time here at the King Archon’s porch? Surely you of all people have no suit before the King, as I have.

Socrates: Mine is not what the Athenians call a suit, Euthyphro, but an impeachment. Somebody has indicted me.

Euthyphro: Who is he?

Socrates: I hardly know the man myself, Euthyphro; he seems to be young and little known. His name is Meletus, of the deme of Pitthis, if you can call to mind a Meletus of that deme, with straight hair, a thin beard, and rather a beak of a nose.

Euthyphro: I cannot say I do, Socrates. But what is the charge he brings against you?

Socrates: No trivial one, I think, for it is no small thing in so young a man to have knowledge of so great a matter. He knows, he says, how the young are corrupted, and who corrupts them. He must be a wise man; and of all our public men he seems to me the only one to begin in the right way, for the right way is to care first for the young, as a good farmer cares first for the young plants; and so Meletus is clearing away first those of us who blight the young shoots, after which he will no doubt attend to the older generation, and become the author of very great blessings to the city.

Euthyphro: I could wish it were so, Socrates, but I fear the opposite. But tell me, what does he say you actually do to corrupt the young?

Socrates: Strange things, on the face of it. He says I am a maker of gods; that I make new gods and do not believe in the old ones. That is the ground of his indictment.

Euthyphro: I understand, Socrates: it is because of the divine sign that you say comes to you now and then. So he has indicted you for religious innovation, and he goes to court knowing well that such charges are readily believed by the many. Why, they laugh even at me, when I speak of divine matters in the assembly and foretell what is coming, as though I were mad; and yet nothing I have foretold has failed to come true. But they envy men like us. We must not mind them; we must meet them face to face.

Socrates: Good heavens, Euthyphro. Is your knowledge of religion, of things pious and impious, so exact that with the facts as you describe them you are not afraid that in prosecuting your father you may be the one committing impiety?

Euthyphro: My knowledge would be worth little, Socrates, and Euthyphro would be no better than the run of men, if I did not know all such matters exactly.

Socrates: Rare friend! Then I can do nothing better than become your pupil. So tell me, in the name of that exact knowledge you claim: what do you say piety and impiety are? Is not the pious the same as itself in every action; and the impious, again, the opposite of all that is pious, and like itself, so that everything impious has one single character of impiety?

Euthyphro: Certainly, Socrates.

Socrates: Then tell me. What do you say the pious is, and what the impious?

Euthyphro: I say that piety is what I am doing now: prosecuting the wrongdoer, whether over murder or temple robbery or any other such crime, be he your father or your mother or whoever else; and that not to prosecute is impious. And observe, Socrates, what strong proof I can give you. Men themselves believe Zeus to be the best and most just of the gods, and yet they agree that Zeus put his own father in bonds for unjustly devouring his sons, and that that father had mutilated his own father before him for wrongs of the same kind. Yet with me they are angry, for proceeding against my father when he has done wrong. So they contradict themselves: one thing for the gods, another for me.

Socrates: Can this be the reason I am under indictment, Euthyphro: that when anyone tells such stories about the gods, I somehow find them hard to accept? But at present I would rather you answered the question you have not yet answered. When I asked what piety is, my friend, you did not teach me it; you told me that what you are doing now, prosecuting your father for murder, is pious.

Euthyphro: And what I said was true, Socrates.

Socrates: Perhaps. But you agree, Euthyphro, that there are many other pious actions.

Euthyphro: There are.

Socrates: Then remember that I did not ask you for one or two out of the many pious actions, but for the character itself by which everything pious is pious. For you said, I think, that the impious things are impious and the pious things pious by one single character. Teach me, then, what that character is, so that I may keep my eye fixed on it and use it as a pattern; and whatever you or anyone else does that matches it I may call pious, and whatever does not, impious.

Euthyphro: If that is what you want, Socrates, that is what I will tell you.

Socrates: It is exactly what I want.

Euthyphro: Then what is dear to the gods is pious, and what is not dear to them is impious.

Socrates: Excellent, Euthyphro; now you have answered in the way I wanted you to answer. Whether truly, I do not yet know; but you will go on, clearly, to show me that what you say is true.

Socrates: Then by this argument, noble Euthyphro, the same things will be both pious and impious: loved by some of the gods and hated by others. And it would be nothing surprising if, in punishing your father as you are doing, you were doing something pleasing to Zeus but hateful to Cronos and Uranus, welcome to Hephaestus but hateful to Hera, and so on for any other gods who differ about it.

Euthyphro: But Socrates, on this point, I think, no god differs from another: that whoever has killed a man unjustly must answer for it.

Socrates: Yet men dispute it, Euthyphro, endlessly, in the courts above all. They do not dispute that the wrongdoer must be punished; what they dispute is the fact: who did the wrong, and what it was, and when. And the gods, if they really do quarrel about justice as you say, must quarrel in the same manner: each side pointing at some particular act, which some of them call just, and others unjust. So come, my friend, teach me. What proof have you that all the gods think that labourer died unjustly, the hired man who turned killer, and was bound by the dead man’s master, and died of his bonds before the messenger came back with word what to do; and that on behalf of such a man it is right for a son to prosecute his own father for murder? Show me plainly that all the gods, without exception, approve the act, and I will praise your wisdom for the rest of my days.

Euthyphro: That may be no small task, Socrates, though I could prove it to you very clearly indeed.

Socrates: Then let me help you amend the statement, since we need not settle what each god thinks. Suppose we say: what all the gods hate is impious, and what they all love is pious; and what some love and some hate is neither, or both. Shall that be our definition of the pious and the impious?

Euthyphro: Yes, let us say that: what all the gods love is pious and holy, and its opposite, what they all hate, impious.

Socrates: We shall know better presently, my good friend. Consider this. Is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy? Or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?

Euthyphro: I do not know what you mean, Socrates.

Socrates: Then I will try to speak more plainly. We talk of a thing carried and a thing carrying, of a thing led and a thing leading, of a thing seen and a thing seeing; and in all such pairs the two differ. A thing is not carried because it has the character of a thing carried; it has that character because it is carried. A thing is not seen because it is a thing seen; it is a thing seen because someone sees it. The state follows the act, and never the other way about. Now, what do you say of the pious, Euthyphro? On your account, all the gods love it.

Euthyphro: Yes.

Socrates: Because it is pious? Or for some other reason?

Euthyphro: No; because it is pious.

Socrates: So it is loved because it is holy; it is not holy because it is loved.

Euthyphro: So it seems.

Socrates: Whereas what is dear to the gods is dear to them because they love it; the state follows their act of loving. Then the holy and the god-beloved are not the same thing, Euthyphro; they differ. The one is loved because it is such as to be loved; the other is such as to be loved because it is loved. Ask what the holy is, and you answer me with something that merely happens to it, that all the gods love it; what it is, you have still not said. So do not hide your treasure from me. Tell me again, from the beginning, what the holy is, whether the gods love it or not, for over that we shall not quarrel. And tell me what the impious is too.

Euthyphro: But Socrates, I no longer know how to say what I mean. Whatever we put forward somehow keeps moving about and will not stay where we placed it.

Socrates: Your statements, Euthyphro, are like the works of my ancestor Daedalus, whose statues, they say, would run away. If I had proposed them, you might tease me that my handiwork inherits his habit of walking off. But the propositions are yours, and so the joke needs a different edge: it is your own statements that will not stay put, as you see yourself.

Euthyphro: No, Socrates, the joke still fits you well enough, I think. This moving about is none of my doing; you are the Daedalus. Left to me, they would have stayed exactly where they were.

Socrates: Sacrifice is giving to the gods, and prayer is asking of them?

Euthyphro: Precisely, Socrates.

Socrates: Then on this account piety would be a science of asking and giving.

Euthyphro: You have caught my meaning perfectly.

Socrates: And asking rightly would be asking for what we need from them, and giving rightly, giving in return what they need from us. It would hardly be skilful giving, to present anyone with what he has no need of.

Euthyphro: True, Socrates.

Socrates: Then piety, Euthyphro, would be a sort of art of commerce between gods and men?

Euthyphro: Commerce, if you like to call it that.

Socrates: I do not like to call it anything unless it is true. Tell me, what benefit do the gods get from the gifts we give them? What they give is plain to everyone, for we have no good thing they did not give. But how are they benefited by what they receive from us? Or do we drive so sharp a bargain that we take every good from them, and they take nothing from us?

Euthyphro: But Socrates, do you suppose the gods are benefited by what they receive from us?

Socrates: Then whatever would these gifts of ours be, Euthyphro?

Euthyphro: What should they be but honour and reverence, and, as I said just now, what is pleasing to them?

Socrates: So the pious is what pleases the gods, but is not beneficial to them, or dear to them?

Euthyphro: I should say nothing is dearer.

Socrates: Then once again, it seems, the pious is what is dear to the gods.

Euthyphro: Beyond a doubt.

Socrates: And saying that, can you wonder that your statements will not stand still but walk away? Will you accuse me of being the Daedalus who moves them, when you are so much more skilful than Daedalus, making them go round in a circle? Do you not notice that our argument has come clean round to where it began? You remember, surely, that earlier the holy and the god-beloved proved to be different things. Do you see?

Euthyphro: I remember.

Socrates: And do you not see that now you are saying that what is dear to the gods is holy? And is what is dear to the gods anything but the god-beloved?

Euthyphro: It is that.

Socrates: Then either we were wrong before, or we are wrong now.

Euthyphro: So it appears.

Socrates: Then we must begin again from the beginning and ask what the holy is. For I shall not willingly give up until I learn it. You know it, if any man does, and like Proteus you must not be let go until you speak. For if you did not know the holy and the unholy with certainty, you could never have moved, on behalf of a hired labourer, to prosecute your aged father for murder; you would have feared the gods too much for the risk, and been ashamed before men. So I am sure that you think you know exactly what is holy and what is not. Tell me then, most excellent Euthyphro, and do not conceal your thought.

Euthyphro: Another time, Socrates. Just now I am in a hurry, and it is time for me to be off.

Socrates: What are you doing, my friend! You go away and dash me down from the great hope I had: that I would learn from you what is holy and what is not, and get free of Meletus’ indictment, by showing him that Euthyphro had made me wise in divine things at last, and that I would no longer speak carelessly about them out of ignorance, or make innovations, and would live better for the rest of my life.

Socrates lived always in the open. Early in the morning he went to the walks and the training grounds; when the market place filled, he was there to be seen; and for the rest of the day he was wherever the most people were to be met. He was generally talking, and anyone who wished could stop and listen. Yet no one ever saw him do, or heard him say, anything impious or irreverent. For he did not discourse, as most of the others did, on the nature of the universe, speculating on how what the professors call the cosmos came into being; he argued that to brood on such problems was folly, seeing that the proudest of the theorists agreed with one another like madmen: one school finding that all being is one, another that it is infinitely many; one that everything is forever in motion, another that nothing has ever moved.

He himself never wearied of examining human things. What is piety, and what impiety? What is the fine, and what the shameful? What is just, and what unjust? What is sound sense, and what madness? What is courage, and what cowardice? What is a city, and what a citizen? What is rule over men, and what makes a man able to rule? These, and others like them, were his constant questions; and those who knew the answers he counted men of true worth, while those who did not, he said, deserved to be called slavish.

Sirs, he would say, if war came upon us and we wished to choose the man most likely to bring us through it safely, should we choose one we knew to be a slave to his belly, or to wine, or to lust, and given to collapsing under hardship and sleep? Or if a man lay near the end of his life and wanted someone to bring up his sons, to guard his unmarried daughters, and to keep his property safe, would he think a man of no self-command worthy of the trust? Why, we would not take an intemperate slave as a gift; no one would set one over his herds or his stores. And if a man will not accept such a slave for nothing, what care should he take that he does not become such a thing himself? The greedy man can at least tell himself that in stripping others he enriches himself; the man without self-command is a curse to others and a greater curse to himself, and it is surely the greatest of curses to ruin, never mind one’s house and property, one’s own body and one’s own soul. Every honest man, then, must hold self-command to be the very foundation stone of virtue, and lay it down first in his soul. For without it, who can learn anything good, or practise it to any purpose? And what slave of pleasure does not degrade body and mind together? By Hera, every free man should pray never to have such a slave, and every man enslaved to such pleasures should pray to the gods for good masters, for nothing else can save him.

So he talked; and his self-command showed even more plainly in what he did than in what he said. He had mastered the pleasures of the body, and mastered, too, the pleasures that come by money, holding that whoever takes money from a chance giver sets up a master over himself, and enters into a bondage as degrading as any there is.

Antiphon: Socrates, I had always supposed philosophy was meant to make men happier; but the fruit you have got from yours is the opposite. You live in a style no slave would endure from a master. Your food and drink are the poorest; the cloak you wear is not merely wretched, it is the same cloak summer and winter; and you go the whole year barefoot and shirtless. Money you will not take, though the making of it is a pleasure, and the having of it lets a man live at once more independently and more agreeably. The teachers of other subjects try to turn their pupils into copies of themselves. If that is your plan for your companions, you should call yourself a professor of wretchedness.

Socrates: You have painted my life so miserable, Antiphon, that I am sure of one thing: you would sooner die than live as I do. So come, let us see what it is you find so hard in it. Is it that the man who takes payment must deliver the work he is paid for, while I, who take none, need not talk with anyone I do not choose? Do you look down on my diet, as less wholesome than yours, or less strengthening? Do you not know that the better the appetite, the less need it has of sauces, and the sharper the thirst, the less it looks for expensive drinks? Men change their clothes because of heat and cold, and wear shoes so that sore feet will not stop them walking. Well then: have you ever known me keep indoors for cold, or fight for the shady side of the street in summer, or be kept off any road by my feet? Do you not know that a man naturally weak, if he trains, comes to beat the strong who neglect themselves? And will you not allow that I, forever training my body to endure whatever may come, bear it all more easily than you, who do not train? If I am not enslaved to my belly, or to sleep, or to lust, can you name any better reason than that I have pleasanter things than these, which delight not only in the using but in the hope of profit that lasts? And you know this much at least: joy belongs to the man who sees his work going well, his farm or his ship or whatever his hand is on; and is all that joy together worth as much as the sense of growing better oneself, and gaining better friends? That is the belief I live in.

Then again, which man goes to war more lightly: the one who cannot get on without an expensive table, or the one content with what is at hand? Which is sooner starved into surrender in a siege? You seem to think, Antiphon, that happiness is luxury and extravagance. I hold that to want nothing is divine, and to want as little as possible is the nearest thing to divine; and as the divine is supreme, what stands nearest the divine stands nearest supremacy.

He had often heard it said that of all possessions the most precious is a good and sincere friend. Yet most men, as far as he could see, gave their care to almost anything sooner than to the getting of friends. Houses and fields, slaves and cattle and furniture, they worked to acquire and struggled to keep; but the friend, the greatest blessing of all by their own account, most men never troubled to gain, nor to keep the ones they had. Let a friend and a servant fall sick together, and a man will fetch the doctor to the servant and spare no pains for his recovery, while the friend gets scant attention; if both die, he is vexed at the loss of the servant, who cost him something, while the friend’s death leaves his affairs, he feels, no worse off. He would leave no other possession uncared for; only the friend’s mute appeal for care goes unanswered.

And most men, he noticed, know the count of their other belongings, be they ever so many; but ask them to count their friends, few as these are, and they cannot; and setting out to make a list, they will strike out names they had put in. So much thought do people give their friends. Yet set anything you like beside a good friend, a horse, a yoke of oxen, the most loyal of slaves, and how much heavier the friend weighs. For a good friend puts himself wherever a friend falls short. Whatever a man’s hands can do for him, his eyes see, his ears hear, and his feet accomplish, a friend will do on his behalf; and often enough what a man has failed to do for himself, or to see, or to get, his friend has done or seen or got for him. And still, though men will tend a tree with care for the sake of its fruit, this most fruitful of all possessions, the friend, is left by more than half the world to look after itself.

Aristarchus: I am in real difficulty, Socrates. Since the troubles began in the city, my women relatives have all come to me for refuge: sisters, nieces, cousins, fourteen free-born souls under one roof. We get nothing from the land, the enemy holds it; nothing from my town property, for the city is emptied of people; nobody will buy the furniture; and money is nowhere to be borrowed. It is hard, Socrates, to stand by and watch your own people die; and to feed so many, in times like these, cannot be done.

Socrates: Then how is it that Ceramon, who feeds many, contrives not only to keep himself and them in necessities but to lay money by, while you, who also feed many, fear you will all starve together?

Aristarchus: Why, bless you, because his people are slaves, and mine are free.

Socrates: And which would you say are the better, his slaves or your free kin?

Aristarchus: My free kin, of course.

Socrates: Then is it not a shame that he should prosper by the worse sort, while you and your better sort are in want? What can his people do that yours cannot? Barley meal is a useful thing to make, is it not, and loaves of bread, and cloaks and tunics and mantles and vests; and your household, I think you said, can make them all. Then are you not aware that from one of those trades alone, the milling of barley, Nausicydes keeps himself and his servants and a good many pigs and cattle besides, with enough over to bear his share of the city’s burdens; that Cyrebus keeps his whole household handsomely from a bakery, Demeas of Collytus from making cloaks, Menon from making mantles; and that half the Megarians live by making vests?

Aristarchus: Yes, but those men buy foreigners and can make them work. My people are free, and they are my kin.

Socrates: And so, because they are free and your kin, you think they should do nothing but eat and sleep? Is that how other free people do well, the ones who live as your people live now? Is idleness what helps a man learn what he ought to know, and remember what he has learnt; is idleness what keeps the body healthy and strong, and gains and keeps the things life needs; and are work and attention of no use at all? Those arts your kinswomen know: did they learn them as things dead and useless, or as things to work at some day and be the better for? As things stand, I should guess, there is no love lost in your house. You cannot help feeling that they are costing you; they can see that you find them a burden. From that soil, dislike grows and the old affection withers. But give them work, and you will grow fond of them when you find them profitable, and they of you when they see that you are pleased with them. If the work were anything shameful, better to choose death first; but what they know is the most honourable and fitting work a woman can do, and everyone does best, and most gladly, the thing they know. So do not hesitate to propose it; it will profit them and you alike, and they will very likely be glad to hear it.

Aristarchus: By the gods, Socrates, that seems to me so well said that although until now I have not been willing to borrow, knowing that once the money was spent I could not repay it, I think I can bring myself to do it now, to set up the work.

After that, capital was raised and wool was bought. The women worked as they breakfasted and worked on till supper, and the house was cheerful instead of gloomy. Instead of eyeing one another sideways, they looked one another in the face with pleasure. The women loved him as their guardian; he grew fond of them as useful. In the end he came to Socrates delighted and told him how things stood, adding: and now they say I am the only creature in the house who eats without working. Then tell them the fable of the dog, said Socrates: how, in the days when the beasts could talk, the sheep complained to her master that she gave him wool and lambs and cheese and got nothing but what she took from the ground, while the dog, who gave him nothing of the kind, was fed from his own table; and how the dog answered: and rightly, too, for I am the one who keeps you safe, so that you are neither stolen by men nor carried off by wolves; without me you could not so much as graze for fear of your lives. At that, so the story goes, the sheep conceded the dog his honour. Tell your flock the same: that you are their watchdog and their overseer, and that thanks to you they work in safety, and no one harms them, and they live content.

Noticing that Epigenes, one of his companions, was a young man in poor condition, he said: how untrained you look, Epigenes. And he answered: I am not in training, Socrates; that is not my business. It is your business, said Socrates, as much as the business of any man who ever entered the lists at Olympia. Or do you count for nothing the contest for life and death against her enemies which the Athenians will hold, one of these days, when it suits them? It is not a few who die in the dangers of war through poor condition, or save their lives shamefully because of it; many are taken alive for the same cause, and many earn a coward’s reputation through nothing but the weakness of their bodies. Do you despise those penalties? The toils of keeping fit are far lighter to bear, and pleasanter. Everything men do, the body serves; and in every service it renders, it matters greatly that it be as fit as it can be made. Even in thinking, where the body might seem least concerned, everyone knows that grave failures come of its disorder; forgetfulness, despondency, ill temper, and madness break in on many men’s minds, through nothing but bodily corruption, so hard that they drive out what the man knew. The man in sound condition is well insured against all that. And besides, it is a disgrace to grow old in careless neglect before finding out what manner of man you might have been, in the fullest beauty and strength of your body. And that you will never see if you are careless; for it does not come of its own accord.

When Meletus had already lodged the indictment, Hermogenes heard Socrates conversing on anything and everything rather than the case, and told him he ought to be considering his defence. Do I not seem to you, he answered, to have spent my whole life preparing it? For he had passed his life doing nothing but examining what is just and what is unjust, doing the just, and leaving the unjust alone; and this he held to be the finest preparation for a defence that a man could make. But do you not see, Socrates, said Hermogenes, that Athenian juries, carried away by a speech, have put innocent men to death before now, and acquitted the guilty? I do, he said; but twice, when I set myself to think out my defence, the divine sign opposed me. Do you think it strange that the god should judge it better for me to close my life now? Do you not know that to this day I would yield to no man the claim of having lived a better or a pleasanter life than mine? For they live best, I hold, who take the most care to become as good as they can; and most pleasantly, who feel most surely that they are becoming better; and so, until now, it has been with me. But if my years are drawn out, I know the dues of old age will have to be paid: to see less and hear less, to reason more feebly, and to grow worse at everything I was once good at. Life on those terms, even unnoticed, would be life shrinking; and noticed, how could it be anything but joyless? And if I am to die unjustly, the shame of it falls on those who kill me; for if injustice is shameful, every unjust act is shameful, and none of this act is mine. I see the reputations that earlier men have left behind them, and how differently posterity speaks of those who did wrong and those who suffered it; and I know that I too, dying today, shall be held in another regard than my killers. For men will always bear me witness that I never wronged any man, nor made any man worse, but tried all my life to make better men of those who kept my company.

To me, he was what I have set down: so devout that he did nothing without the counsel of the gods; so just that he never did the least harm to any man, while he did the greatest services to those who had dealings with him; so self-commanding that he never chose the pleasanter over the better; so sound in judgement that he did not err in weighing better against worse. He was able, too, to put such matters into words, to define them, to test other men, to show them their errors, and to turn them towards virtue and true worth. He seemed to me everything that the best and the happiest of men would be. If anyone is not content with that account, let him set the character of another man beside it, and then judge.

Strepsiades: Do you see that little door, and the little house there?

Phidippides: I see it. What is it, father, really?

Strepsiades: That is a thinking-shop for clever souls. Men live there who will persuade you, if you pay them, that the sky is a baking-cover and covers us all round, and that we are the charcoal. And they teach you, if you give them money, to win any argument, just or unjust.

Phidippides: Who are they?

Strepsiades: I do not know the name exactly. Deep thinkers, careful ones; fine men, excellent men.

Phidippides: Ugh, I know them, the frauds. You mean the pale-faced quacks who go barefoot, that wretched Socrates and Chaerephon.

Strepsiades: Quiet, quiet! None of your foolishness. If you care at all whether your father keeps his daily bread, give up your horses and become one of them. They keep the two Arguments in there, the Better, whatever that may be, and the Worse; and the Worse one, they say, wins even when its case is unjust. Learn me that unjust argument, and of all these debts I owe on your account I need never pay anyone an obol.

Student: You must treat these as holy mysteries. A moment ago Socrates asked Chaerephon how many of its own feet a flea can jump; for one had bitten Chaerephon’s eyebrow and leapt across onto Socrates’ head.

Strepsiades: And how did he measure it?

Student: Most elegantly. He melted wax, took the flea, and dipped its two feet in; and when the wax cooled, the flea had a pair of little Persian slippers. He slipped them off and set about measuring the distance.

Strepsiades: King Zeus! What subtlety of mind!

Student: And Chaerephon of Sphettus once asked him whether gnats hum through the mouth, in his opinion, or the other end.

Strepsiades: And what did he say about the gnat?

Student: He declared that the gnat’s inner passage is narrow, and the wind is driven hard through that slender pipe to the rear; whereupon the rump, being hollow where it joins the narrow part, rings out under the force of the blast.

Strepsiades: So the rump of the gnat is a trumpet! Thrice-blessed man, for such sharp sight into entrails! A defendant could easily get himself acquitted, I should think, with the gnat’s anatomy at his fingertips.

Strepsiades: Come, who is that man in the basket?

Student: Himself.

Strepsiades: Who is Himself?

Student: Socrates.

Strepsiades: Socrates! Then call him for me, go on, good and loud.

Student: Call him yourself; I have no leisure.

Strepsiades: Socrates! My dear little Socrates!

Socrates: Why do you call me, creature of a day?

Strepsiades: First tell me what you are doing up there, I beg you.

Socrates: I walk the air, and contemplate the sun.

Strepsiades: So you look down on the gods from a basket, and not from the ground, if you please?

Socrates: I should never have discovered the truth of celestial matters if I had not suspended my intellect, and mingled my subtle thought with the air it is akin to. Had I stayed on the ground and considered the upper world from below, I should have found nothing; for the earth draws the moisture of thought down to itself by force. The very same thing happens to watercress.

Strepsiades: What are you saying? Thought draws moisture into watercress? Come down to me now, my little Socrates, and teach me the things I have come for.

Socrates: And what have you come for?

Strepsiades: Wanting to learn to speak. Interest and ill-tempered creditors are carrying me off plunder and all; my goods are being seized for debt.

Socrates: And how did you slide into such debts without noticing?

Strepsiades: A horse-sickness ate me alive, a terrible feeder. But teach me the one of your two Arguments, the one that pays nothing back; and whatever fee you name, I swear by the gods I will pay it.

Socrates: By which gods will you swear? To begin with, gods are not current coin with us.

Strepsiades: But tell me, by Zeus, Socrates, who are these ladies who sang so solemnly? Some breed of heroines?

Socrates: Not at all. They are the heavenly Clouds, great goddesses to men of leisure and thought, who supply us with judgement and dialectic and understanding, with marvel-mongering and circumlocution, with the striking of poses and the taking-in of others.

Better Argument: Come forward and show yourself to the audience, bold as you are.

Worse Argument: Go wherever you please. I shall destroy you far better with a crowd watching.

Better: Destroy me? And who are you?

Worse: An Argument.

Better: Yes: the Worse one.

Worse: And yet I beat you, who call yourself my Better.

Better: By what clever trick?

Worse: By inventing new principles.

Better: Yes, that trade flourishes, thanks to these fools here.

Worse: No; these wise men here.

Better: I will destroy you miserably.

Worse: Tell me how.

Better: By speaking what is just.

Worse: Then I shall overturn you by contradiction; for I say that justice does not even exist.

Better: You say it does not exist?

Worse: Well then, where is it?

Better: With the gods.

Worse: Then if justice is there, how is it that Zeus has not perished for it, he who put his own father in chains?

Better: Faugh! Now this profanity is spreading. Fetch me a basin. And through you no young man is willing to go to school any more; and one day Athens will find out what it is you teach her fools.

Strepsiades: Ah, what madness! How mad I was, to throw away the gods for Socrates’ sake! Come, Xanthias, come out here; bring the ladder and the mattock, climb up on the thinking-shop and hack the roof in, if you love your master, until the house comes down on their heads. And someone fetch me a lighted torch. This very day I will make certain people pay, impostors as they are.

First Student (within): Hoy! Hoy there!

Strepsiades: Do your work, torch: send up a good flame!

First Student: Man, what are you doing?

Strepsiades: What am I doing? Why, nothing but chopping logic with the beams of your house.

Second Student (within): Who is burning our house? You will destroy us! You will destroy us!

Strepsiades: The very thing I hope, unless the mattock disappoints me, or I fall through the roof first and break my neck.

Socrates (within): You there, on the roof! What are you doing up there?

Strepsiades: I walk the air, and contemplate the sun.

Socrates: Ah, wretch that I am, I shall be suffocated!

Chaerephon (within): And I, poor devil, shall burn!

Strepsiades: And what possessed you to insult the gods, and peer into the seat of the moon? Chase them, stone them, strike them, for all their crimes, but above all because they offended against the gods!

[The thinking-shop burns down.]