Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Apology of Socrates: A Socratic Dialogue
    Unavailable
    The Apology of Socrates: A Socratic Dialogue
    Unavailable
    The Apology of Socrates: A Socratic Dialogue
    Audiobook1 hour

    The Apology of Socrates: A Socratic Dialogue

    Written by Plato

    Narrated by Frank Marcopolos

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The Apology of Socrates by Plato is the Socratic dialogue that presents the speech of legal self-defense which Socrates presented at his Athenian trial in 399 BC. Specifically, the Apology of Socrates is a defense against the legal charges of "corrupting Athen's youth" and "not believing in the same gods the city believes in, but rather in other daimonia that are foreign" to Athenian life. This version was translated by Benjamin Jowett. The e-text was prepared by Sue Asscher. The text is a Project Gutenberg e-text, which is a public domain work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at Carnegie Mellon University. The text and the translation are in the public domain.


    ***


    Narrator Frank Marcopolos (1972-) is the founder of The Whirligig literary magazine, a novelist, voice-over artist, podcaster, and Learning Ally volunteer. He was with the 82nd Airborne Division in the 1990s. He currently lives at The Bookquarium.


    Praise from listeners for Frank's distinctive narrative style and voice includes the following:


    "The vocals on this are fabulous. I loved listening and you will too! Great voice on this guy." - From Scribd.com


    "Thee perfect voice for audiobooks. It is SO listenable!" - From YouTube

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Bookquarium Audio
    Release dateMar 26, 2019
    ISBN9781733664653
    Unavailable
    The Apology of Socrates: A Socratic Dialogue
    Author

    Plato

    Plato, one of the most renowned ancient Greek philosophers, was born in 427 B.C. to an aristocratic and wealthy family, which played a prominent part in Athenian politics. Plato in conjunction his teacher, Socrates, and his pupil, Aristotle helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and culture. While primarily influenced by Socrates, Plato’s work was also affected by the philosophies of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans. Under the guidance of Socrates, Plato devoted himself to the pursuit of wisdom and upon Socrates’ death, joined a group of the Socratic disciples gathered at Megara. Later he travelled in Egypt, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. He returned to Athens and founded a school, known as the Academy, which seems to have been his home base for the remainder of his life. While thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have traditionally been ascribed to Plato, modern scholarship doubts the authenticity of some of them. His early dialogues are also known as the Socratic dialogues and include Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, and Protagoras. He followed these with his transitional dialogues: Gorgias, Meno , and Euthydemus . The Symposium and the Republic are considered the centerpieces of Plato's middle period and are considered some of his most revered work, and other middle dialogues include Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus. Plato’s Laws is the best known dialogues of his late period. Plato died in 347 B.C.

    More audiobooks from Plato

    Related to The Apology of Socrates

    Related audiobooks

    Performing Arts For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Estate Management and Symposium

      Jun 2, 2023

      ISBN: 978-0198823513 Oxford University Press (2023) - £8.99 www.global.oup.com Anthony Verity's latest translation for Oxford University Press collects Xenophon's Estate Management, also known as Oeconomicus, and Symposium into a single volume, with

      3 min read

    • Article

      Is Nothing Sacred? Aristophanes’s The Clouds and Moral Taboos

      Nov 1, 2020

      On my way to an evening class, my eye caught an interesting poster on the hall bulletin board. In its most recent efforts to rehabilitate my retrograde moral sensibility, Fordham University advertised that it would now provide full vegan menus to the

      26 min read

    • Article

      Getting The Skinny On The Semicolon

      Sep 12, 2019

      Getting The Skinny On The Semicolon
      2 min read

    • Article

      The World Of Writing

      Dec 2, 2021

      The World Of Writing
      4 min read

    • Article

      Down To The Piraeus

      Aug 22, 2022

      Down To The Piraeus
      6 min read

    • Article

      Theatre Props and Civic Identity in Athens, 458-405 BC

      Jan 23, 2023

      ISBN: 978-1350186477 Bloomsbury (2020) - £28.99 www.bloomsbury.com Modern society is all too aware of the potential that the arts have for exploring contemporary identities and politics. Comedians have always been pointing to the contradictions in pe

      3 min read

    • Article

      Bugs, Bots, And Ghosts

      Apr 25, 2019

      Bugs, Bots, And Ghosts
      7 min read

    • Article

      Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas: A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

      Apr 30, 2015

      In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science

      10 min read

    • Article

      Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor Cosmopolitans

      Aug 31, 2017

      Just when our vocabulary of political invective was looking a bit tired, the White House has provided a fresh new term of insult. The trouble is, it isn’t quite clear just what the insulter meant. And it may not really be all that fresh. A CNN report

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Lost Art of Not Knowing Something

      Feb 10, 2022

      I'd posit that there is a bit of Larry David in Socrates. They both puncture hypocrisy, force us to question our own moral platitudes, and deign that we must defend our presuppositions, even if doing so seems rude. The post The Lost Art of Not Knowin

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Book No One Read: Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.

      Oct 2, 2014

      I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel roo

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Politics of Public Space

      Jul 27, 2020

      The Politics of Public Space: Public Lectures in Contentious Spaces (Volume 1) gathers together a series of lectures that emerged out of a program of seminars and design studios led by Melbourne design and research practice Office (as part of its tea

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Short History Of atoms

      Jun 3, 2020

      A Short History Of atoms
      5 min read

    • Article

      Edgar Allan Poe’s Other Obsession

      Jun 11, 2021

      This article was published online on June 11, 2021. In the early and macabre days of coronavirus shutdowns, Edgar Allan Poe was trending. “The Masque of the Red Death,” his Gothic tale from 1842, became in March of 2020 a go-to source for allegory: A

      9 min read

    • Article

      Mephistopheles In The Anthropocene

      May 6, 2022

      "Him will I drag through life's wild waste, /Through scenes of vapid dullness," Mephistopheles says, and it might describe the experience of endlessly perusing Twitter, anesthetizing yourself as you doom scroll. The post Mephistopheles in the Anthrop

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Big Bang Is Hard Science. It Is Also a Creation Story.: Even with its explanatory power, Big Bang theory takes its place in a long line of myths.

      Sep 4, 2014

      In some ways, the history of science is the history of a philosophical resistance to mythical explanations of reality. In the ancient world, when we asked “Where did the world come from?” we were told creation myths. In the modern world, we are inste

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Big Bang Is Hard Science. It Is Also a Creation Story.

      Aug 8, 2019

      In some ways, the history of science is the history of a philosophical resistance to mythical explanations of reality. In the ancient world, when we asked “Where did the world come from?” we were told creation myths. In the modern world, we are inste

      5 min read

    Reviews for The Apology of Socrates

    4/5

    282 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Socrates would have made a great internet troll.
    • 5/5
      This book is a portuguese translation of the famous Plato's work Απολογία Σωχράτους. The only philosophy book I have read three times (so far) and a very enjoyable short digression about justice, truth, and a moral way of living.
    • 4/5
      I haven't read anything by Plato before this, or really anything about Socrates. But since Socrates was illiterate, we only have Plato's accounts of his philosophies and actions. Before this I didn't know much about Greek philosophy or Socrates death. Now I can really appreciate the Renaissance painting of Socrates Death. I can also now see why people found Socrates and his Socratic Method so annoying. I would be annoyed as well is someone used questions to back me into a corner until I had to agree with what they were saying and then called me a fool. But despite this, Socrates philosophy was, in his time and place, a turning point for Greek philosophy. I'm very glad I got to read this. I certainly humbled me and opened my eyes a little. I also appreciated the authenticity of this translation. From it the reader can get a good idea of Socrates himself as a man and how he spoke. It was very refreshing.
    • 5/5
      These days when we think of the word apology we usually connect it with saying sorry for something that we have done wrong, however that is not necessarily the origin of the word. Christianity has a field of study known as apologetics, and once again, this is not necessarily saying sorry for the many evils deeds that have been committed under the name of Christianity but rather putting up a defense against attacks that are levelled against the faith and providing a reason for the hope that we have. This is what the Apology of Socrates is about: it is the defense that Socrates made against the charges that were levelled against him in 399 BC which ultimately led to his death. I note that the dating of this work is about 9 years after Socrates' death, so many of the sayings (such as the 'unexamined life is not worth living') are second hand, however we should note that Plato was present at the trial so this is in effect an eyewitness account. Also, it is clear that this was transcribed and published at least 9 years after the events themselves, and since the memories of the ancients were much better than our memories (namely because they did not have sources such as Wikipedia at their disposal) I am willing to accept that this is a fairly accurate report of what happened at the trial.The Apology is divided into three parts, corresponding with the way that an Athenian trial would be conducted. When you appeared in an Athenian court you were not allowed to have somebody appear on your behalf, as is the practice today, but had to make your charges, and answer them, yourself. As such a hugely profitable business arose in which speech writers would write the speech on your behalf for you to deliver it. No doubt Miletus, the person making the accusation against Socrates, either used this service, or was a sophist (the person who would write the speech) himself.The first, and the longest, section of the Apology is Socrates' defense. From reading the defense we can determine that the charges were twofold, heresy and corrupting the youth. During his response, he refers to Anaxagoras, a philosopher who was also brought up on charges of heresy, but Socrates distances himself from Anaxagoras namely because Anaxagoras was an atheist; Socrates was not. The second charge, corrupting the youth, is not the same as we would understand it today. Today, crimes against youths (that is people under the age of 18) are generally always sexual, though crimes do exist where the perpetrator encourages the youth to commit a crime (though to be brought up on such a charge, the person that you are influencing could be of any age). The charge against Socrates was that he taught the youth to question everything and that his teachings were decidedly anti-democratic.It is clear from the Apology that Socrates held a very dim view of Athenian Democracy, and from what we can gather I am not surprised. It has been suggested that Socrates leant to the right but I do not believe that we can ascribe modern political theory to the politics of Athens. The concern Socrates had with Athenian democracy was that it was clearly based on popular opinion rather than upon truth and justice. One example he raises is the events at the battle of Arginusae. Despite that battle being an Athenian victory, it was also quite disastrous for the city, best described as a Pyrrhic victory (despite Pyrrhus living after these events). As a result the generals leading the battle were put on trial, and despite the generals actually being innocent and the trial being little more that a witch hunt, they were found guilty by popular opinion and executed. This is the problem that Socrates had with democracy (and in many ways it is still the case today, where a government will act unconstitutionally because popular opinion demands that the government act as such: for instance, at a trial in South Australia the judge acquitted the accused, and there was such a public outcry over the acquittal that the government stepped in, overturned the acquittal, and ordered a new trial, as well as sacking the Director of Public Prosecutions).The concerns that a certain party had was that Socrates' teachings would undermine the democratic system of which Athens was so proud. However, Socrates' position was that one should only act in a just manner, and it is this desire for justice that made Socrates such a thorn in people's side. Socrates himself even says that he stayed well away from public office simply because he did not trust himself to be able to maintain his position with regards to justice if he were to find himself in a position of power. Obviously he was required to attend the assembly, as was expected of all Athenian citizens, however he never put himself forward (or so we are told) to be elected to the executive council, or any of the other positions that were available to Athenian citizens.The second part of the Apology is where Socrates puts forward his proposed punishment. Once again it is similar to our legal system where once a person is found guilty (and in Athens is was not beyond reasonable doubt, but rather a balance of probabilities, and of the 500 members of the jury, just over half voted in favour of his guilt, so it appears to have been a tight run thing) both sides have the option of swaying the judge in regards to the punishment. No doubt the prosecution always goes for the toughest sentence possible, while the defense will then put forward a sentence that is much lighter. Socrates, however, suggests that the only sentence that is beneficial for him would be death simply because he has no money to pay a fine, and that even imprisonment is not an option because of the fact that he is poor. He also considers banishment, but suggests that due to his reputation, and due to his age, there really is no point. He does settle on the idea of a fine, however he did suggest that due to his influence in the city, maybe being treated as a hero was much better.Obviously he was sentenced to death so the third part of the Apology is his final speech to the jury and in this speech he indicates that he really doesn't care about his punishment. He is not scared of death and he feels that he has lived a long enough life that death does not really concern him, particularly since he is destined to die anyway. Even then, the uncertainty of death simply means that it is another opportunity for him to learn something new.I wish to finish off on another comment that he makes, and that is that if they do execute him they should be aware that somebody like him is unlikely to come around for a long time, so they need to be aware that once he is gone, he is gone for good. Mind you, others have appeared (Jesus Christ for instance) however he is quite correct in that, not that he is being arrogant, but indicating that his motivations, and his desire for truth and justice, is what keeps the city for falling into obscurity. He sees himself as a challenger and as a moderator against the extremes. He also speaks of a voice whom he listens to because the voice moderates his activity. It is not that he voice tells him to do things, but rather tells him not to do things. He is very clear on that, and one thus questions whether this is schizophrenia in the true sense. Mysterious voices tend to urge people on to do things (and usually bad things) however Socrates is quite clear that his voice is a voice of restraint. To be honest with you, I am more likely to listen to a voice of restraint than I am to listen to the opposite, and the reason for this is that restraint tends to protect you from putting your foot in your mouth and making enemies than does a voice that urges you on to do things that maybe you shouldn't really be doing.
    • 5/5
      Aah, the first thing I ever read in Greek! Then Apology is wonderful even in translation, but the beauty of Plato's prose just blew me away. This edition is fabulous, too, because it has a glossary at the back, which I think is a really helpful too for beginning readers.
    • 3/5
      Socrates might just be trolling Athens...