Socrates

Socrates At the elderly age of seventy, Socrates found himself fighting against an indictment of impiety. He was unsuccessful at trial in the year 399 B.C. The charges were corrupting the youth of Athens, not believing in the traditional gods in whom the city believed, and finally, that he believed in other new divinities. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates defends himself against these charges. He claims that the jurors’ opinions are biased because they had probably all seen Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds. The Socrates portrayed in Aristophanes’ Clouds is an altogether different character than that of the Apology. The two different impressions of Socrates lead to quite opposite opinions with regard to his guilt. In The Clouds, Socrates’ actions provide evidence of his guilt on all three charges. However, in the Apology, Socrates is fairly convincing in defending his innocence on the first two charges, but falls short on the third charge. Socrates, in The Clouds, is portrayed as an idiot who thinks he’s walking on air and is interested primarily in gnats’ rumps. He is delineated as a natural philosopher/sophist. He is hired to teach Pheidippides to make the “worse argument”, the argument that is really incorrect and unjust the “better”—to socrates, gods, clouds, charge, traditional, charges, zeus, youth, guilty, father, claims, believing, work, while, third, socrates’, seems, rather, pheidippides, new, lines, himself, guilt, first, even, corrupting, corrupt, apology, two, plato’s, one, divinities, different, delphi, claim, believed