Plato and the Apology

By Claudia Mársico

In 399 BCE an Athenian jury sentenced Socrates to death. The speech he gave in his defense, as Plato preserved it, became one of the founding texts of Western philosophy and one of its most contested.

Plato and the Apology guides the reader through that text and the trial behind it. Claudia Marsico, a leading scholar of Socratic philosophy, places Plato's account beside the rival versions of antiquity. Xenophon composed a competing defense. The sophist Polycrates, in a pamphlet now lost, turned the charge toward Socrates' political responsibility and his closeness to the city's worst men. Other Socratics claimed the master for themselves. The result is a portrait of a trial shot through with politics from the start.

Marsico reconstructs the world of the verdict. An amnesty had been sworn to bury the civil war, and it left the prosecution unable to name the thing it most resented, Socrates' ties to Critias and Alcibiades. She then follows Socrates beyond his death, into the afterlife that made an executed citizen the model of the examined life.

Rigorous and accessible, this is an entry point for students of ancient philosophy and for anyone who has wondered why Athens killed Socrates, and why we are still reading his defense.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9873729208
• ISBN13: 9789873729201
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Notios
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"