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Section 26

SOCRATES. What is this, Meletus? Are you so much wiser at your age than I am at mine, that you have recognized that the bad always do some evil to those closest to them, and the good do good; whereas I have reached such a depth of ignorance that I do not even know that if I make one of my associates wicked, I risk being harmed by him, and yet I commit this great evil intentionally, as you claim? I do not believe you, Meletus, and I think no other human being does either. Rather, either I do not corrupt them, or if I do corrupt them, I do so unintentionally. So in either case, you are lying. And if I corrupt them unintentionally, the law does not require bringing people to court for such unintentional errors, but taking them aside privately to teach and admonish them. For it is clear that if I learn better, I will stop doing what I do unintentionally. But you avoided associating with me and teaching me; you did not want to do it. Instead, you brought me here to court, where the law says those should be brought who need punishment, not instruction. It is already clear, men of Athens, what I was saying: Meletus has never cared about these things, neither greatly nor slightly. Nevertheless, tell us, Meletus, in what way do you say I corrupt the youth? Or is it clear from the indictment you wrote that it is by teaching them not to believe in the gods the city believes in, but in other new spiritual things? Do you not say that I corrupt them by teaching these things?

MELETUS. I most certainly say that.

SOCRATES. Then by those very gods we are discussing, Meletus, clarify this further for me and for these men. I cannot understand whether you are saying I teach them to believe in certain gods—in which case I do believe there are gods and am not entirely an atheist, nor am I guilty of that, but simply that they are not the gods the city believes in, but different ones, and this is your charge against me, that they are different—or whether you are saying that I do not believe in gods at all myself, and that I teach this atheism to others.

MELETUS. That is what I say: you do not believe in gods at all.

SOCRATES. Marvelous Meletus, why do you say this? Do I not even believe that the sun and moon are gods, as the rest of mankind does?

MELETUS. By Zeus, judges, he does not! He says the sun is stone and the moon is earth.

SOCRATES. Do you think you are prosecuting Anaxagoras, my dear Meletus? Do you despise these men so much, and consider them so illiterate, that you think they do not know the books of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae are full of these theories? And the young men learn these things from me, when they can buy the books in the orchestra for a drachma at most, and laugh at Socrates if he claims these ideas as his own, especially since they are so strange? But tell me, by Zeus, do you really think I believe there is no god?

MELETUS. You do not, by Zeus, not at all.