“For if you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble stead who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me, and therefore I would advise you to spare me. I dare say that you may feel out of temper (like the person who is suddenly awakened from sleep), and you think that you might easily strike me dead...and then you sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you sent you another gadfly.”
Like a horsefly – which we all know is horribly irritating and has a sharp bite – Socrates likens himself to the bug as a means to show that without his presence and constant questioning, the people of Athens would be like sheep, sleeping through their lives when they should be examining and questioning ideas of virtue and truth. Socrates, like a horsefly, bites at the complacent citizens while compelling them to consider philosophical matters of virtue. He irritates and bites them awake and into thinking about important philosophical ideas.
Socrates proceeds to argue that if they sentence him to death, they will be harming themselves more than they will be harming him: “if you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.”
Socrates is found guilty, and Meletus suggests the death penalty. Socrates points out that he has tried only to do good for all of them – by questioning them – and thus deserves a reward, not punishment: the just sentence is “maintenance in the Prytaneum.” The Prytaneum was like a town hall of Athens, in which public entertainments were performed, especially to athletes victorious at Olympia. By “maintenance” is meant free meals. Socrates suggests that the just sentence is for the city to pay for his meals.
Socrates explains why he does not suggest exile as punishment: he would be irrational to expect non-Athenians to put up with his philosophical questioning when his own people would not put up with it:
And if I say exile, I must indeed be blinded by the love of life if I were to consider that when you, who are my own citizens, cannot endure my discourses and words, and have found them so grievous and odious that you would fain have done with them, others are likely to endure me. But why won’t he stop philosophizing?
It would mean being disobedient to the God, as he stated, “this would be a disobedience to divine command.” The more famous reason he gives – and in fact this is one of the most famous statements in all of philosophy, and in all of Western culture: “the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue ... the life which is unexamined is not worth living.”
Finally, Socrates issues a prophecy: after he has died, a far stronger punishment that the one inflicted upon him will be enacted upon his executioners.
He states, “And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am about to die, and that is the hour in which men are gifted with prophetic power. And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after my death punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you. Me you have killed because you wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an account of your lives. But that will not be as you suppose: far otherwise. For I say that there will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom hitherto I have restrained: and as they are younger they will be more severe with you, and you will be more offended at them. For if you think that by killing men you can avoid the accuser censuring your lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable; the easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves. This is the prophecy which I utter before my departure, to the judges who have condemned me.”
In the end he was sentenced, of course, and put in jail to drink his cup of hemlock in the presence of close friends. Very rich and powerful men of the city were among them, and they set everything up – like bribing the guards – to allow their 70-year-old mentor to get out of his cell. Socrates though just wouldn’t go. Why leave now and act against the laws of the very city he never left all his life except for warfare? If that’s his city’s decision following its laws, that’s all right with him. Death is nothing to be afraid of in the first place, since we don’t know anything about it, as he told everyone over and over again. After being presented with the result of the jury’s vote and the verdict, death by hemlock, he encouraged the jury and audience to take care of his kids and be just as strict as he was, in case they tried to do “nonsense”. He closed his final speech with this very telling statement: “Now it is the hour to leave – for me to die, for you to go on with your lives. Who is headed for the better, is unrecognizable to anyone but God.”