a life should I lead, at my age, wandering from city to city, ever
changing my place of exile, and always being driven out! For I am quite
sure that wherever I go, there, as here, the young men will flock to
me; and if I drive them away, their elders will drive me out at their
request; and if I let them come, their fathers and friends will drive me
out for their sakes.

Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and
then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?
Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this.
For if I tell you that to do as you say would be a disobedience to the
God, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe
that I am serious; and if I say again that daily to discourse about
virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining
myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined
life is not worth living, you are still less likely to believe me. Yet
I say what is true, although a thing of which it is hard for me to
persuade you. Also, I have never been accustomed to think that I deserve
to suffer any harm. Had I money I might have estimated the offence at
what I was able to pay, and not have been much the worse. But I have
none, and therefore I must ask you to proportion the fine to my means.
Well, perhaps I could afford a mina, and therefore I propose that
penalty: Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, my friends here, bid
me say thirty minae, and they will be the sureties. Let thirty minae be
the penalty; for which sum they will be ample security to you.

*****

Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name
which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that
you killed Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise, even
although I am not wise, when they want to reproach you. If you had
waited a little while, your desire would have been fulfilled in the
course of nature. For I am far advanced in years, as you may perceive,
and not far from death. I am speaking now not to all of you, but only to
those who have condemned me to death. And I have another thing to say to
them: you think that I was convicted because I had no words of the sort
which would have procured my acquittal--I mean, if I had thought fit to
leave nothing undone or unsaid. Not so; the deficiency which led to my
conviction was not of words--certainly not. B