themselves. For I
am confident that what I say will be just, and let none of you expect
otherwise, for surely it would not become my time of life to come before
you like a youth with a got up speech. Above all things, therefore, I
beg and implore this of you, O Athenians! if you hear me defending
myself in the same language as that in which I am accustomed to speak
both in the forum at the counters, where many of you have heard me, and
elsewhere, not to be surprised or disturbed on this account. For the
case is this: I now for the first time come before a court of justice,
though more than seventy years old; I am therefore utterly a stranger to
the language here. As, then, if I were really a stranger, you would have
pardoned me if I spoke in the language and the manner in which I had
been educated, so now I ask this of you as an act of justice, as it
appears to me, to disregard the manner of my speech, for perhaps it may
be somewhat worse, and perhaps better, and to consider this only, and to
give your attention to this, whether I speak what is just or not; for
this is the virtue of a judge, but of an orator to speak the truth.

2. First, then, O Athenians! I am right in defending myself against the
first false accusations alleged against me, and my first accusers, and
then against the latest accusations, and the latest accusers. For many
have been accusers of me to you, and for many years, who have asserted
nothing true, of whom I am more afraid than of Anytus and his party,
although they too are formidable; but those are still more formidable,
Athenians, who, laying hold of many of you from childhood, have
persuaded you, and accused me of what is not true: "that there is one
Socrates, a wise man, who occupies himself about celestial matters, and
has explored every thing under the earth, and makes the worse appear the
better reason." Those, O Athenians! who have spread abroad this report
are my formidable accusers; for they who hear them think that such as
search into these things do not believe that there are gods. In the next
place, these accusers are numerous, and have accused me now for a long
time; moreover, they said these things to you at that time of life in
which you were most credulous, when you were boys and some of you
youths, and they accused me altogether in my absence, when there was no
one to defend me. But the most unreasonable thing of all is, that it is
not possible to learn and mention their names,